Of course, in the different diseases of the organs, such as nephritis and diabetes, we must regulate their diet according to the experience of others and according to the individual. But in regard to ulcers of the stomach and those so-called alkaline producing diets, I feel that we must go very slowly, that we can do a great deal of harm. It is necessary to feel our way very slowly.
Diet is a thing that has to be worked out for each individual. All we can do is to take what we have all gathered together and let every therapeutist use it in the way he thinks best.
DR. E. UNDERHILL, JR.: I have had an unusual opportunity to consider diet from the comparison standpoint. We learn things best by comparison. Prior to 1929, I paid almost no attention to diet. I followed Dr. Thachers general diet scheme. When the patient said, “Doctor, what about my diet?” I said, “Well, eat anything you want.” “Could I have tomatoes?” “If you want them, eat them. If you dont like them, dont eat them.” Dr. Thacher was one of the best prescribers we have had.
In 1929, at the Summer School in Boston, I happened to meet Dr. Kavcic from Jugo-Slavia. He was a diet enthusiast, to say the least. I got acquainted with them and invited him to Philadelphia, and I got pretty nearly off my base on diet. It has taken pretty nearly a year for me to get back on some rational basis. However, I learned much from that and corrected my own diet with a vast improvement in my health.
Since Dr. Thachers death, I have taken over a large part of his practice, and since Dr. Gladwins death almost all of Dr. Thachers patients are in my care. I have all his records. Only very occasionally have I needed to deviate from the remedy he prescribed. The first thing I did in those cases was to correct the diet, which he had not done in many cases. I have achieved conspicuous results in so many of those cases that the patients say, “Why, doctor you have done more for me than Dr. Thacher ever did! How dies that happen?” I explain what the diet did. I did not change the prescription in most instances.
This shows what diet will do. Some of these patients had been under his care for years, and just a correction of diet has stepped them up just as much as the homoeopathic remedy could possibly do. In my own cases I noticed a great difference after I corrected the diet.
It is not as hard a job or as big a student as one would think. Go at it from a simple, common sense standpoint. There are certain combinations that do not agree. Acid fruits and tomatoes can be classed together and should not be combined with starch, or any carbohydrate, for that matter. The patient says, “Doctor, I cant take tomatoes.” They never blame the bread and potatoes they ate with the tomatoes.
If they take acid fruits by themselves or with milk, which will combine, it is all right. Milk or cream will combine with acid fruits, but you have watch out for idiosyncrasies. Some people have aversion to milk. There is no use in mixing milk with acid fruits for those people.
A single article of food will be all right if it agrees with the patient himself, or a single combination – hot cakes and butter and maple syrup, or hot cakes and butter and honey. There is no reason why they cannot make a breakfast out of it. If one cake wont do, maybe ten will. That will certainly agree if the patient has a craving for it and is not just sensitive to that thing.
The long detour from soup to nuts is really a terrible proposition! It is a wonder people get away with it as long as they do!.
I think it is a most excellent thing to carry out the suggestion I brought out in the paper I wrote, to have the patient bring in a two-day menu. They can do it for you just as well as not. Let them bring it in all written out, breakfast so-and-so, dinner, supper, and anything they ate between meals. Take your pencil or pen and cross out the wrong combinations. Start with the patients diet as it is and modify it. After you have corrected it a few times, the next week or the week afterward have them bring in another two-day menu.
In a short time, by simple steps, you have corrected and simplified that patients diet. Usually you need to add more raw fruits and more raw vegetables. The cooking of food certainly does not improve the energy value of it. These vitamins or living proteins are largely destroyed by heat. When you cook food, therefore, you more or less kill it or drive the energy out of it. It is an unnatural process. It is one of the things that has gone along with our civilization.
I dont think I had better say anything more about diet, but i commend that procedure to each and every one of you and hope to hear about it next summer.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER: I just want to say that the doctor has given us a concise and clear-cut arrangement to start in this matter. We can go farther.
It is refreshing that so many things have been said about diet. Dr. Underhills remarks yesterday and his essay were practical. One of the criticisms that has been made against the high potency homoeopathic prescriber has been that he pays no attention to anything else, gives his remedy and performs miracles. They perform miracles many times, but they will perform more miracles and do much better work if they will heed the chemistry of food, the thing that builds the body.
If idiosyncrasies appear after we have given the diet, and we find it still aggravates those patients, the patient is undoubtedly susceptible to the influence of that one ingredient in the diet.
We have a remedy, Succus fruiti, that was brought out some years ago by some member of this Hahnemannian Association, one of the older men. He was able to remove the susceptibility to ordinary raw fruits with the other Succus fruiti, which is the juice of the pear, apple, plum and one or two other fruits, I think, like the peach. It is the combination of fruits potentized, and it is effective.
I remember years ago reading in some of the proceedings – I dont know which one it was – of a patient who was peculiarly susceptible to mutton. She was given potentized mutton, and could eat mutton after that. Where we find a real susceptibility, we can remove it with a single dose of the high potency. Tomatoes undoubtedly will fall in that line.
I think this is a very constructive paper. We ought to take it home and study it and try to bring out something more constructive next year, as Dr. Underhill has suggested.
DR. C.L. OLDS: I am very much pleased that so much has been said about diet, I am not a diet crank, but I think that that is one of the things that we, as homoeopaths, should consider very carefully, aside from our homoeopathic remedy. It seems to me that the remarks of Dr. Underhill, about the patients of Dr. Thacher who improved so very much without any further change of remedy, prove the value of the diet.
We have to remember what Hahnemann says about the things that obstruct. A faulty diet can obstruct just as much as faulty medicine. He gives us a long list of things that are to be avoided when we are making provings. This is a pretty good indication of what he thought about the influence of foods.
I am glad that this has been brought up.
DR. B.C. WOODBURY: I am glad Dr. Wright Hubbard brought up the matter of proving foods, because that is a subject in which I have been interested for a long time. I made, at one time, a series of what I called food provings, which were very interesting. They were more or less individualistic. My idea was to have the thing done on a much larger scale in places so that we could have a number of provers to check up our results.
The doctor brought out one point in that different foods should be proved on sensitive provers. That is also an interesting thing. I wrote three papers on that subject. One of them was called Food Provings; another was called The Homoeopathic Diet; another was called The Natural Diet in Cancer. Those three articles particularly have reference to this subject.
In regard to sensitive foods, onions, of course, we know are met by Lycopodium and Thuja. Dr. Patch had a patient who was very susceptible to oranges. I think Medorrhinum was the remedy in that case. I also remember the remarks of Dr. Hering, or Dr. Boenninghausen, with respect to Carbo veg. in people who drank wine. You could always pick out a Carbo veg. patient by the reaction to wine at the table. I had a patient who was poisoned by strawberries, and I gave a potency of Fragaria.
I also have a potency of fifteenth trituration of Egg, which was given to me by Dr. William Boericke in San Francisco. He used it successfully in children who were susceptible to egg poisoning. This is a serious thing in some children. They cannot tolerate eggs. Egg intolerance it is called.
One other point is in the selection of food, should it be by a scientific study, by elimination, or by the natural instincts of the patient? Hahnemann, in his little essay called Dietetic Conversation with My Brother, refers to that matter of the instinct. He says that in the normal human instinct is a safeguard. I take it that nowadays, when we have so much food perversion, so much food adulteration, that we cannot so safely trust this instinct; whereas, in Hahnemanns time, when he made his observation, this homoeopathic diet, of which he spoke and which was referred to by Dr. Olds, was the thing he had worked out to his own satisfaction as being the most complete list of foods which could be deleted from the patients diet list.
