Every physician who, for any length of time, has been engaged in homoeopathic practice, must have become thoroughly convinced of the superiority of the homoeopathic therapy as compared to the therapeutic procedures employed by orthodox medicine. This conviction naturally creates a desire to see the principles of Hahnemann accepted by the whole medical world, in order that every patient may receive the full benefit of the homoeopathic treatment.
In the past great efforts have also been made by homoeopathic physicians to get the official medical school to put the Hahnemannian method to the therapeutic test. These efforts, however, as you all know, have been far from successful, but since the reasons for this failure have been pointed out so many times before, it will be quite unnecessary to dwell upon them here. It is enough to emphasize, however, that in spite of the fact that homoeopathy in the past has proved its superiority over the official therapy, it still remains a method employed only by a small minority, and in most places it is still looked upon only with scorn and ridicule.
Yet today one often hears reference made to the fact that orthodox medicine in its research work is getting closer and closer to the homoeopathic principles. True enough, such expressions as “constitutional therapy”, “individual treatment”,, “functional pathology”, etc., are nowadays often mentioned by allopathic physicians; articles on homoeopathy are now and then appearing in allopathic medical journals; homoeopathic physicians have on a few occasions been invited to address allopathic medical societies and the attitude of the allopathic profession towards homoeopathy seems slowly, but surely, to be undergoing a change for the better. Why is it, then, that it still seems such a hopeless task to get the method of Hahnemann officially accepted by our allopathic colleagues?.
One reason for this is to be found in the unwillingness, so common to us mortals, to openly confess our mistakes and shortcomings; but another, and perhaps still more important reason, is the failure on our part to really prove that homoeopathy still retains its superiority over the allopathic therapy.
Many of you now probably feel like saying that homoeopathy is proving its value daily and in a great number of cases, and you will recall in your minds, no doubt, a great many instances where homoeopathy has brought good results after other therapeutic methods have failed. To this I am going to reply, however, that individual cases prove very little — and in many instances nothing at all– as to the therapeutic value of the method employed.
Individual members of practically every therapeutic school –beginning with our “Old School” colleagues and then down along the line of osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths or whatever they call themselves –are able to report individual cures just as startling as those reported by our best homoeopathic prescribers. Yes, even pure quacks, without any medical education whatsoever, are often able to show some really remarkable results.
It happens now and then that a patient who has perhaps been going downhill for a longer or shorter time, suddenly, from reasons unknown, gets a new lease on life and shows a marked improvement, which may even lead to a complete cure, without having been subject to any special therapy. Any therapeutic method that is brought to bear upon the case just before such an improvement sets in is naturally getting the credit for this improvement, but in reality it was not all the cause of the change in the patients condition.
This was impressed very strongly upon my mind by a case that I had some years ago. I was called to a middle-aged woman who had been confined to bed for about five weeks with a temperature of around 103. She had been admitted to a hospital, but since the hospital physicians had not been able to determine the cause of her fever or to bring it down, she returned to her home. I examined her, but I could not find anything to account for her high temperature. The only thing I discovered was a slight leucocytosis. She complained of nothing save a headache and general malaise.
I prescribed for her, and told her husband to let me know in a few days how she was getting alone. After two days he called me on the phone and told me that his wifes temperature was perfectly normal. Naturally I felt quite pleased about the good result from my prescription. However, before I had any chance of saying anything, he asked me whether I now considered it necessary for his wife to take the medicine I had prescribed.
He then went on telling me that the drugstore had been unable to fill my prescription right away and that he had been told to return for his medicine in a couple of days. His wife had thus not taken any medicine, and she recovered completely without taking any! This case shows how extremely careful we must be in judging therapeutic results in individual cases.
Another fact which must also be taken into consideration is the therapeutic effect of the physicians own personality. It is through this channel that the quacks usually work their often quite remarkable cures. We had a good example of that here in Sweden some years ago. A man whose work was to care for the cattle on a farm suddenly decided to establish himself as a healer of human ills. He got some very good results, and his reputation soon spread over the country. Patients started to flock to him in such large numbers that special buses were needed to carry them all out to the farm where he lived. Finally the police authorities started to investigate his business.
It was now found that his whole therapy consisted in giving his patients some water which he, according to his own statement, had bottled from a brook that “ran from the north”. When one hears about things like that one must really wonder if the physicians own personality is not the most important factor in bringing about the therapeutic results. It seems as if anybody who has a suitable personality — a medical “it” if that term may be used — can obtain good results, no matter what kind of therapy he employs.
I have pointed out these facts in order to show that reports of individual cases prove nothing as to the value of the therapeutic method employed unless we are able to show, not only that the patients in question- as in the case I mentioned a little while ago-would not “have got well anyhow”, but also that the therapeutic effect was not simply caused by the physicians own personality. the first of these two factors can never be excluded entirely: the second only when it is a question of a small child, an unconscious patient or an animal. The only thing that is proven by many of these case reports that appear in our homoeopathic journals is our own lack of self-criticism.
The only way in which we can really prove the superiority of the Hahnemannian therapy is by means of a statistical data for well defined disease entities which usually run a fairly definite course with a fairly constant mortality rate, such as pneumonia, typhoid fever, cholera, etc. These statistics must be sufficiently large, and the diagnosis in every case verified by the usual diagnostic methods. At present we are not able to furnish any such data.
When we want to show the value of homoeopathy, we have to resort to statistics that are almost one hundred years old. The marked difference in results between allopathic and homoeopathic treatment which appeared in these statistics were, no doubt, at least partly due to the very harmful therapeutic measures, such as venesection, purging, etc., which were still employed by the allopathic school at that time: methods which now have been discarded.
This was clearly demonstrated by that famous allopathic clinician, Diet, by the investigations that he carried out at the Wieden Hospital in Vienna. During the years 1842-1846 he treated 380 cases of pneumonia. Eighty-five of these were treated by the usual venesection and with a mortality of 20 percent; 106 cases received large doses of ipecacuanha, and the result was a 20.7 percent mortality, while the remaining 189 cases, which only received dietetic treatment, only showed a mortality of 7 percent.
The homoeopathic statistics which have been compiled more recently are not large enough, or else they have been gathered from private physicians and are then very difficult to examine. The International Homoeopathic Directory for 1931, however, contains some figures. Thus the mortality rate in pneumonia at the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia during the ten year period 1921-1930, according to Dr. Wells, has been as follows:.
Pure homoeopathic treatment (130 cases) 7 percent.
Mixed treatment (190 case) 47 percent.
Physiological treatment (120 cases) 70 percent.
This would give an average mortality of 41 percent.
The question is whether these figures would stand any closer scrutiny. The exceedingly high immortality in the “physiological” group (70 percent as compared to around 30 percent in allopathic hospitals) makes these figures look rather suspicious to me. To account for such a high mortality the “physiological” group must have been made up of mostly very severe cases, and this would then leave only the milder cases for the homoeopathic group. If this had been the case, then these figures are of no value whatsoever.
