“Treat the Patient and not the Disease.” Why in the world should one bring forward this hackneyed item? We have heard it so often, it rings in our ears. Yet with all its obviousness we miss using i our work deadly regularity, especially if we ever have seen, in a big letter sign, TREAT DISEASE, blazoned along the route of regular medicine.
We persist in treating quinsy with Hepar; scarlet fever with Bell; mumps with Pilocarpin; results of flu with Influenzin; the invalidism of malaria, plus quinine, with Nat. m.; a foul, discharging ear or slow, burrowing tubercular abscess with Sil.; neuralgia with Spig.; measles with Puls.; epilepsy with Oenan. 3x; most injuries with Arn., except the of nerves where Hyper; comes in; insomnia with Coffea; dysmenorrhoea with Mag. p.CM.; warts with Thuja; indigestion Nux. v. or Ant. cr.; chronic skins with Sul. or Psor. post-nasal catarrh with Kali.bi.; vomiting wit diarrhoea with Ars., or Verat, a.; etc.
And today we sent Trombidium to an old M.D. friend who called yesterday, complaining bitterly of a profuse, watery nasal discharge whenever he would eat and at no other time. And, as I pen this, a mother called up whose daughter, very susceptible to poison ivy, had just started this eruptive disturbance. No trouble to stop that with two powders of Rhus. t. 50M, one now and another tomorrow morning, if it has not already begun to fade. My friend Dixon has for years been sending these powders all over the U.S.A. And still he tries to tell me that pathological prescribing is crime number one. Or we may in pneumonia give Tub. 1 M., after the acute called for remedy Bry., Phos., or whatnot, to aim at the out-of-this-world record of Bryant of Texas.
All of you, in this pathological prescribing, have practised with satisfaction to yourself and your patients through the years.
So why “treat the patient” and not the disease. The point is would you like to see chronics under your care come into an improved general health?.
For instance: Mrs. W., 43 years old. Persistent bleeding from breasts for two years. Modern M.D.s known that only surgery is indicated. The idea of medical treatment would certainly be visionary. This patient had, however, in acquaintances, seen evil results of breast surgery and held back from exposing herself. In the space of two months this bleeding has been stopped by a potentized Homoeopathic remedy. Not only that; she has come into a radiant health never before experienced. She can and is doing more work, physical and mental, than ever before in her life.
Any homoeopath could not have missed the remedy. She should have been, but was not, informed of the possibility of remedy reaction. It happened that her husband had some knowledge of homoeopathy and was able to tell her that the severe disturbance was caused by the remedy prescribed? Well, just because she was that remedy. It stood out from every part of her. Tall, slender, delicate always, narrow hips, sensitive, and sensitive to cold except head and stomach, mentally alert, very cooperative, none of the reticence of Nat. m., must eat or weak and faints, big thirst for cold water, worse lying on left side, burning between scapula, lively perception, nervous, weak, blood streaked discharges, hemorrhagic, waxy skin, tight feeling in parts; responding to Herings double bar symptoms with “Yes, Yes, Yes”.
So congratulate me. For this come we have treated THE PATIENT and got our reward.
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.