WHY CAN NOT HOMOEOPATHY BE IMPROVED AS CAN MODERN MEDICINE?.
For the very reason that homoeopathy, unlike modern medicine, is based upon a natural law, and we all know, if we know anything at all, that it is impossible to either change or improve a natural law. The more we try to improve homoeopathy the more we cripple its usefulness. As Boenninghausen truthfully said, “Homoeopathy is independent in its nature and any admixture, false attire or gaudy ornaments are but to her detriment.” Homoeopathy can neither be improved nor modernized. All that we can possibly do for homoeopathy is to go on conscientiously proving more remedies, practising it in all its purity, thereby extending its usefulness and influence.
Allopathy, so-called modern medicine, is a jumbled assemblage of fads, fancies and experiments, often dangerous, as the Texas, Sydney (Australia), and Luebeck (Germany), catastrophies attest. As these fads and theories, the products of experience, from which the modern doctor learns little, wear out, new methods and experiments must be constantly thought up or the modern medical show would soon cease to exist. What is thought true, conventional and official in allopathy today will be discarded as obsolete, passe and dangerous 50 years from now, as that of 50 years ago has been, in keeping with past tradition and experience.
But what is true, conventional and official in homoeopathy today is identically the same as that used over 125 years ago, and will be just as true, conventional and official until the end of time, or at least until Nature undergoes a complete change. Its discarding at the present time by the medical profession in general and by the homoeopaths in particular will be looked back upon in years to come as an error brought about through the most pitiful ignorance of us so-called modern medical men.-A. PULFORD. DRUG, POTENCY, ANTIDOTE.
No man, living or dead, from the very beginning of medicine down to the present time, not even Hahnemann himself, had, or has, any real conception of the true significance, composition and action of our so-called drugs. We, and they, have all lived to handle and use them in the densest of darkness and ignorance. The conceited brightest and most intelligent minds of all ages studied them scientifically and intelligently, weighed them out and apportioned them with the greatest skill and care in the drugs materialistic form, believing implicitly that what they held visibly in their hands was the very power itself, never realizing that all they saw or could see was but the physical container of the real power. They have been and are working with, and applied and do now apply, a supposed substance of which they had, and have, no conception whatever.
No logical reason could be given why so-called drugs acted. Doses were scientifically and intelligently (?) graded and gauged according to age, but no attention whatever was paid to existing conditions, and it was that a strong constitutional child was in better condition to cope with, react against and throw out a large dose of drug than a weak, worn-out adult whose resistive powers were away below par. There was no conception, and there is not now, of why an animal should be immune to a drug that might prove fatal to a human, or vice versa. Drugs are doled out today without rhyme or reason and just as ignorantly as in the very beginning of the medical era. Homoeopathy alone has shed the only ray of light, that has ever been produced, to enter the medical brain.
No doctor living today, outside the homoeopathic ranks, can give the positive indications that should indicate his time aged calomel or corrosive sublimate in any given disease. The modern doctors patients are “scientifically” dosed with drugs of which he absolutely knows nothing; drugs that are not indicated and, if indicated, are not accurate. All that seems necessary from the allopaths point of view is that they shall be below the lethal mark. From the average homoeopaths point of view, drugs shall merely fall short of an aggravation. They forget that it takes more power to produce symptoms than to remove them.
If we accurately knew just how much of the drug power it took to accurately fall short, in all cases, of an aggravation, or a lethal dose, then we should know, and there should be no excuse for not knowing the exact potency in each and every case. The time is fast approaching when those who heretofore have hidden their ignorance behind a self constructed adamantine wall of obstinate prejudice will be smoked out and no longer be able to cover up that ignorance. Those who sneered, and those who do not sneer, at Hahnemanns small doses have only deceived themselves and their ignorant dupes and followers.
To the intelligent, these men merely display their own ignorance and it is pitiful to have to note that such doctors are too ignorant to realize it. Hahnemann, whether consciously or unconsciously, has confirmed, through potentization, a statement of ours made over 40 years ago, that there is no such thing as inorganic chemistry. Life is force, through force we get attraction and repulsion. All things change, die and disintegrate. All visible things or objects contain life-force or power which can be liberated at will. The stronger the power to be confined, the more dense its container, as witness flint, inert in its crude state but deeply active and destructive when its power is liberated.
THE POTENCY.
Potency means power; potentization, merely a regulation of the amount of that power. Every drug contains a fixed amount of power that can never be changed and no matter what the so-called potency of that fixed power the ultimate result, both pathogenetic and curative, will be exactly the same. If it were humanly possible to either accurately and finally combine two powers, or to change the one, each would produce an entirely different final result. Take Hepar sulph. as an example, a substance as thoroughly fused as it is possible for us to be able to fuse any two objects. If that fusion was complete and the powers changed, just why should Hepar show at various points symptoms unmistakable of either or both of its component parts? The reason, we feel, that there is such a diversion of opinion among homoeopaths regarding potency, potentization and antidote is because of a misconception of what is truly meant by the term drug.
The prevailing idea is that when the drugs physical container disappears from view the encased real drug power escapes with it. Drug power is energy. Who has ever seen energy? Who is capable of weighing and ocularly demonstrating energy, to the physical eye, who is able to show just when that energy disappears or is about to cease to act? As Dr. Dayton Pulford aptly put it, “We see its results and the physical basis to which it is attached or bound. Electrical energy may be bound to any number of conductors, yet it is never seen. Both are only known by their effects. In the so-called potentization of the drug the energy is transferred by the process to the graduating menstrum, as the result of a single dose of a high potency of the similar remedy will amply demonstrate to any unprejudiced observer”.
That, alone, on which the remedy is to act can furnish us with the answer as to whether or not the power in the potency is still present. The application of the remedy may be likened to the shutting off of the rays of a powerful searchlight by the aid of a shade, the closer you go to the origin of the rays the smaller will be the size of the shade required. Each disease, like each drug, represents a fixed, unchangeable power, and must be met with an equal and unchangeable power, otherwise the ultimate result will be disappointing, or at least only partially satisfactory and complete. As true artists, we must match these two forces accurately, as the artist-painter must unerringly match his colors.
Ignoring our art, or pursuing it in a loose manner, leads us into all kinds of pitfalls, causes all our failures and untimely deaths. As Kent truly said, which I have stoutly maintained ever since I got my first insight into true Hahnemannianism, “The symptoms may lead us to the remedy or drug, but the exact potency leads us to the similimum” (not the Latin Similimum, or most similar remedy). The potency must fit the case if a radical cure, which should be the only goal of all true physicians, is expected Medicine has never been practised either as an art or a science but rather as a medico-physical endurance test on the patient with no thought of cure in mind. Medicine needs, and that badly and urgently, intelligent study and investigation and intelligent application.
THE ANTIDOTE.
The commonly accepted idea of an antidote is that it is something to change the character of the agent to be antidoted. This common concept of the operation is, we think, entirely wrong. Again, each drug represents a fixed power that can under no circumstance be changed. But two operations can take place in this antidoting. First, if the two opposing forces are equal in power, they bring each other to a standstill; second, the opposing or antidotal drug may so change the bodily secretions as to render them incapable of acting on the drugs physical container thus rendering its power inescapable and thus the drug passes out of the body an inert mass.
Allan D. Sutherland was born in Northfield, Vermont in 1897, delivered by the local homeopathic physician. The son of a Canadian Episcopalian minister, his father had arrived there to lead the local parish five years earlier and met his mother, who was the daughter of the president of the University of Norwich. Four years after Allan’s birth, ministerial work lead the family first to North Carolina and then to Connecticut a few years afterward.
Starting in 1920, Sutherland began his premedical studies and a year later, he began his medical education at Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia.
Sutherland graduated in 1925 and went on to intern at both Children’s Homeopathic Hospital and St. Luke’s Homeopathic Hospital. He then was appointed the chief resident at Children’s. With the conclusion of his residency and 2 years of clinical experience under his belt, Sutherland opened his own practice in Philadelphia while retaining a position at Children’s in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department.
In 1928, Sutherland decided to set up practice in Brattleboro.