THIS may be summarized in a single sentence as “the fine adjustment of remedy to malady” – alternatively, of the remedies appropriate to the various phases of the disease, adjusted as these develop.
This is in total contra-distinction to the uniformitarian and customary method of selection of Radium, or Operation, as the sole panacea, repeating either as recurrences appear. The clinical history of malignancy is not be controlled that way, which justifies the scathing criticism of Claude Bernard (applied to another medical problem) that “our mouths are full of promises but our hands are empty”.
The many-sided malady of malignancy is not to be compressed within the circle of the single remedy, the natural powers of resistance varying from patient to patient. And the scourge is reaching the dimensions of a pestilence or plague. Sir George Newman in a recent Report gives the alarming totality of some 60,000 deaths from this disease during the year 1934, and the rate is steadily rising.
This mortality seems to have paralysed the initiative of the profession in general, for such is public opinion at present that of this multitude few pass without the routine remedies of Radium or Surgery, or both. Yet despairing efforts are occasionally made toward a newer and better way. Here is such an instance.
Within recent time, in a large provincial city, at an abdominal operation for carcinoma, the senior Surgeon – holding a position of distinction – found himself confronted with an absolutely inoperable state of matters.
The present writer chanced to be present, to whom the operator turned in his perplexity. “Surgery has done its best” said the latter authority, “Can you do better?” The challenge was accepted there and then: the “fine adjustment of remedy to malady” was at once commenced, and is continuing week by week: omens of encouragement are developing – not alone of recovery from the operation, for that has been assured long ago – but also from the malady; and a therapeutic triumph in an otherwise hopeless case is definitely being built up.
Nor was this the first occasion in recent time in which from a great hospital had been passed on a hitherto incurable case of cancer into homoeopathic hands for physical salvation. The pages of this Journal last year recorded another instance when a similar procedure was followed as a “counsel of despair”, but when the complete recovery of the patient ultimately ensued from a condition apparently similarly hopeless.
The writer, as a responsible intermediary, can testify to the regaining of the lost health , the disappearance of the acute pain, the cessation of the discharge, the absorption of the neoplasm and the pelvic deposit associated with it. Only a few weeks ago the patient presented herself for re-examination to receive re- assurance as to the permanence of the recovery.
Yet another instance, uncomplicated by operation. A lady with a definitely tubercular history was sent to one of the surgeons of a great London Hospital with a hard growth in the right breast and a series of nodules in the corresponding axilla and over the clavicle. There was also considerable retraction of the nipple. The surgeon, because of the underlying tubercular taint, desired in the first instance to send the patient into the Department for Radium treatment.
To this the patient objected in that a similar procedure had failed in the case of another member of the family. The present patient came under Homoeopathic supervision; the response to one of the forms of the Bendien test-method was definite and positive, as antecedent to treatment. The reaction to therapeutic methods has been continuous and satisfactory. She has gained several pounds in avoirdupois; the enlarged glands are no longer evident and she is within measurable distance of a full and final return to normal health and vigour.
Here is another recent case removed from the category of derelicts to health and strength by the fine adjustment of remedies to malady.
The patient, a married woman, at sixty, went into one of the large London Hospitals with an abdominal growth which at operation proved to be inoperable. The scar in the skin in the later convalescence gave way in part, leaving an intestinal fistula through which pus and fecal matter freely discharged.
Later she come into the London Homoeopathic Hospital, when the inoperable tumour was found as the basis of the local trouble. It was about the size of a cricket ball. The patient was treated with Calendula for irrigation purposes, and as internal remedies received Silica supplemented by Carcinosin, Lycopodium, and one or two other remedies.
After eight weeks the fistula had practically ceased to discharge, and she returned home. In another month her physician reported, “The patient is now in excellent health and the fistula has quite closed; the underlying tumour has been practically absorbed”. The patient herself wrote: “I am feeling altogether a new woman”.
THE MODERN MOVEMENT AWAY FORM SURGERY AND
MERELY LOCAL TREATMENT
Other indications present themselves of the modern movement away from the aforetime routine methods of operation with or without local Radium application.
At a recent meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine in London a large assembly of Fellows and Members listened with every evidence of appreciation to an address by Dr. Todd, of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, on the treatment of incurable and inoperable forms of malignancy by injection. The method was that of utilization of a single chemical substance-Sulphur-selinide- which has been saturated with X-rays and injected into a vein. The whole plan has received a searching trial at the hands of Dr. Todd and his colleagues in the cases submitted to them, and with the following results:. One third of the patients are cured by this method.
One third of the totality received considerable benefit by the palliation of the acute symptoms, but falling short of cure. In the remaining 40 per cent. of cases, neither cure nor notable palliation resulted.
The foregoing is remarkable in that it is the first systematic and reasonably successful treatment of cancer cases in this country by the activation of the inherent powers normally possessed by the organism. Its radical defects are that it does not proceed – as Homoeopathy does-by the fine adjustment of various remedies to various types and phases of the malady. But in any case it is an enormous advance on the method, or absence of method, which is responsible for a mortality rate of some 60,000 cases per annum in this country.
THE HOMOEOPATHIC TREATMENT OF MALIGNANCY.
PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE
1. The fine adjustment of remedy to malady, alternatively to various phases and stages of the malady, from time to time.
2. The underlying postulates that in the tissues are normally present certain powers and tendencies which conduce to the elimination of the cancerous taint.
3. Such powers and tendencies are capable of being activated by the properly adjusted remedy or remedies chosen on a homoeopathic basis.
4. The choice of remedies is controlled by the similar symptoms, or maladies, which such remedy is capable of producing in the healthy body in poisonous dose. Thus, Hydrastis in heavy dosage causes just such cancerous affection on the sound organism, as it tends to cure (in much refined dosage) in the already cancerous tissue.
5. The method of cure is assumed to be by way of activation of the corresponding tendencies to cure at present overwhelmed by the cancer poison. Or, alternatively, by the neutralization of the obstacles to cure, acting as disease potencies in the organism. The curative method may be qualitative or quantitative.
6. As the cure proceeds by an increase in potency of the normally antagonistic tendency to cancer in the organism, so this opposition, as in other cases of immunity, tends to perpetuation.
7. Radium and X-rays, according to their dosage, will in suitable cases cure cancer on the one hand or, alternatively, produce or increase it on the other. Here again, what is requisite is a fine adjustment of remedy to malady in its stages and phases.
