Gentlemen,
There are various ways of taking a case. Let us examine first of all an allopathic case sheet from our local hospital. Generally it is a blank with a few scribbles here and there. If an allopathic case sheet is carefully filled up, you will find that they have practically turned the patient inside out; examined him before the X ray screen, examined his urine, stools, stomach contents, blood, sputum; in short, all his secretions and excretions. He has been taken to pieces so thoroughly that there is nothing left of him. Yet when it comes to sizing up the sick man, the medical student and the practitioner hardly know who the sick man is, why he has fallen ill, and for what reason he was unable to resist the evil effects of his environment. He is merely Be Head Ticket No : so and so.
It is no doubt true, to a certain extent, that the allopathic thoroughness in examining all physical abnormalities manifested in a patient is a very praiseworthy thing and can give us important clues, not always but often, to vast pathological changes. It can tell us of tumors in the brain and the spinal cord, changes in vision, stenosis and strictures in certain parts, and that the liver, blood spleen and stomach are not upto par. The allopathic physical diagnosis can only confirm that a man is physically ill, generally only cognisable when his illness has advanced to such a structural extent that it is too late for effective cure.
Very often not even that. It cannot tell us why a man has fallen ill, not even how he has fallen ill. The misfortune with the allopathic method, at least with the general prevailing method, of diagnosis is that it leads to a tendency among physicians, and medical students to the belief that medicine is a mathematical science and that human disease is a packet of misery with a label attached to it. They think that this parcel can be removed if you know what it contains, or have learnt the trick of dissolving it or cutting it away. That the patient can be something more than a mere messenger carrying a bundle which is painful or burdensome to him, or for the doctor a secret code to be cracked, is a concept which few physicians are willing to accept.
The dictatorship of bacteriology in present day medicine has made it difficult for most allopaths to understand that meningococcus bacteria do not necessarily mean meningitis, that sugar is not diabetes and that lacking a specific type of person these two maladies could not possibly occur. The same idea has been expressed by the idealist philosophers that vibrations are not sound in themselves and come into existences only when falling upon a percipient ear. In other words the physicians task is and should be to study the nature of the man behind the patient and within the patient.
What does this mean? Is it possible that man himself is the causal factor of disease? How should we get to know the real man within the patient? You know that in Homoeopathy Hahnemann taught that of all symptoms the mental picture of the man before you is most important, more important, more important than all physical symptoms. But you will find that exactly this is the most difficult thing to judge or obtain. For, while most people will cheerfully expand upon the sad fate and hardships that have been theirs, they will not willingly or easily either face or expose their true selves as reflected in thought-processes and feeling states.
In Kents Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy you will find on page 202 his mentioning how false modesty prevents men and especially women from telling you the truth about themselves. This is known as the “Defensive Mechanism” in Psychiatry. And no physician, except the gifted few, can at the first meeting worm out the deeper psychic factors of disturbance that play a most important role in the illness of a given patient. For instance, it is difficult to imagine a typical Indian woman telling you at the first, or even at this fifth sitting that she has an aversion to her husband, that she desire the sex-act but hates it afterwards, that she enjoys the emotional part of love but not the sex act., or that she is in love with another man, or even that she masturbates.
Another woman may refuse to tell you that she has never been satisfied with her husbands embrace, that it has left her with a sense of disappointment and frustration, that her genital organs are turgid and painful because of lacking detumescence, that she feels resentful that her husband turns his back to her and snores with profound satisfaction after his own premature discharge leaving her wakeful, dissatisfied and resentful with ashes and pains. You cannot browbeat a woman into confession like a lawyer cross-examining a hostile witness in the witness box. You must sense them instinctively.
A womans moods are dictated by the moods of her uterus; and if you dont understand that, cannot intuitively sense that, you can never unravel the woman in front of you nor ever prescribe successfully for her. But she saint or sinner, a woman is the manifestation of her emotional and sexual make up, much more subtle and complete than a man. You may remember Byrons lines. “A mans love and mans life are things apart: its womans whole existence”; or you may remember Nemilovs “The Biological Tragedy of Woman.”
Take the case of a young woman who came to me. She had digestive upsets, all sorts of aches and pains which were indeterminate, vomits, pain in the left ovary, no history of disease, no leucorrhoea, menses scanty since marriage. What is one to make out of such a statement? She was very intelligent, very intellectual and apparently surprisingly frank in everything except in the one real thing, the single factor that was the cause of her trouble. It needs a very wise man or a consummate villain to understand the mask that human beings wear to hide their real selves.
Kent says that “the physician must be possessed of an uncommon share to circumspection and tract, a knowledge of the human heart, prudence and patience, to be enabled to form to himself a true and complete picture of the disease”. But this is not enough. It far better expressed by James Corscaden in his “History Taking and Recording”, when he says… “the reliability of the information from certain patients often depends upon the intuition of the physician and on his ability to examine into the thought and personality of the sick individual.”
Really speaking, very often intuition alone comes to our rescue supported by keen observation, may be, of the fleeting play and the gleam in the eyes, the swift play of the facial muscles, transient change in colour, the faltering, in the voice, that we can avoid the deliberate deception in the patients words. Very often, during psycho-analysis, conscious lies are told because of the fear of discovery of some supposed or real past crime, indiscretion or shame. For example, this lady patient to mine, apparently so frank, fearless and truthful, how was I to know from her the facts? Why did the menses becomes scanty after marriage ?
Why did the pain in the ovaries start marriage ? Why was there no leucorrhoea? Men who know only one woman will never understand other women. Perhaps that man is the wise physician who has watched hundreds of men man women in their varying moods. That brings intuition and understanding. Only intuition told me that before me was a sexually starved and dissatisfied woman. A happily married woman is a tower of patience and quiet courage. Finally I won this young woman over to admit that the man she married was totally impotent, that each sex attempt was a disillusionment and failure. No amount of symptomatology could analyse the real cause of her trouble nor the way she reacted to it. The is correct etiology.
Or, take again the case of a intelligent young man who came to me for treatment. He was passing blood from the bowels, and in hospital it was twice treated as duodenal ulcer although the X ray gave no evidence in support for such an assumption. In hospital he was put on Sippy and Alkaline treatment after which he became worse. What was the allopathic diagnosis? “Duodenal ulcer.”- for which there was no evidence. What was the cause of his bleeding from the bowel or the ulcer? The allopath did not know. Now see how a homoeopath would go about the investigation. He would follow the dictum that…”Since disease is not a preformed entity which grafts itself upon a person, the history should concern itself as much with the character of the man as with the special factor of the environment which oppresses him. From our standpoint, the nature of the evil influence is not so significant as his manner or reacting to it.”
Now, in this young mans case what was the nature of the evil influence and his manner of reacting to it? After very careful questioning it turned our that he was practicing “coitus interruptus” as birth control. You know this method puts a great strain upon the nervous system, more especially upon a man who is constitutionally a neurotic. Added to this, the young man for the past one year has fallen violently in love with another woman with whom he indulges in unlimited and excessive venery. The first bleeding took place after 20 days of excessive venery.
