EDITORIAL


EDITORIAL. As a minority group in medicine we advanced and prospered as along as we were satisfied to adhere to our therapeutic concepts. When, under pressure from the vast and well organized medical majority, we showed a willingness to abandon our principles in order to win favor with the majority, we rightly lost face as a group who either had tried our therapeutic methods and found them wanting, or as a group who would desert a sound therapeutic principle for the advantages offered us as individuals as the price of concurrence.


THOUGHTS ON BASIC HOMOEOPATHIC THINKING.

As a minority group in medicine we advanced and prospered as along as we were satisfied to adhere to our therapeutic concepts. When, under pressure from the vast and well organized medical majority, we showed a willingness to abandon our principles in order to win favor with the majority, we rightly lost face as a group who either had tried our therapeutic methods and found them wanting, or as a group who would desert a sound therapeutic principle for the advantages offered us as individuals as the price of concurrence.

This has meant that we were required to return to the most ancient method of therapeutic selection known to man, namely, the empirical, which is absorbed almost entirely with disease entities to the near exclusion of consideration of a universal factor in all sickness, i.e., the innumerable individual variations present in every case of illness.

Actually, no proper attempt has ever been made to show that the idea of simile is wrong as a basis for the abandonment of that principle. On the contrary, if in the whole century and a half since Hahnemann began to explore the simile concept, there were instances where it failed to apply, it surely would have become apparent. Actually the evidence in support of simile has constantly piled up until today it is reaching gigantic proportions. As we read current medical journals, time and again we find such instances reported as paradoxes.

The paradox that barbiturates +8 cause, in susceptible individuals, the very chain of symptoms for which they are given as “curative agents.” The paradox that curare and prostigmine +9 cause similar symptoms or sufferings when given to the healthy, and yet one (prostigmine) is known as an antidote for the other. As one puts it, when used for well muscles it (prostigmine) produces similar changes to those it helps when the muscle is poisoned by the other.

The paradox that streptomycin +10 has recently been recommended in very small doses, as a treatment for Menieres syndrome. The paradox that an extract of mouse sarcoma +4.5 and of human adenocarcinoma cured sarcoma in a strain of mice highly susceptible to sarcoma and produced an immunity in the individuals that had been so cured (cured is used advisedly) so that they no longer would accept sarcomatous grafts.

Scientists the world over have been searching for natural laws to help them explain and understand natural phenomena, but while regular school medical men are pre-eminent in their claims as scientists, they seemingly resent the idea in therapeutics there may be a natural law that might guide them in their selection of effective therapeutic measures.

This resentment has gone so far as to cause near ostracism of those who dare to support such an idea, and has resulted in a general widespread desire for regularity on the part of many men who originally intended to follow the simile concept. Economic pressure is a highly effective weapon and the making of rules that rob men of their legal rights, even retroactively, has proven to be a most potent weapon.

It may be that recent changes in the attitudes of leaders of the majority group may make possible once more the recruiting of well-trained men for the examination of the concept of similia similibus curentur. Those of us who have used this finding principle with satisfactory results over a period of thirty to fifty years certainly feel that through examination by unbiased or even biased but honest observers can lead to great good to the human race.

Rabe R F
Dr Rudolph Frederick RABE (1872-1952)
American Homeopathy Doctor.
Rabe graduated from the New York Homeopathic Medical College and trained under Timothy Field Allen and William Tod Helmuth.

Rabe was President of the International Hahnemannian Association, editor in chief of the Homeopathic Recorder, and he wrote Medical Therapeutics for daily reference. Rabe was Dean and Professor of Homeopathic Therapeutics at the New York Homeopathic Medical College.