“For 116 years we have offered them our knowledge, but we have been scouted. My suggestion is that we should now turn our attention to the laity, and tell them where their safety lies.”
My own suggestion would be rather that the laity should turn their attention to Homoeopathy and to the wider question of the validity of the pretensions of the medical profession in regard to the treatment of disease.
Far too much is taken for granted in this matter by the laity; indeed, from such utterances as that of Sir Almroth Wright, quoted above, it would seem that even more is taken for granted by the laity than by the more open-minded of the doctors themselves.
The whole subject has acquired and entirely new importance for the public with the passing of the National Insurance Act, which makes the State directly responsible for the efficient medical treatment of millions of its citizens, and thereby requires it to ascertain that they are treated in the best way possible and that the vast sums of money raised for the purpose are expended to the best advantage. In America the State takes no account of distinctions between different schools of medical opinion. Homoeopathy and allopathy flourish side by side in public medical institutions. There consequently exists in America a very valuable field for testing the respective pretensions of homoeopaths and allopaths in regard to the treatment of diseases.
It is obviously the duty of the Insurance Commissioners, as soon as they have got their business into working order, to enter upon some inquiry of this kind; and if it shows anything like the superiority of results for Homoeopathy that is indicated in the above figures, it will become their further duty to make provision for affording homoeopathic treatment to insured persons wherever they can be induced to try it.
Even if the two systems showed themselves pretty much on a par in regard to killing and curing, there would remain one overwhelming argument in favor of Homoeopathy in its incomparably greater economy in the use of drugs. Dr. Hoyle, noticing this point in the letter above quoted, states that L100 in homoeopathic drugs will go as far as L2,000 in allopathic. The importance of this point is self-evident. The cost of drugs is a big item in the expenditure under the Insurance Act, as everybody will have seen from the part it has played in the preliminary wrangling over terms of service, and a little difference of 1,900 per cent. in this item is a matter of very considerable consequence to all the contributories under the Act. With this very practical hint I commend the whole subject to the consideration of Mr. Lloyd George and his assistants.
