There is as tragic tendency in us Indians to become votaries of cults. This make us sectarians. It is had enough that we are often Sanatana Dharmists in religion. It becomes infinitely worse when we become medical or political Sanatanists. Orthodoxy becomes a shield behind which we hibernate, hide all our flaws and weakness and staunchly defend untenable causes. British Medical thinking is proverbially reactionary and conservative. It is decades behind American and continental medicine in progressive ideas. Sir George Newmans proposals for medical and health reform, presented to the British Health Ministry in 1910, was practically adopted by the British Government in its post-war Medical Reforms of 1944.
British Medical test books are still more old-fashioned and out of date from modern medical standards; the British Medical Association, the “Citadel” of conservatism; and the General Medical Council of Great Britain, a Trade Union of vested interests. George Bernard Shaw 1 can tell you much about that. Slaves and neo-converts often outdo their masters in zeal of orthodoxy. Here we have the Indian Medical Council, composed mainly of Indian Allopaths, with its extraordinarily exaggerated orthodox and narrow views of propriety.
I have to deal with several such august medical bodies and I know what struggles I endure to make them listen to the patent and glaring fact that the Medical and Economic problems are peculiarly difficult in India and need a broad and courageous ideology and programme and a radical departure from the official mechanised views of fossilised Surgeon Generals with the Government of India.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE 100 p.c. HAHNEMANNIANS:
But the Homoeopaths in India are no less guilty. There are the various groups of “Cent per Cent” Hahnemannians, whose groups often outweighs their knowledge; who think reading the Organon and Kents Philosophy a hundred times is all one needs to know, the be-all and end-all of the art of Homoeopathy. In one of the journals I read of one of our colleagues raising our teacher, Hahnemann, to divinity calling him “Lord Hahnemann” like Lord Sri Krishna and Homoeopathy to a religion, a thing the founder never desired either for himself or his teachings.
Not is it true, as the Sanatanist Hahnemannians would like to believe, that a mere matching of symptoms is all that is necessary to find the similimum. In spite of brilliant results often achieved, the mere mechanical comparison of symptoms not only often fails in large percentage of cases but can actually be dangerous so far that it may be utilised in cases where the similie is not applicable, though apparently well indicated, and better procedures are available. Several drugs are indicated in decreasing vision.
But decreasing vision may equally well need correct refraction and prescription of glasses for astigmatism; there may be a cerebral glioma, retinitis albuminurica, or due to diabetes, leukaemia, retinal detachment or central cataract. Highly essential information may often be lacking, but when available, there is no reason why we should not use it if we understand how to use it. And I certainly believe that if we homoeopaths were to restrict our observations to the primitive level of the record of symptoms, the similie would be the graveyard of science and all further progress.That is one aspect of the position.
FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE.
But when we, as scientific homoeopathic physicians, turn to investigate the newest in our official school of Medicine, Allopathy, we are appalled at the volume of progress which still leads to nowhere, still has reached no conclusions and still has discovered no law of cure or positive therapy. I am each time dismayed at the tragically low standard of medical thinking among Indian allopaths. The medical teachers at our Universities have advanced not one step further in their views on the problems of medicine.
It is disheartening to head that soulless catalogue of medicine known as “Prices Text Book of Medicine” or Cushnys Text book of Pharmacology, the Bhagvad Gitas of Indian medical teachers. A little more encouraging to go through is recent American medicine. And one is surprised to learn that at long last it is being openly admitted and proclaimed that thee is no purely organic disease but that psychic factors play important roles. This of course, is a slap in the face of the “Organic Tradition In Medicine” which 99.9 p.c. of allopathic physician in India adhere to : for, as Weiss and English2 point out:
“As a consequence of the structural and physiologic tradition in medicine, a large number of physician pride themselves upon their unwillingness to concede the absence of physical disease when dealing with an obscure case. In discussing such a patient they are apt to say but there must be something the matter, meaning that there must be a physical basis. And they furthermore believe that further researches along lines of physical medicine will eventually uncover the hidden causes infection, allergies, endocrine or metabolic, responsible for such obscure illness.”And a brand new name has been given to this medical speciality:
PSYCHO-SOMATIC MEDICINE.
And in spite of the awe- inspiring, Nobel Prize winning discoveries of Sulfa drugs and Pennicillin, Streptomycin and Vitamins A to Z, we are told by Dublin3 that “the total volume of illness ill increase in the next decades” and that “the illness with which the physician is least prepared to cope are the illness he will meet with the greatest frequency in his practice” and a prominent British medical officer, Halliday,4 in the British Medical Journal gives us the more consoling news that “there will be a marked increase in chronic and recurring neurotic illness, as well as in many examples of organic sickness labelled by such as anaemia, rheumatism, gastritis, peptic ulcers, bronchitis”, none of them amenable to the present “cure-alls”-the Sulfas and Pennicilin, while Boas speaks of the “Unseen Plague-Chronic Diseases, increasing by leaps and bounds”.
Now, what the average allopath is to make out of all this he who knows practically nothing of the nature of chronic diseases. whose whole dramatic success lay till today in the combating of acute exacerbations and outbreaks with suppressive measures. Nowhere in allopathy is there any explanation offered for the nature of chronic diseases. Only Hahnemann and the Ayurveda have offered a theory which theoretically may be questioned, but in practice has proved its with.
And it is deemed that “while Psycho-Somatic Medicine, though in practice is as old as the art of Medicine, it is a new discipline” (Dunbar6). And things known for a hundred and fifty years to every average homoeopathic become a brand new discovery. Thus it seems that in World War I. the leading cause of disability was an entity known as Soldiers Heart”. Later it was called “Effort Syndrome” and was promoted to grander position as “The Klein-Levi Syndrome” and finally it needed World War II. to get its final and correct name “Cardio-vascular Asthenia.”
The disease entity has not changed, but the fancy names have. Five sixths of them were wrongly diagnosed in the first war as genuine heart disease; thousands were discharged from the army and pensioned off and became chronic heart cases. They further admit that the general practitioner knows more of psychosomatic medicine empirically unconsciously than the University medical professors and the usual specialised internist. The old traditional family physician, unfortunately rapidly dying our, was an unconscious psycho-somatist.
PSYCHIATRISTS, PSYCHO-ANALYSTS AND, PSYCHOS-SOMATISTS.
We are edified to find further specialisation among specialisation among specialists in allopathic sciences, each man trying to know more and of less and less. Where this craze for water-tight compart mentalism is going to lead to, Lord only knows. It seems that while psychiatrists and psycho-analysts knew that emotions and sub-conscious conflicts could lead to fatal physical illness and that the “death due to a broken heart” is not a myth, the ordinary run of clinicians and medical men know practically nothing of it.
It is complained that even the pathologist takes a wider view of etiology than the clinician by admitting the possibility of an unknown intrinsic factor X. How different the Homoeopath who was taught by Hahnemann that of all the symptoms the Mentals came first in importance. It seems it is now discovered that among with civilians and military ranks 40-50 p.c. of all illnesses are psycho-somatic in origin and that during this war these diseases have sky-rocketed, e.g., peptic ulcers. They have suddenly discovered that many cases of bronchial asthma, hay-fever, arthritis, cardio-vascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, cardio-vascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, coryza and various allergies are psychosomatic in origin.
Advanced practitioners desire to include Tuberculosis, obesity, alcoholism and even the so-called “Railway-spine”. Further, tendency to accidents is attributed to the desire to fall ill” as an escape mechanism, that peculiar factor is called X. What that precise mechanism is whereby emotions lead to illness (except to a certain extent in peptic ulcers) is not known and amount to 15 p.c. of all civil and military illness, and 80-90 p.c. are psycho-somatic; and yet Dunlop7 as late as 1944, admits that the usual Sippy Diet and alkalis, though they are totally wrong and worthless, are all they have because they relieved distressing symptoms.
