In the last issue we talked about who is sick, what is sick, what is health, with something of the order of development of sickness.
Now we shall consider the ideal cure. Many, many cures are not ideal because interferences are frequent and great; also mans mortal mind cannot compass the perfect whole. We discuss the ideal, however, and consider later the things which mar it.
If almost any physician is asked what constitutes a cure, he will talk about removing the results of disease. If there is a tumor, cut it out along with all affected tissues in its neighborhood; if an abscess is forming, bring it to maturity and drain it; if an area is infected, open it and cut out everything infected; if pain is agonizing, give an anodyne, a pain killer, to allow the patient rest; if digestion is disturbed and the bowels clogged, use purging and clear the intestinal tract; if parts are inflamed, give medicines to quiet that inflammation; if there is high fever, give a medicine to lower the temperature. Such is the trend and thought behind it.
The homoeopathic idea of sickness shows that removal of disease results does not reach the sick man to cure him, that we must get behind such procedure to the man himself to put him in order, to restore him to health.
Hahnemann says, “the highest ideal of a cure is rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of the health – in the shortest, most reliable and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles”.
Purging for obstinate constipation is rapid, but it is not gentle or permanent, for the reaction is greater inactivity of the bowel; giving medicine to reduce fever often produces quick results but the fever appears again; many operations relieve quickly but they are violent and the victims are not well people.
In recent years the general trend is toward small doses of medicine but not toward the single remedy. Instead, these small doses contain several strong drugs whose action is insidious is harmful effect. It seems gentle and fairly rapid but, instead of being permanent, the drug effects are cumulative and lead gradually to breakdown of order in the man himself. Such cases are most difficult for the homoeopathic physician; they are frequently incurable from the point of view of the ideal cure.
The trend of such treatment is toward organic and mental troubles. It explains much of the increase in deep nervous disorders, focal infections, tuberculosis, cancer and insanity in these days. The disorder, for which small doses of concentrated, compound drugs were given, is still there progressing insidiously toward the inner man. Added to this, drug disease is engrafted on the patient to render his future disorder far more serious.
In contradistinction to all this, the ideal cure, homoeopathically speaking, takes place so quietly that the patient is scarcely aware of the process. It is like a gentle flowing or streaming through the whole system; it is comparable to the flowing of a river with hardly a ripple upon the surface; everything becomes orderly from within outward.
The cure must be “on easily comprehensible principles.” This last means law, fixed principles, as certain as the law of gravitation. Law never changes; human use of it may be far from ideal but the principles are the same yesterday, today and forever. This is not the medicine of experience, of changing opinion, for it is based directly on natural law.
The Law of Similars and its corollaries will be taken up in later issues to show what they mean. We shall discuss the directions of cure, how the physician may know whether his patient is getting well or growing worse, whether he is curable or incurable, various conclusions about his constitution, vitality, susceptibility to various things, etc.
Next time we shall glimpse what is curable in sick people and what is curative in medicines.
