THE PHYSICIAN AND HIS CLIENTELE.
A number of years are, as a rule, required to build up a fairly representative practice in the various professions. A clientele must be carefully and earnestly cultivated.
Successful practice depends on many factors, personality, salesmanship, adaptability, reputation, position and results last and unfortunately perhaps, least. Successful practice in the medicine field is by no means indicative necessarily of successful treatment.
The longer a physician practices his profession the more en rapport does he become with his following. Natural selection, cultivation and weeding out proceed subconsciously but unceasingly as the years pass.
Fortunately perhaps for their patients, few physicians realize what tremendous influence and power is really theirs. Given the awakened consciousness of this power together with an incentive or motive of sufficient consequence to arouse the will to determined action and the clientele will soon be enlisted in “the Cause”.
For ethical (?) and other reasons many of our members and subscribers hesitate even to mention the I.H.A. and The Recorder to their patients, much less solicit contributions for any cause no matter how worthy.
Homoeopathy is reaching thousands but its benefits should extend to million more. Nothing short of active, whole-hearted cooperation on the part of all Hahnemannians will ever bring this about. If the beneficiaries, the patients and friends of homoeopathic physicians cannot be interested in the perpetuation and extension of homoeopathic methods of treatment just who or what class of individuals are we to approach?.
No one has a better opportunity, no one is better qualified, no one has a better right to interest and enlist the help of any group than has the homoeopathic physician in the daily practice of his profession.
Psychologically it is not so much WHAT we do but HOW we do it, not so much what we say but how we say it. In short it is our APPROACH and that brings us back once more to the qualities prerequisite to professional success personality, adaptability and salesmanship. If we are at all “successful” we have these qualities in no small measure, and we have, to some extent at least, sold homoeopathy to our clientele. With the interest and help of that clientele we can sell it to the wide world.
Contributions ranging from one to five dollars can be secured from a large number of our patients. A few can afford and will gladly give larger amounts if earnestly encouraged to do so.
Small subscription books are being supplied to all I.H.A. members and to subscribers to The Recorder. Let each contributor write his name and the amount contributed in the subscription book. This will facilitate the APPROACH and place the proposition on a basis that will preclude the possibility of any professional embarrassment.
Concerted action along these lines will end the depression as far as our Organization and our Journal are concerned and it will put us on the medical map where we rightfully belong.- EUGENE UNDERHILL, JR.
The cases published recently in The Recorder, and their analyses by the two general methods of repertorizing, have brought forth considerable comment from our readers. This was one purposes in publishing the series, to have object lessons in repertory work. The other purpose was to stress the necessity of taking the case properly to get a true picture of the individual.
It was the pride of many of the older homoeopathic physicians that master prescribers, given a case, would come to the same remedy without having compared note. This is undoubtedly true. It is just as possible now as then, provided any given case is carefully and thoroughly taken so that a true picture of the case may be seen. If the true picture is given, we cannot help but feel that whatever generally is used, the results will be the same.
The author of the series of cases printed in The Recorder maintained that one case might be better worked out with one system than with another. As a matter of fact, and as has been frequently demonstrated, either the Kent or the Boenninghausen system provide a working basis for one who understands the method. Any general repertory of proven worth will analyze a given case, properly taken and properly recorded, with equal facility.
It is true that one prescriber will find one method of greater help to him than another method, not because of any superiority in the method, but rather because he has a superior knowledge of one method, and he therefore handles it with greater facility. This need throw no discredit upon the other repertories. Kents, Bogers and Boenninghausens methods all have their supporters, who demonstrate by the facility that each of these has a distinct value as an aid to accurate prescribing. The old saying, “Beware of the man with one book”, has its application in repertory analysis, because a man who is thoroughly familiar with one general repertory will be master of almost any situation that calls for repertorial analysis, and he will usually be more proficient in repertorizing than the superficial student of several methods.
The sole use of the repertory is for the elimination of the partially similar remedies in any given case: the repertory analysis usually brings us down to two, three or at most, five, remedies that are closely similar in several respects. It is for us then to use our art and knowledge of the materia medica to detect their true relationship to the given case, and to eliminate all but the similimum. In this work the seventh section of Boenninghausens Therapeutic Pocket Book assists us very much, for the purpose of this section is to give the comparison of relationships of the remedies , under definite headings which refer to various locations of symptoms.
We feel that this series of cases has been of considerable benefit to students of repertorial analysis, and if it has stressed to each reader the importance of careful, thoughtful case taking, the work has been worth while.- H.A. ROBERTS.
