DR. MARQUEZ: I think you are referring to the pathological diagnosis, which is thirty-three and one-third per cent from autopsy.
DR. RICE: I think the homoeopath has a distinct advantage in the matter of making diagnosis, because a study of the symptoms complex leads him right there. It is just as faithful a diagnosis.
DR. BELLOKOSSY: The diagnosis includes the cause, also, and not just a simple picture.
DR. RICE: The homoeopath has the vantage ground there, too, and generally a good homoeopath is a better diagnostician than those ……
of the old school, because the homoeopath has the background, and symptomatology as the field of action.
DR. GRIMMER: I think we are getting into that which is in the unsealed world.
Dr. Mackenzie has faithfully portrayed the interpretation of the master Hahnemann when he tells us that the real cause, after all, is the sick life forces which are to be remedied by the indicated remedies. If that life force in the body is not sick, we do not have disease. When this life force is harmonious, there is no disease. Our remedies simply restore the flow of the life force and we have health.
DR. SHERWOOD: If I understand Dr. Mackenzie correctly, he is in favor of the use of diphtheria antitoxin and calls it homoeopathic. I cant agree with that. I believe a case of diphtheria can be cured with a single homoeopathic remedy in a minimum dose. Some of you wont agree.
I want to say if the homoeopathic graduates of all time had paid more attention to their material medica and less to diagnosis of disease and giving a name to it; if they had studied materia medica with a view to knowing what to do for the sick patient, we would have far more recognition than we have today.
DR. FARRINGTON: There is a growing trend, which is also indicated in Dr. Mackenzies paper, toward the idea of the unity of the human economy. Those of you who have read Alexis Carrels book, Man, the Unknown, will remember his statements along this line. He says: “Disease is not an entity but a condition. Disease is very much of a personal affair.” I am surprised that what he says about the specialist hasnt gotten him into trouble with the powers that be. Perhaps he was outside the medical profession, and untouchable. Being outside the medical profession, he has an advantage over those who are in it, from the standpoint of observation. He is detached, as it were.
Others voice a similar thought. One of them, for instance, is Pottenger, a celebrated old-school chest specialist, but nevertheless a philosopher in medicine. In one of his articles, he says it is a mistake to predicate disease of organs, because diseases do not divide themselves that way. The body is so closely united through the nervous system and the circulation that when one part is sick the whole man is sick, and it is only a matter of degree.
These men see the light, although they are unable to give the remedy to follow.
DR. MACKENZIE: There are a few things I would like to speak on as to points raised by the discussants. One is the diagnosis. That seems to have come up two or three times. As I tried to stress in my paper, diagnosis must comprehend every possible factor, etiologic and otherwise, and the secondary manifestations. Lets take the fundamental dyscrasias.
For instance, there are a lot of people going around with diabetes, and they dont know it. I will venture to say there are at least four cases of diabetes in the room, and those people dont know they have it. People who are going to die of diabetes a week from now, if you spoke to them and said, “Hello, Bill, how are you?” would answer, “I was never more fit in my life. I havent seen a doctor for thirty years.” Yet he may die of diabetic coma a week hence. He has no symptoms. These things come on insidiously. Hahnemann stressed them.
Every thing I said here has been written before by myself in different contributions mostly to the Institute Journal. I want to show you the trend. I did mention a mans name, but didnt go into detail. There are lots of things I didnt cover in detail because I didnt have time, but they can be looked up.
A man by the name of Joseph Meller, the most outstanding specialist in the world, has spent his entire medical life in the investigation of tuberculosis. Many years ago he conceived the idea that many of the diseases had as their cause a latent dyscrasia in the form of tuberculosis. The patient had no symptoms referable to the lungs. He began to investigate, using many avenues of approach. Among them was the intracutaneous test to tuberculin, and began at the beginning of the century. It is conceded by all allergists today that the reaction on the skin to tuberculin is an allergic phenomenon.
The primary effect of Hahnemann, the negative phase of Wright of London, the aggravation which Hahnemann refers to are all the same, and I have known homoeopaths to say they have given homoeopathic remedies and never saw an aggravations. I dont believe a man is a convert to homoeopathy who says he never saw an aggravation. The duration of those aggravations depends upon the size of the dose in proportion to the patients reaction, the vital force reacting against it. If the dose is sufficiently large, they will react. With the residual forces not sufficient to cause reaction against it, the patient will go into a deeper and deeper negative phase from which he will not come out unless given a similar drug antigen in infinitesimally smaller doses.
Meller of Vienna, makes an intracutaneous skin test, and if that patient is already suffering from a latent form of tuberculosis without manifestations in the lungs, there will develop a slightly raised, indurated mark, which will last varying lengths of time depending upon other factors. He calls that a local reaction. It is an allergic phenomenon. It shows that the patient has been allergized or sensitized to that infection in the lungs. The patient will also develop a reaction in the primary focus in the lung, and will ofttimes develop a slight cough and other symptoms suggestive of recurring attacks of active tuberculosis. He will manifest the general phenomena of malaise, rise of temperature, and symptoms of general infection.
There is a fourth reaction which I call the fourth dimensional, …..
and that proves it. I am working on it now, and in the August number of the Institute Journal you will find two pages devoted to it that I have prepared. In this fourth reaction, if the patient is at the clinic for inflammation of the ciliary body or any part of the eye, there will develop an aggravation of those symptoms, to which Hahnemann refers. The patient, being sensitized by infinitesimally small doses of tuberculin, produces a negative phase to the aggravation, which i s told by the fourth symptoms. None of the books on eye diseases describes that. The symptoms referable to it, due to the secondary manifestation of the fundamental infection, I call the specific reaction. The specific reaction occurs all the time in Hahnemanns work, and those of his able followers.
I notice there is a tendency to confuse immunity with hypersensitiveness. is immunity standing on its head.
Someone spoke of the use of drugs to kill germs in vivo, that they must destroy the body. True, they do. There is a very great man, still living, head of the urological clinic in Vienna, who pointed out one of the worlds prizes in medicine about nine years ago. I know him very well and took a trip with him to Salzburg. He won the worlds prize in medicine in this: There is no drug you can give a patient that will kill the germs in vivo, but you can give a drug that will stimulate the reaction of the body cells against the germs and kill them that way, but it is done indirectly in the body cells, and that is a unit of the measures of the patients health.
That is the point I wanted to bring out.
