HOMOEOPATHIC DOSE.
The success of Homoeopathic practice largely depends on accurate homoeopathic selection of medicine and on the smallness of the dose. In order to make the selection of the drug most accurate the physician must make a most thorough examination of the patient. He is to take into consideration the diet of the patient, his residence, occupation, social position, his moral and intellectual character, his domestic relations, his age, sexual functions. He is also to find out all possible obstacles to cures. If he spares no effort in this direction the selection of the drug is expected to be most accurate. But this alone will not help him to cure his patient if he neglects Hahnemanns instruction about the size of the dose of the appropriate remedy. The proper size of the dose should be determined before any cure can follow its administration.
Our Master wants the dose to be as small as possible and any disregard in this important matter will always bring disappointment to the physician. In order to make the patient free from his symptoms the dose of the selected medicine should be sufficiently small so that it may not cause unnecessary and prolonged aggravation doing considerable harm to the system which seeks our aid.
The dose of the accurately selected medicine is to be reduced to the degree of minuteness appropriate for a gentle remedial effect. One drop of medicine can moisten three hundred small globules of the size of poppy seeds and one such globule imbibed with the medicine will make a medicinal dose. One such globule should be put dry on the tongue in order to effect a gentle cure. In case of very sensitive patients one single olfaction of such a small globule will produce most rapid result. Hahnemann says:-
The suitableness of a medicine for any given case of disease does not depend on its accurate homoeopathic selection alone, like-wise on the proper size or rather smallness of the dose. If we give too strong a dose of a medicine which may have been even quite homoeopathically chosen it must prove injurious by its mere magnitude. For this reason, a medicine, suited to the case of disease, does harm in every dose that is too large, the more harm the larger the dose, and by the magnitude of the dose it does more harm the greater its homoeopathicity and the higher the potency selected and it does more injury than any equally large dose of medicine that is unhomoeopathic.
The above statement of Hahnemann points to two remarkable facts which are
1. The selection of medicine should be most accurate.
2. The doses of the selected medicine should be reduced to such an extent that, after their ingestion, they shall excite a scarcely observable homoeopathic aggravation.
GLEANINGS.
1. Painless ulcers: Helleb.
2. Ulceration around the nails: Helleb.
3. Feeling as if the intestines had no power to evacuate the faces, during soft stools: Helleb.
4. Dry cough while smoking tobacco: Helleb.
5. Rapid caries of teeth: Fluoric Acid.
6. Complaints worse from sweet things: Fluoric Acid.
7. Constant redness of the hands, especially the palms: Fluoric Acid.
8. Burning pains on small spots of the skin: Fluor-Ac.
9. Hair of the whiskers or beard falls out: Graph.
10. Red nose with black pores: Graphites.
11. Suppressed gonorrhoea followed by rheumatism or orchitis: Gels.
12. Congestive pneumonia, with suffering under the scapulae, both sides; caused by checked sweat: Gels.
13. Eyes weak with lachrymation: Ferrum.
14. Paleness of the buccal cavity: Ferrum.
15. Canine hunger with or before ague or after quinine: Eupatorium Per.
16. Hectic from suppressed ague: Eupatorium per.
17. Eruption develop tardily, especially measles: Eupat. per.
18. Ague with frightful dreams during the fever: Eupatorium Purpureum.
Calcutta