The master prescriber, Dr. Kent, has strongly emphasised this point. An illustration may be helpful. A boy aged about 12 years got malarial fever and was cured (?) of it in about a week. After remaining well for about 3 or 4 days, he started getting attacks of abdominal pain daily, accompanied by ineffectual urging to stools, commencing daily about midday and subsiding by about 10 P.M. when he would go to sleep and wake up all right next morning. All this had been going for six days when I was called, and during this period the boy had passed no stools, not even flatus.
He had also been getting vomiting at times, the vomited matter being very bad-testing and foul smelling, greenish and sometimes blackish fluids. The pain would make the boy very restless obliging him to assume all sorts of positions in bed and driving him from bed to chair and chair to bed. His allopathic doctor had asked him to go to a surgeon for abdominal operation for obstruction of the bowels.
A single dose of Ars. 200 settled the matter. The next day there was hardly any pain but there was a very offensive smelling vomit containing four hard round balls appearing to be faecal matter. He then started passing winds and the next day passed a stool. Without any further medicine he progressed on to full recovery. If attention were to be focussed only on the obstruction of the bowel what would be the position of Arsenicum? Yet, the generals strongly demanded Arsenicum, and it did not disappoint!
And when with all possible care you have selected the remedy and administered it in a suitable potency, there are the chronic miasms Psora, Syphilis & Sycosis to obstruct the action of the remedy or to terminate it in an unexpectedly short time. I remember the case of a child of about four years of age who used to get convulsions during the least fever off and on. In one of these attacks I tried the best indicated remedies and failed to stop the convulsions. Two doses of Sulphur 30 at half-hourly intervals marvellously ended the whole trouble, and a dose was given on the next two consecutive mornings. It is now four years, and even though the boy has had fever sometimes, the convulsions have never been witnessed ever since then.
After weighing all these considerations, would anybody still assert that homoeopathy is mere symptoms covering? The artistic matching of the genius of the sickness with the genius of the remedy is an art which is the acquisition of a lucky few, coming after hard labour and mature experience alone. And yet this is only the first hurdle to be crossed in the attainment of the goal of clinical success.
The selection of the suitable potency, the repetition of the dose only when the effect of the earlier dose is exhausted and not earlier, knowledge and application of the prognostic conclusions from the action of the remedy, patiently watching the effects of the remedy, watching the old symptoms, reappearing and disappearing according to the laws of cure, retaining the power of sound judgment in trying reactions, resisting the temptation to repeat or change remedies too quickly – these are some of the other hurdles where many of our less fortunate, less experienced and less steady comrades falter.
Hard work and persistent endeavour alone can enable each and every one of us to attain the goal. In the hours of trials and tribulations, let us not despair and start blaming homoeopathy, but in all humility ask ourselves – “Have I done my part flawlessly?” Kent says: “And if you hear that somebody has tried this and tried that without success, remember that somebody has demonstrated his own failure. Homoeopathy is capable of demonstrating itself in all intelligent hands.” If we shall adopt the aphorism “Glory is all Homoeopathys, the faults are entirely our own” and approach our failures with the genuine outlook of a student, the success we aspire for will surely be ours.
Homoeopathy never betrayed a heart that loved her and followed her faithfully.
B.A., M.D.S.
Dehradun, India