It has been my experience to treat a number of the barbital addicts and we are getting a tremendous number of them. Personally, I have not yet been able to find the right homoeopathic antidote, Stramonium being nearer to it than most other things, but in so treating these cases, if possible I immediately start them into the positive psychology of asserting themselves that they are Gods children and to claim dominion over this drug habit and over these so-called germs and what- have-you.
I may be introducing something which is a little too radical in calling myself a homoeopath, but I have had remarkable success in the treatment of this, in so doing in the past year.
DR. ROOD: Sodium succinate is the antidote for barbituric acid in my experience. Twice my own brother was unconscious for twenty-four hours after a long anesthetic given in the veins. This new Sodium penthatol was given and he only became clear in his head after Sodium succinate given nine days later in potency, the 1M., by powder on his tongue.
DR. WAFFENSMITH: Where did it come from?.
DR. ROOD: I borrowed it from Dr. Harriet Knox. He was in Bay City Hospital.
DR. FARRINGTON: I dont know how much time we have for this discussion, but as the essayist said, he does not say anything new. But he emphasized some of the old things, so that they appear to us in a new light. One of them was that this philosophy is a complete one and that is not found anywhere else.
The point I especially want to make is this: We dont have to go to the old school to find empirical prescribing. We have it right in our own midst. It is the easy way. How many times have I wished I could give a dose of quick acting drug and not have to rack my poor brains to dig out a remedy for some difficult and intractable case. Routine prescribing and keynote prescribing and keynote prescribing are for the most part empirical.
Several years ago I stood on the shores of that beautiful Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. It was just before sunset and the suns rays came up over the mountains in glorious colors, giving the lake and its water, and the cliffs around it, a soft, beautiful, misty tint. I looked on one side of me; there was a painter painting a box; probably to be used as a fire alarm or something of that sort. He was painting it a brilliant vermilion and doing a very good job of it, too. It looked beautiful, smooth and red.
Then as I turned the other way there sat an old German with his easel and a canvas on which he was putting just the final touches. He had caught that marvelous and elusive thing that artists always seek, “atmosphere”. His tints, his blending of colors, gave a perfect picture of what was there.
To my mind good Hahnemannian prescribing is represented by what that mans art was putting down on canvas. The painter was doing something useful and very nice, but that is all.
DR. GRIMMER: I should like to answer the good doctor over here. I cant let that go unchallenged, because long before Christian Science was discovered, Hahnemann spoke about the desirability of faith in Divine Providence and the spiritual side of our nature, and recognized that it is very important and we all have sense, every good homoeopath, but we know that psychology comes along in some cases– in many cases they will do just what the doctor has prescribed, but you take these deep psoric or even other inheritable conditions, and you have a great deal of difficulty to psychologize them out of some of their mental fixations.
You take the remedy Stramonium, and some of the deep ones, even some of the deep constitutional remedies, through a series of miasms, the antimiasmatic remedies, to cure some of these cases over quite a period of time.
Another thing, I had, or in my practice I have had, quite a few Christian Science healers who have come to me for treatment, and I treated them. They werent able to apply their own law, because they were deeply sick and they were opposed to allopathic drugging– they wouldnt take that.
They got the philosophic idea that homoeopathic potencies were spiritual remedies and hence they didnt have so much difficulty in taking them, but I have seen that happen, and I think, while it is a good thing, and we are glad that men like Cabot and the other great man that wrote Man the Unknown, Alexis Carrel, have become converted to the idea that spiritual and mental healing are sufficient to heal almost anything if the faith is sufficient– and it was said that Alexis Carrel became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church on the strength of what he saw in one of the shrines in France, a cancer wither away on a mans arm–he was a noted and ardent scientists, a man of great ability all around, so we must not ignore these things, because Hahnemann said the cause of disease was from the deeper senses, and man meets on the externals, and from that then goes on back again if it is not arrested by the homoeopathic remedy.
So we are not really antagonistic to these things and I think we are glad to have patients that come from a line of thought and it shows what the future is for us, swinging from one pendulum to another, from drastic doses to mental and spiritual healing. There will be a middle ground and homoeopathy will stand on the middle ground to take care of those that need more. We can really welcome these things because they are good. They are doing away with the drastic drugging, and I, for one, have no warfare with the Christian Scientists, outside of the fact that I cant accept their philosophy that there is no evil in the world.
In his book The Collected Works of Arthur Hill Grimmer, Grimmer spoke out against the fluoridation of water and vaccinations. Grimmer wrote prodigeously, Gnaphalium, Homeopathic Prophylaxis and Homeopathic Medicine and Cancer: The Philosophy and Clinical Experiences of Dr. A.H. Grimmer, M.D.