EDITORIAL


EDITORIAL. For the patient who is sure to get well, little doctoring is needed. for the one who is not, much can be done to ease his mental and bodily burdens. What other branch of medicine offers the field and scope of the homoeopathic one for these poor suffers? These patients need a good physician more than any other class and they deserve it.


FAILURES.

Failures during homoeopathic treatment are experienced by all those practising this healing art. They are particularly under mining to the physicians ego when they occur in a patient of long standing and a loyal supporter of this branch of therapeutics. The transference of their allegiance to some other from of treatment which, for the time being at least, seems to give benefit or relief is quite a blow to the conscientious physician. The cause requires investigation and we may arrive at the conclusion that Hahnemanns art is to blame, that it lacks something.

Generally speaking, the fault is ours-with our handling of the case-provided, of course, said case is capable of alleviation or cure.

Too often we subconsciously prefer the challenge of new patients, patients who have consulted one or more physicians of the dominant school or of some of the medical cults and who have not received benefit from the various prescriptions and treatments ordered. The older members in the homoeopathic fold in reality should receive and get the best efforts we have to offer.

He or she has earned this extra effort and consideration through years f loyalty. But, alas, we have become too familiar with their complaints; our ears are not attuned or our sight is more vagrant and our thoughts are inclined to wander. He or she perhaps gets a little, just a mite, more or less of the mental brush off. No one senses this more speedily or less of the mental brush off. No one senses this more speedily than the patient. “Doctor has lost interest,” they think, “and to whom shall we turn?”.

Well, when it;s the patient of another doctor they may turn to you. When its your patient they may turn to another homoeopath, if available, or to a so-called specialist. To whom they turn depends in part upon how much their homoeopathic loyalty has been dented.

Now if there is no organic disease present, the specialist will order vitamins, liver, hormone injections, etc., and for a while (while their money lasts) they may be quite well satisfied but eventually they will return to their old love. It is so very hard for a patient who has had years of homoeopathic treatment for the various conditions which arise from time to time to have to resort to large colored pills, injections, etc., when the has always received relief from the little white powders and pellets.

If there is organic disease present you may never see this patient again. Lengthy examinations and consultations may pigeon-hole him as being incurable. He will be told that an injection once a week or oftener will have to be his outlook for years; there is not cure; he can, of course, have sleeping pills, etc., but further doctoring is useless.

For the patient who is sure to get well, little doctoring is needed. for the one who is not, much can be done to ease his mental and bodily burdens. What other branch of medicine offers the field and scope of the homoeopathic one for these poor suffers? These patients need a good physician more than any other class and they deserve it.

Many other cases of failure are due to spoiling the case by too frequent repetition of the dose, by faulty case taking and therefore wrong remedy selection.

Allan D. Sutherland
Dr. Sutherland graduated from the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and was editor of the Homeopathic Recorder and the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy.
Allan D. Sutherland was born in Northfield, Vermont in 1897, delivered by the local homeopathic physician. The son of a Canadian Episcopalian minister, his father had arrived there to lead the local parish five years earlier and met his mother, who was the daughter of the president of the University of Norwich. Four years after Allan’s birth, ministerial work lead the family first to North Carolina and then to Connecticut a few years afterward.
Starting in 1920, Sutherland began his premedical studies and a year later, he began his medical education at Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia.
Sutherland graduated in 1925 and went on to intern at both Children’s Homeopathic Hospital and St. Luke’s Homeopathic Hospital. He then was appointed the chief resident at Children’s. With the conclusion of his residency and 2 years of clinical experience under his belt, Sutherland opened his own practice in Philadelphia while retaining a position at Children’s in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department.
In 1928, Sutherland decided to set up practice in Brattleboro.