SPOTLIGHTS ON TUBERCULOSIS


SPOTLIGHTS ON TUBERCULOSIS. A physician in his lifetime may have to face a few cases which cannot be measured and resolved by the above five standards and instruments of the similimum., In such cases eight from too great an artificial suppression of symptoms by a most vigorous antipathic, antibiotic treatment which destroys or paralyses the symptom-producing capability of the nervous system and keeps the defense mechanism in abeyance the live principle remains stagnant.


A MENACE.

Tuberculosis like cancer is a scourge of society, exacting larger tolls than anything else taken singly. It is more honorable to discover a remedy for either of them, than digging a tunnel right through the earth linking the two hemispheres. Pathology and biochemistry with the help of antibiotic and other therapy are labouring through thick and thin admit obstacles and hindrances. A mass of new drugs is daily pouring forth in to the market, a new name in therapy being announced nearly every day break. But what is most unfortunate is that the results of such huge enterprises, intellectual, scientific and economic, as attested by experience, is to shatter all hopes.

Tuberculosis remained a menace as ever, as cancer is an enigma still today. What Homoeopathy can furnish today is more than fifty years old. We have done nothing new from the attainments of the past century; we have traversed no new land beyond what was reached with a tiptoe of traversed no new land beyond what was reached with a tiptoe of expectoration by Swan or Burnett.

We cure many cases of tuberculosis and cancer in the latent or primary stage. But are we sure of curing case when the disease has broken forth and advanced far, showing a picture of devastation in the human constitution? I wish I could discover something for this stage, even at the cost of the whole of my homoeopathic Materia Medica. ON THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW LIGHT.

Dr.R.R.Gregg, as manifested in his work, Consumption: Its cause and Nature, seemed to be on the threshold of a new light, a new truth, a revelation as it were; but on final analysis, he could not fulfil our cherished expectation. He takes a new step from the metaphysical concept of some of his predecessors and contemporaries, that the bacterium is not the cause but an effect, but basing his conclusions on a solid foundation of prevalent data from anatomy, physiology and pathology, he convincingly establishes his theory of consumption: “that a loss of albumen from the blood, and the consequent disproportion into which such loss must necessarily throw all the other constituents of blood was the cause of consumption,-the key to the production of tubercles and all their attending phenomena,” the bacillus, on the other hand, being “nothing but a result of the softening or suppuration of the tubercles, a simple rod of fibrin” (Chapt.11, pp. 20 and 21, Ind.Edition).

The notorious tubercle, according to Dr.Gregg, is nothing but “granules” or “capillaries filled with decolorized blood corpuscles,” which again resemble tuberculous corpuscles in the minutest detail, and as such are one and the same with them. “Both contain fatty matter, partly in very in very fine granules and partly in vesicles and the same salts…chlorides, phosphates and the like; while the action of Acetic Acid upon the one is identical to what it is upon the other chapt. XIV, pp. 105 and 106. Ind. Edition).

Here is established the oneness of the decolorized blood corpuscles with the tuberculous corpuscles, anatomically, chemically and microscopically, as also that of the rod of fibrin with the bacillus tuberculosis, for the pure fibrin taken from a perfectly healthy animals blood and decomposing in a solution of distilled water manifested “precisely the similar forms to what Professor Eberth of Germany obtained from the sputa of consumptives and labelled bacilli tuberculosis (chapt. XVII, p. 130. Ind., Ed).

But what is yet to be done is either to prove the oneness of the simple rod of fibrin with the bacillus tuberculosis as conceived under the stain method of testing for A.F.B., or to disprove the said stain method itself scientifically in order to confirm the fibrin theory of tuberculosis thereby. And apart from the speculative ingenuity and confirmation of Hahnemanns Psora theory, Dr. Greggs treatise, through outstanding in investigation information, planning and execution, and so distinctly admirable in the whole range of homoeopathic literature,m is of no practical value to us. It was Dr. H. C. Allen who came to the rescues in adding a more voluminous therapeutic and repertorial part to it. A STEP FURTHER.

Drs. Fortier Bernoville and A.Nebels works in this line lead us a step further and confirm the conclusions of many, derived from the testimony of the clinic. Despite some crooked confusions about the psora theory of Hahnemann, and the introduction of a rather than the similimum, their works may be pronounced to a well-balanced planning and a comprehensive evaluation of the whole subject,m coupled with a determination to find a way our,m are to be carefully considered.

But alas! as we finish the book. Bernoville and Nebels Tuberculosis (consisting of their translated Essays, by Dr. Raj Kumar Mukherjee). and look back we find ourselves to have taken only a step further and no further, whence the much desired goal is a tremendously long way off.

A PLACE OF RESORT.

Tuberculosis is universally acknowledged to be a bacterial disease. Isolation blocks for tubercular patients are being increasingly erected in every country. and sanatorium treatment has had the reputation of yielding beneficial results since the early decade and advise the patient (not?) to go to a place “where the affection would be worse, so that all its manifestations would be apparent.” The total picture of a disease or a case, aptly termed as totality of symptoms.” must include all factors of modes operandi or modality of the case in hand, e.g., aggravation and amelioration, including climatic influences, if any. on his health in general, or on a particular symptom or a group of symptoms, which the patient usually gives us to complete the anamnesis.

But to send a patient to a place where his sufferings are worse is equal to lodge a tubercular subject in a cell situated in a most unhygienic slum, to remove a cholera or a dysentery case to an epidemic area provided with dirtiest water, and to drive a person suffering from malaria to a more malarious region, confounding all that Hahnemann preached and stood for conditions of heat and cold, types of climate and diet which are grateful to the patient and so are conductive to his mental and physical well-being, having nothing in them medicinal or antagonistic to the remedy applied, must be advised in all Hahnemannian sense of Homoeopathy (vide Organon, 6th ed., Secs. 238, 262, 263., 291 and p. 85). to do the reverse is to reverse the tenets of Homoeopathy and is a crime against mankind.

IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL SPHERE. From the pure homoeopathic point of view, tuberculosis is a constitutional disease and should be met in the constitutional sphere. Why, all treatment in Homoeopathy is constitutional. Homoeopathy is not an antibiotic therapy and as such has no “phenol, “Carbolic Acid, or “Dettol” in crude form to kill bacteria with.

Homoeopathy is concerned only with the defense mechanism of the human organism, and helps to rouse the vital principle to give an honest fight to the disease in question, to create antibodies, enhance the process of elimination of toxins and other morbid matter and drive our or annihilate, totally or considerably, the bacilli, bacteria or the viruses as the case may be, or at least to engage them in some infiltrated spots where they die a natural; death, deprived of all that they can thrive on, whereupon the cherished recovery ensues and the patient is restored to health, gently, rapidly and permanently.

A homoeopathic prescription therefore, in a case if tuberculosis can not differ in principle of pattern from a prescription in a given case of another disease. “Find the similimum” is the principle that applies to all cases in Homoeopathy and is irrevocable.

THE SIMILIMUM.

But what is the similimum? How to find it? Like everything under the sun, it is a relative term and is never absolute. The similimum sometimes takes the shape of the past history: hereditary or acquired; sometimes it takes the form of a group of local symptoms, sometimes of the syndrome of constitutional general indications, and, occasionally it comprises a single rare and indications, and, occasionally, it comprises a single rare and peculiar symptom, belonging neither to the local nor to the so-called general sphere of the case in hand, but characterizing the patient so strikingly as to partake of a general characteristic, revealing a new light to the careful observer. Sometimes, again, the similimum is to be drawn from a few broad general manifestations indicative of the genius or the inner nature of the case and of the remedy.

Further, rarely a complex of common physiological or pathological symptoms, or even a few faintly figured our aspects have to be out together as a last resort to form an image of the case, and the similimum then descends from its lofty pedestal to the mud and dust of the simile, So the similimum may probably take six distinct forms, of which we are to choose that which serves our purpose best. At any rate,m our “sole mission is to restore the sick to health” and we are to follow the lead of the symptom-image that most prominently thrusts itself upon our mind, outshining all its competitors, be the image a presentation of the similimum (the likes) or of the simile (the like). HEREDITY.

S M Bhattacherjee
S.M. BHATTACHERJEE, M.A., P.R.S.M.. BERHAMPORE.