Man may be acted upon, and his mental and physical state altered by his environment, by mental stimuli, such as joy, sympathy, anger and sorrow, and fear, by food and drink, or by the lack of it, by disease, and by drugs.
These are all forces or forms of energy. Among the more potent of these forces, which are able to alter mans mental and physical state, are the various diseases to which he is prone, and drugs which are administered usually for the relief of these diseases.
Not recognizing the fact that all drugs are able to effect these changes, the old school has singled out a few from the many, and called them alternatives. Many physicians have scoffed at the idea that a drug can exhibit these powers, but every homoeopath who studies his drug provings, must admit that all drugs are alternative in their properties.
From the old school standpoint potassium iodide is the most shining example of an alterative. The tertiary lesions of syphilis will melt away under its action, and a seeming cure will result. However, should any further diseases of a baffling nature at any later date affect a patient so treated, his trouble is still diagnosed as syphilis, even if years have intervened. This is a tantamount admission that the potassium iodide did not cure by the old school, and are terribly difficult to cure by homoeopathy.
Therefore, we arrive at the conclusion that drugs given in massive doses are productive of harm and are not curative. But we must not lose sight of the fact that these drugs are potent forces, and that, can they be rightly administered, so as to act without leaving a new or drug disease within the patient, then and then only can we use them for the cure of disease.
This was the task which confronted Hahnemann, and his discovery that drugs could cure diseases whose symptoms were similar to those which the drug was able to produce upon a healthy individual, or group of individuals, is the very foundation upon which the homoeopathic system of cure rests.
Just as we see today the injurious effects of massive doses, so did Hahnemann, and his experiments in dosage, lead him to the wonderful discovery of the minute or dynamic dose. He did not know of ions – electro positive and negatively active – but he did recognize the fact that he was dealing with forces which became more active the more they were attenuated.
We now know that the further we dilute a drug, according to the fixed rules layed down by Hahnemann, the more active it becomes. In other words the further from the physical mass of the drug we proceed, the nearer we come to the liberation of the force or inherent energy of that drug. Thus, when we give a dose of a potency we are giving a dose of force or energy, which still acts as an entity and retains its individuality, not a lesser but to a greater extent than before the process of preparation.
Now indeed we are prepared to treat the sick, for with such minute doses, we need fear no terrible reaction and results, no drug diseases. We are armed with drugs capable of altering the life force of the patient back to health.
How do these forces act? (Organon, sixth edition, paragraph 27):.
The curative power of medicines, therefore, depends upon their symptoms similar to the disease, but superior to it in strength, and that each individual case of diseases is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently annihilated, and removed only by medicine capable of producing (in the human system) in the most similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms which at the same time are stronger than the disease.
There is no beating about the bush or hedging in the wording of the above paragraph. Hahnemann leaves us no loophole for escape when he expressly states that the curative power of medicines are stronger than the disease force, and he is not speaking of massive doses. He recognizes the force within the potencies.
How then can we, followers of Hahnemann, salve our conscience when we at times deliberately employ drugs in massive doses? For when we do, then are we pulling up more troubles for our patient; we are harmfully altering his disease state, and making it double hard to give him that relief for which he has applied to us.
Our stumbling-block is not always the failure to select the right remedy, but our lack of faith in the power of the dynamized drug. Why should we be afraid to give potencies to our patients? Why should we speak in whispers of having made cures with high potencies? The chances are they will not be cures in the true sense unless we have used potencies. These potencies are forces, they are sources of energy. Any substance which can cure disease, without leaving harmful after results, must be a very potent force. Therefore, let us think of them as stored energy which when liberated in the right place and time, are capable of instant action. Let us use them as directed by Hahnemann.
In our remedies, gentlemen, we have the only alteratives worth possessing.
TORONTO, CANADA.
DISCUSSION.
DR. MACFARLAN: We now live in the twentieth century, and it is surprising the amount of ignorance there is among the people who have practiced medicine, even highly trained people, how they use such little common sense in their practice. I just cite a case. I have a good friend whom I play golf with every Saturday afternoon, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the leading surgeons in Philadelphia. Last Saturday I played with him, and he didnt play very well. I said, “What seems to be the trouble?”.
He said, “I am going to my brothers funeral tomorrow at Greensburg”.
I said, “My, how did that happen?”.
“Well,” he said, “about ten days ago he developed a little loss of power in his right arm. He went to a neurologist there. He asked him how long this thing had been coming on, and he told him it had been coming on gradually, so he took a blood and spinal Wassermann. Although it was not positive, he said he thought that the course of mercury or arsphenamine would do him good. So he gave him a small dose, 3/10 of a gram of arsphenamine intravenously. This was ten days ago. Within half an hour he started to vomit. He had intermittent vomiting for about a day. He passed blood in his urine.
After he had vomited for about a day and a half, the doctor said, “I still think you need stimulation, and this will do you good. I am going to give you another dose. The same thing repeated itself, with a little more violence. After he had vomited for about a day and a half, the doctor said, I still think you need stimulation, and this will do you good. I am going to give you another dose. The same thing repeated itself, with a little more violence. After vomiting for two days off and on rather steadily, he stopped vomiting. He gave him a third injection, the same dose, and he died an hour or so after the dose”.
You wouldnt think a person in this day and generation would do a thing like that. That is an actual case. Mass medication takes its toll all the time,but people go gayly on. Of course, all you can do for people when they die is to bury them.
DR. COLEMAN: I have a similar case. This gentleman had syphilis many years ago and had a course of treatment. He was of a large family, a very prominent man. Just for good measure, he went down to see his physician, and they had a spinal Wassermann taken. I think it was found positive, but he was in perfect health. Just to be on the safe side, they injected salvarsan. He promptly got a degeneration of the spinal cord from the injection of the salvarsan, and died. If they had let him alone, he would be alive today and probably in perfect health.
DR. WAFFENSMITH: I also have a similar case, but this man didnt die. Once in a while we get cases that dont die. This case came to me about a year previous to the time that I intend to lay emphasis upon, for a chronic complex. I treated this man very carefully, and he improved, but there was some unseen obstacle that I was unable to touch, and I felt it, and it took me one years time to discover that. He suddenly developed an acute condition, and a careful study of the symptom complex presented the picture of Mercury. I asked him, “Did you ever take any drug for an indefinite period of time?”.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Some ten or more years ago I was given, by my family physician, calomel. I took it for two years once a month”.
I gave that case calomel in homoeopathic doses and cleared it up so quickly that it would delight the heart of any homoeopath.
That is what we get repeatedly, but it isnt always that we get at the fundamental cause and can clear up the cases so quickly and beautifully as this particular one.
DR. A. PULFORD: About three or four years ago Dr. DAyton and I published a pamphlet on what constitutes the real drug. We have been so engrossed in the material that we have failed to take a view of the other side, the energy. Paracelsus realized that when he wrote that what we see is not the drug contains a circumscribed, limited phase of energy, and if the system cannot get that energy out of the drug, it makes no difference whether you give the millionth part of a grain or ten million grains, it cannot get it out. The reason that we potentize the drug is to free that energy.
