Some Aspects of Homeopathy

Based on a Dissertation read before the Royal Medical Society on Friday, 13th November. 1964. Homoeopathy has existed as a branch of medicine for over one hundred and fifty years and its practitioners in this country are all fully qualified medical men. There are seven homoeopathic hospitals within the framework of the National Health Service and Her Majesty the Queen and His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester are both Patrons of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. In 1950 Parliament passed the Faculty of Homoeopathy Act whereby the Faculty was legally recognised and its objects defined. Now these are real achievements and although they mean nothing in terms of proving the validity of Homoeopathy they do mean we cannot turn a blind eye and ignore the whole subject completely. Copyright Royal Medical Society. All rights reserved. The copyright is retained by the author and the Royal Medical Society, except where explicitly otherwise stated. Scans have been produced by the Digital Imaging Unit at Edinburgh University Library. Res Medica is supported by the University of Edinburgh’s Journal Hosting Service: http://journals.ed.ac.uk ISSN: 2051-7580 (Online) ISSN: 0482-3206 (Print) Res Medica is published by the Royal Medical Society, 5/5 Bristo Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL Res Medica, Spring 1965, 4(4): 33-37 doi: 10.2218/resmedica.v4i4.442 Some Aspects of Homoeopathy


Based on a Dissertation read before the Royal Medical Society on Friday, 13th November. 1964
H om oeopathy has existed as a branch of m edicine for over one hundred and fifty years and its practitioners in this country are all fully qualified m edical m en.T h ere are seven hom o eopathic hospitals within the fram ework of the N ational H ealth Service and H er M ajesty the Q ueen and H is Royal H ighess the D uke of G loucester arc both Patrons of the Royal London H om oeopathic H ospital.
In 1950 Parliam ent passed the Facu lty of H om oeopathy A ct whereby the Faculty was legally recognised and its objects defined.N ow these arc real achievem ents and although they mean nothing in terms of proving the validity o f H om o eopathy they do mean w e cannot turn a bind eye and ignore the whole subject com pletely.

THE BIRTH OF HOMOEOPATHY
Christian Sam uel H ahnem ann was a G erm an doctor practising in Saxony during the latter part o f the eighteenth and early nineteenth c entury.As a young physician he was deeply dissatisfied with the state of m edicine in his day -in fact some of his com plaints still seem relevant.Patients were not treated as indiv iduals or even whole people and diagnosis con sisted of applying descriptive labels to groups of sym ptom s, for exam ple: the vapours, the pox or goal fever.Treatm ent had little rational basis but consisted of running through a whole range of remedies from bleeding to purgation and adm inistering blunderbuss concoctions of drugs w ith varying effects upon the patient.
H ahnem ann quickly rebelled against con tem porary concepts of the nature of disease but realised also that no attitude to the pro blems of diagnosis could be of m uch help to the patient unless it were m atched with an equally rational method of treatm ent.In the year 1796 he was engaged in translating into G erm an the M ateria M edica of W illiam C u llen .In particular he disagreed with C u llen on the pharm acological action o f Peruvian Bark o f which quinine is the active constituent.In an effort to test the effect of this drug he took the bold step o f adm inistering a dose to him self and found to his surprise that it caused the sym ptom s of ague-the very disease o f which quinine was the cure.If this drug could both cause and cure a disease then w hy not others?This observation marked the birth of H om o eopathy.
Sm allpox inoculation1 ), a controversial topic throughout all of the latter half of the eight eenth cen tury, was another exam ple of both causing and curing or at least preventing a disease by the same agent.

COMPILING THE EVIDENCE
T h e difficulty now arose that little was known about the sym ptom atic effect of drugs upon the normal healthy human body.O ver the next twenty years Hahnemann conducted extensive " planned provings" upon his friends, his family and himself.These subjects were free from the symptoms of any disease at the time of drug administration and undertook to avoid any mode of life or action that could result in symptoms which would prejudice the result of the experiments.Some volunteers were given immedicated preparations unknown to them selves in order to eliminate as much as possible the effects of autosuggestion upon the trials.Each observer was asked to record with great care every single symptom he had experienced and all these recordings were checked and cross checked repeatedly.Gradually a pattern of symptom response for each substance developed and after these twenty years Hahnemann pro duced his findings in his mammoth work Materia M edica Pura.
W hen a disease caused certain symptoms in an individual he found that as with the ague, the administration of the substance that caused exactly the same symptoms in a healthy subject often effected a cure, although this was not always the case.T h e principle: " Similia sim ilibus curentur" -let likes be cured by likes was not entirely a new one.Tw o hundred years earlier Paraclsus had advanced the same idea and it was even contained in Hippocratic writings.Only H ahnemann, however, attempted to prove the truth of this suggestion and when his experiments showed to his satisfaction that it was indeed true then it became the corner stone of Homoeopathy.Subsequently other investigators carried out more experiments or provings and added their results to the originals.Fifty years later knowledge had increased to such an extent that the homoeopathic Materia M edica edited by Allen compromised ten large volumes of which as many as ninety-three pages were devoted to the three thousand nine hund red and twenty symptoms produced by Earlier on I pointed out that not all patients were cured by the administration of homoeo pathic remedies, in fact some were made worse and in others abnormal reactions occurred.Hahnemann postulated that in disease the body was extraordinarily sensitive to the dose and that the large dose used in conventional therapy over-stimulated the defence mechanism of the body and exhausted it.T h erefore, if the correct remedy were chosen, minute doses would be more effective.Thus homoeopaths consider that the more dilute a drug becomes the more potent it becomes and the process of dilution is known as potentisation.Quite how small the homoeopathic doses arc will be realised when it is pointed out that the dilution of the average therapeutic dose is one part of active ingredient to 1 x 1 0 6 0 parts of inert base.Th e doses that are regarded as being more powerful and dangerous in the hands of un skilled practitioners are of course much more dilute.
If the drug to be used has been chosen cor rectly then not only is a minute dose most effective but it need rarely be repeated.If there is any improvement at all in the patient's condition after the initial dose then further dosage will not help that improvement and may hamper recovery as long term toxic effects result from over medication.If improvement does cease then another dose may be given but if new symptoms develop or if there has been no improvement at all then another drug must be sought.

T H E S IN G L E D R U G P R IN C IP L E
In Homoeopathy the correct remedy is the only useful remedy.There is no need for more than one drug to be administered at a time and in fact this is strongly contraindicated as the two may well cancel each other out.T his is not nearly so controversial an attitude to-day when the pitfalls of polypharmacy are well appreciated but in the early nineteenth century it was revolutionary: Then it seemed wise to attack disease with every drug available and one preparation in the 1783 Pharmacopoeia con tained fifty separate drugs.

T H E C H O IC E O F D R U G F O R T H E S P E C I F I C D IS E A S E S IT U A T IO N
T h e homoeopathic physician makes a careful diagnosis on several planes before deciding exactly which single remedy to use.There a r e :

T h e Provisiona l Pathological Diagnosis
Every effort should be made to find out which tissues arc diseased and how far cellular func tion has been deranged.Surgical advice may be needed, for if tissues are irreversibly damaged then no form of medical treatment can restore them.Certain drugs have an affinity for certain tissues and so the patho logical diagnosis may help in the selection of a remedy.

Actiological Diagnosis
Symptoms caused or aggravated by specific factors will be remedied by drugs influential upon those factors.

Symptomatological Diagnosis
This is one of the most important fields of diagnosis.It is not that the patient has a cold.A cold in which the discharge is watery and burns the nose needs a completely different remedy from one in which the discharge is thick and causes no discomfort.Every symptom must be examined exhaustively and details are all important for one factor missed will result in an ineffective remedy being chosen.

Constitutional Diagnosis
Experience has shown that some remedies, whilst theoretically suitable for the treatment of a patient must be rejected because they are unsuited to the constitutional type that is the patient.This phrase " constitutional type" in cludes not only the physical characteristics of the patient but whether he is lazy or fastidious, cold or warm blooded, an extrovert or an introvert.

D R U G C L A S S IF IC A T IO N
W hilst formulating a diagnosis the physician will be narrowing down the number of possible remedies until one emerges which is then used in therapy.As in conventional medicine, some practitioners have a flair for their work and instinct plays a large part in drug selection.Others have to follow the rules and indications laid down by their predecessors and contem poraries until they too arrive at the drug most suitable for the patient.One practical problem that immediately becomes obvious is that there are so many drugs in the modern homoeopathic Pharmacocopoeia and so many listed symptoms that it could take an age to select one drug to match a specific symtomatological, aetiological, pathological and constitutional picture.In order to make this task easier the drugs in the Pharmocopocia can be classified in several broad divisions.These are : (1) Classification by the Prominent Characteristics of Drugs Each remedy has some effects which occur time and time again in individuals.For example Aconitum causes extreme thirst and rest lessness in most people.
( (5) Classification by Tissue Affinities For example Iodum has an affinity for the thyroid gland.T h e provisional pathological diagnosis will show which tissue is involved.
(4) Classification by the Physical Features of the Patient It is thought that there is a close relation ship between certain drugs and outstanding physical features.For instance when a tall, delicate red-heared fidgety patient crosses the threshold of your surgery the drug Phosphorus should spring to mind as a cure for his troubles.
(5) Classification by M ental Factors Subjective sensations as symptoms are con sidered as specific for one disease process in one individual and when prominent may well indicate the correct remedy.Emotional states such as intense jealousy or hate have corres ponding remedies.

(6) Classification by General Reactions of Drugs
Drugs can be classified by the general effect they have on the body, i.e. a number all cause sweating.Also they can be classified by the effects they have on the general modalities of individuals.This is an expression to denote the way an individual reacts to a wide variety of influences.Such drugs either increase the sub jective feelings of wellbeing under given cir cumstances or else increase the sensation of depression.A change in the normal reaction to an influence such as the influence of heat or cold is highly significant and may help in the final selection of one drug from a group.
(7) Classification by Causal Factor Some drugs are extremely useful in illnesses with certain specific causes-a history of head injury' is a strong indication for Natrum Sulphuricum.
It is obvious that one cannot rigidly dissociate the process of diagnosis and of drug selection as so much of the diagnosis is symptomatological and symptomatology forms the basis of so much of the choice of therapy.

U N O R T H O D O X SC H O O L S
In January Dr. W illiam Scheussler formed the School of Biochemistry which reduced the number of Homoeopathic remedies to twelve inorganic mineral salts.T h e school still exists and in fact one advertisem ent in a recent issue o f the B ritish H om oeopathic Jo u rn a l 21) claims that its d iluting processes are carried out m echanically for tw elve working days before any rem edy is sold.In the U nited States o f Am erica a school of isopathy developed which treated like exactly by like-the cure for tape worm s was a puree o f tapew orm s heads!Study of these and other schools m akes fascinating reading but is not relevant to this article.

WHY HAS HOMOEOPATHY NOT PROGRESSED ?
H om oeopathy reached its peak in B ritain in the m id nineteenth century when there were 300 practising physicians.W h y has it not pro gressed since then?
Surprisingly enough one o f the m ain reasons has been the very factor that eased its intro duction into B ritain, nam ely its social respect ability.
Q ueen V icto ria 's U ncle, Prince Leopold, Q ueen M ary and K in g G eo rge V I have all been advocates o f H om oeopathy but in the sam e way that a shop w ith a R oyal A p p oin tm en t tends to be regarded as an ex clusive establishm ent so hom oeopathy tended to be regarded as a p laything for the A ristocracy.Secondly conventional m edicine has m ade m ost progress over the last seventy-five years and although hom oeopaths consider that m odern drugs have only a short term effect and their use is fraught w ith danger ow ing to know n or unknown side effects, there is no doubt that conventional m edicine is m ore spectacular and exciting.
W ith the developm ent of m ethods of mass com m unication over the last seventy-five years scientific argum ents w hich previously had lim ited audiences becam e fam iliar to the public w ho then tended to b e m ore critical o f the unconventional theories put to them .In som e ways it is a case o f a little knowledge becom ing a dangerous thing.A lth ough the average citizen often docs not have the know ledge to support or reject a theory o n its m erits he now knows w hich theories arc acceptable to A uthority, whether A uth ority be the R o yal Society or the Royal C ollege o f Physicians, and accepts their judgem ent in pre-digested form .A Society is developing in which m ore and m ore tim e is spent obtaining paper qualifications as these are now the only passport for advancem ent and less tim e is spent on original thought.W e are elim inating the unconventional in favour of the drab orthodoxy of the production line scientist.T h e sad thing is that the authority who issues the paper qualifications and upon whom w e all depend now for our livelihood is riddled with vested interests.A lm ost every great scientific advance in history was achieved in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Establish m en t.O rthodox m edicine has had so m uch p u blicity in newspapers and on the radio and television in recent years that all who question its basic assum ptions tend to be grouped together as fools or quacks irrespective of the m erits or dem erits of their argum ents.
Fin ally H om oeopathy has becom e stifled be cause of its very urge to becom e respected by the m edical profession.T h e hierarchy have always insisted that only qualified doctors could becom e hom oeopathic physicians and although the 19 50 A c t of Parliam ent gave the F acu lty the right to run courses and confer D iplom as it did so only to qualified practitioners.It did not insist that m edical schools teach hom oeopathy and today not one m edical school in Britain offers a course in the subject.It is not sur prising that after five or six years o f orthodox m edicine the G rad u ate has at best no interest in H oem oeopathy and in m any cases an instinc tive distaste for som ething that did not appear in his curriculum or was even denigrated by his teachers.In addition the prospect o f extra unrem unerative post graduate work w ith no guaranteed incom e at the end o f it all is hardly enticing.M an y people consider that this search for respectability is doing them far m ore harm than g o o d (3) and that the Profession w ould be better served by loosening its links w ith con ventional m edicine and offering courses and D iplom as to all who wish to avail them selves of the opportunity.

HOMOEOPATHIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO MEDICINE
H om oeopathic physicians have m ade valu able contributions to the A rt and Practice of M ed icine.A lm o st alone am ongst physicians can they claim to have follow ed the exhortation of H ippocrates: " First, do no harm ," and any one w ho has seen the results of say thalidom ide or chloram phenicol in som e patients can hardly be proud o f conventional m edicine on this score.W e owe m uch to hom oeopathic physic ians for our concepts o f the im portance o f the individual, the psychogenic nature o f disease and the im portance of avoiding unnecessary polypharm acy.T h e chief obstacle to the acceptan ce of H om oeopathy as a legitim ate form of m edicine by the Profession is the extrem ist view point held by some of its practitioners.O thers are m ore flexible in their outlook.One contributor to the British H om oeopathic Jou rn al 4 in 19 58 described the adherence to the single infinitesem al dose as " a piece of bravura displayed by the ultra-H ahnem annians" and earlier a noted hom oeopathic practitioner, C .E .W h eeler, stated that the central L aw of H om oeopathy was that governing the choice of rem edy and that it could be practised with out the use of m inute doses.In the G lasgow H om oeopathic H ospital the outlook is even m ore m oderate 5, Physicians do not hestitate to use antibiotics, digitalis or diuretics at the clim ax of an illness or if hom oeopathic remedies arc unsuccessful.T h e y m ake full use of surgical, biochem ical and radiographical facilities in com ing to a diagnosis but in the main treat patients with hom oeopathic remedies and claim considerable success.T h ese people strike a fair balance between conventional m edicine and the outrageous extrem ism of some of their colleagues.T h e y respect but are not slaves of therapeutic orthodox.B eing flexible in their outlook they appreciate the benefits of peni cillin w hilst suspecting the virtues o f aspirin or anticoagulants.It is for us to be flexible too and to consider their case on its merits without prejudice and w ithout mistrust.
P R A C T IT IO N E R N o.1155 V ol.193 S e p te m b e r 1964.p. 364.(2) B R IT .H OM .JO U R N A L V ol.L III N o. 4 O c to b e r 1964, p. iv.(3) F R IN G E M E D IC IN E b y B ria n In g lis 1963.(4) B R IT .HOM .JO U R N A L .1958 (5) Ib id V ol.L III No. 4 O c to b e r, 1964.P r e s id e n tia l A d d re ss p. 225-236.G E N E R A L R E A D IN G A G U ID E TO H O M O E O PA T H Y 3rd e d itio n 1962 by B ritis h H orn. A ssoc.EL E M E N T S O F H O M O E O PA TH Y b y D. M. G ib so n .M .B.. B .S.. F.R .C .S. IN T R O D U C T IO N TO P R IN C IP L E S A N D P R A C T IC E O F H O M O E O PA TH Y -W h ee le r.MEDICAL and DENTAL DEFENCE UNION OF SCOTLAND LTD.BENEFITS OFFERED BY THE UNION : D efence of claim s for alleged negligence in professional work, including unlim ited indem nity and costs.D efence o f claims against a principal in respect of acts by an assistant or locum .A dvice on difficulties arising out of professional practice.A ll benefits available to m em bers in Scotland, E ngland, W ales, N orthern Ireland, Isle of M an, and Channel Islands, and to Short Service and N ational Service Officers with H .M .Forces in any part of the world, provided the total Com m issioned Service does not exceed five years.Benefits of M em bership for new graduates date from the date o f application pro vided duly registered at that date.Subscription for new graduates £ 1 for first three years, thereafter norm al subscription o f £3 for members practising m edicine and £2 for m em bers practising dentistry.N o entry fee for new graduates.F u ll particulars and Form s of A pplication for M em bership can be obtained from the Secretary.C C. MILLAR, T.D., C.A. 1 0 5 S T .VINCENT STREET, GLASGOW, C.2