DR. TURTON: May I be allowed to interject a question? Just how are we going to compete with drugstore prescribing? It seems to me that does more injury than the real allopathic prescription.
DR. LEWANDOWSKI: Many years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the people would be much better off if all the medicine were thrown into the ocean, and the fish would be worse off. We know that allopath has morphine for pain, aspirin as an analgesic or antipyretic, neuronal for epilepsy, castor oil, which would make a very poor grease, for a laxative, and cascara.
Speaking about insulin, I have read statistics recently that here have been more deaths from the use of insulin than insulin was ever meant to benefit in the diabetic. I can vouch for the information I am giving you.
So far as arsiphenamine is concerned in the use of syphilis, there have been more tertiary or advanced cases of lues since the use of arsiphenamine. I am opposed to either the use of insulin in diabetes or arsiphenamine for syphilis.
I had the experience in the first two or three years of my practice of being a strong allopath, with high bills and terrible results, and it didnt take me very long to collect my thoughts and abandon the use of morphine, luminol, bromides, castor oil, cascara, and many other nostrums. (Applause).
DR. A PULFORD: The discussion proves two facts: That difference of opinion proves quite clearly that the truth lies somewhere if you knew but where; the other one is if you throw enough mud, some of it is bound to stick. The fact of the matter is that if the law of similars is correct and the indicated remedy wont cure a disease, no other method will, and it is a proven fact that unless by accident the allopath has never cured a chronic disease. He has been able to suppress it, to palliate it so that the patient was comfortable, but never got rid of the cause. Consequently, I am here to state to you that I have never yet in all my experience seen a disease of any description, of a chronic nature, that was ever cured by any allopath.
I want to confirm what my brother said about insulin. I think your statistics were gathered from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, for I remember reading the identical thing.
DR. ALMFELT: I have done nothing else in the last eighteen years but deal with chronic diseases of the worst kind, that is after they have gone the rounds of other treatment, except homoeopaths. That is probably correct, that all chronic patients get better under almost any form of treatment, even the worst, at times, but when it comes to actual cure, that is an entirely different problem.
Just what is the cure of a disease, and to begin with, what is a disease? We dont always have these conceptions clear in our minds. For this reason, I would like to put the question, what is it that actually cures disease? Is it medicine? Is it food? Or is it physical treatments, or anything we do? If you would allow me to answer that question myself, I would say none of these things cure diseases. The actual thing that cures is life itself, that thing within us that makes us a living being, the thing that makes a distinction between a dead body and a living being; that is life, whatever it may be called. That is the thing that cures when there is disorder in the human body and it maintains health and order, but we as physicians can do a great deal to help life in this process of restoring health, or we might retard it by some things we do.
All people, including the physician eat badly; they know nothing about proper eating in relation to health. Unfortunately, that is the truth. In this state of New York, most men of importance die of some form of heart disease between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. Is that necessary? That is the time when a man should be at his best and do his best work. He has lived long enough to know something; he has had some experience, and he ought to go on living indefinitely if he knows how to live properly.
That being the case, when these people come to me, the first thing I do is to clean house within their bodies. That means elimination. I can have a patient on a light diet of fruit juices and vegetable broth for two or three days, and have colonic irrigations every day, and lots of stuff is carried out. What does it mean? When this stuff is not removed from the system completely every day, there is an absorption of these poisons and it poisons the system and produces disease or disorder of various kinds in the body. You say the remedy will not work. It will work all right, but you will not get as good results from the remedy as when you clean out the system at the same time and give nature a better chance, because by the things we do, we upset the machinery or we assist nature or life. That is my experience.
DR. ROBERTS: Dr. McLaren says that three-quarters of our work is chronic. All of our work is chronic. What is chronic disease as we understand it, or what is acute disease as we understand it? Acute disease is simply a bubbling up of a chronic, fundamental dyscrasia in the system. Take our acute childrens disease. It is a clearing house because there is something wrong fundamentally in the childs constitution. All acute diseases in their primary essence are eruptions of the chronic.
DR. ALLEN: My first thought in reading the original article was that it was a real answer to the question, “Why treat chronic diseases?” It riled me so that I could not help writing a paper on the subject. We do not say that we as homoeopaths are the only ones who can treat disease and who help people, but I agree with several who have spoken before, that when it comes to cure, we can probably claim that distinction.
