SIMILIA SIMILIBUS CURENTUR
is as old as is the history of medicine. Hippocrates, who compiled all of the best medicine knowledge up to his time, recognized it as one method of treatment. This method has been ridiculed from the most ancient times up to the present day. One debunker of those ancient days wrote: “Take the hair, it is written of the dog by which you are bitten.”.
Through the years up to the time of Hahnemann, Similia Similibus Curentur did not gain much headway. This was due to a lack of knowledge as to how remedies act. The ancients knew which remedies produced nausea and vomiting; which produced catharsis; which produced mental disturbances, etc. Accurate knowledge of what symptoms medicine produced on the healthy human being was lacking.
We are all familiar with events that started Hahnemann to prove what symptoms China produces when taken by a healthy person. That was the first thorough testing out of what symptoms a remedy produced upon a human being. This opened up a wonderful new field for investigation. He started taking different remedies and giving them to others and recording both the objective and subjective symptoms produced by the different remedies. He proved the action of a hundred different remedies.
He paved the way for some of the more recent therapeutic applications. Here are two of them. In the proving of China he records this symptoms: “Violent palpitation of the heart with slow pulse and cold skin.” This symptoms is similar to what is now known as auricular fibrillation.
An active principle of China is now used to treat this disease. In the Iodine proving there is a perfect picture of tonic goiter. Nowadays we know what “imbalance” of Iodine plays in the pathology of goiter. There doubtless are many other recorded provings that if properly understood would result in therapeutic measures equal to the above examples.
In the developing his ideas of disease, Hahnemann revived the Vital Force theory. This is an unfortunate word. It is supposed to be the name of “something” of which nobody knows any thing. Words cannot accurately describe something of which we were entirely ignorant. Hippocrates tried to describe this, but could not. Carel says “We are made up of an unknowable reality.”
This is Hahnemanns description of the vital force : “In the healthy condition of man, the spiritual vital force (autocracy), the dynamis that animates the natural body (organism) rules with unbounded sway and retains all the parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation, as regards both sensation and function, so that our indwelling, reason-gifted mind can fully employ this living instrument for the higher purpose of our existence.
The material organism, without the vital force, is capable of no sensation no function, no self preservation; it derives all sensation and performs all the functions of life solely by means of the immaterial being (vital principle) which animates the material organism in health and disease.”.
As a result of his reasoning as above, Hahnemann has this deduction: “When a person falls ill, it is only this spiritual self-acting (autocratic) vital force, everywhere present in his organism, that is primarily deranged by the dynamic influence upon it of a morbific agent inimical to life; it is only the vital principle, deranged to such an abnormal state, that can furnish the organism with its disagreeable sensations, and incline it to an irregular process which we call disease.”
This does not mean that the vital force is sick. It is essential that we get Hahnemanns idea of disease in order understand his subsequent teachings. He mentions time and again that it is a “miasm” that deranges the functions of the patient. This “miasm” comes from outside of the body and produces symptoms in the patient, caused by that “something” he called the vital force, trying to “throw out” the infection. Carrel says : “Illness expresses the adaptation of the organism to a pathogenic agent, or its passive destruction by this agent.”.
When it comes to how a similar remedy cures, Hahnemann puts forth the theory that the remedy given produces a drug disease similar to the natural one, and that it “neutralizes” the disease, and then the drug disease soon runs its course, and then the patient is well. This explanation may be poetic, but it is not exactly true. Even Hahnemann doubts his explanation. In writing of “cure” he says: “It matters little what may be the scientific explanation of how it takes place; and I do not attach much importance to the attempts made to explain it.”.
How a remedy cures is not definitely known. With our present knowledge, one perhaps may say the remedy cures by producing an antitoxin, or an antibody, or an opsome, or by some as yet unexplained process. The remedy as stated above produces a substance that destroys the bacteria, the toxin, etc. Homoeopaths have cured diphtheria long before antitoxin was known. The only way the homoeopathic remedy could possibly cure was by stimulating nature to produce the antitoxin.
The method of treating disease in order to produce a substance to “neutralize” the toxic symptoms of the disease is very common these days. Witness the use of similar remedies to treat hay fever, allergy, etc.; also the use of vaccines, serums, etc.
An exact strain of streptococcus that produces symptoms similar to scarlet fever is now used to cure that disease. Our drug houses are exploiting an extract of poison ivy leaves for the cure of rhus tox. poison. This is a sort of the hair of the dog treatment. All these methods of treatment are based on the plan of treatment of similia similibus curentur and not on contraria curentur.
A remedy that produces a disease and which also cures that disease is surely a similar and not a contraria. No one can deny that. Some members of the old school have broken into the rear window of similia, but they do not recognize or at least do not acknowledge that they are in the domicile of homoeopathy. As the old school develops more of this method of treatment, someone in the future will be brave enough to enter the front door of the temple of similia.
In times past homoeopaths were denounced on account of small doses. It was believed that there was none of the remedy in the solution. Nowadays scientists can subdivide an element to such a small degree that it would turn the average low potency homoeopath green with envy. In our school days we were taught that an atom is the smallest indivisible particle of matter.
Nowadays they smash an atom into fragments and the end is not yet. The only use of the small dose is to avoid a violent reaction as is sometimes caused when a too large dose is given. Hahnemann experimented with all degrees; of dilution, and arrived at the conclusion that the smallest dose that would cure was the best to use for the patient. There is no fixed rule to govern the size of the dose. Our potencies are absolutely useless unless the symptoms of drug action are fitted to the symptoms of the disease. In these days many patients are killed by the new powerful medicines. Some of the remedies have been abandoned because of the fatal results, and others have been modified in the hope that they may not kill so many patients.
No one knows how these remedies act on the healthy person. All we know is from the post-mortems of those who have been killed by these drugs. These remedies are prescribed for the name of a disease or more generally for the names of many diseases. There is no individualisation of the patients symptoms after the method established by Hahnemann, nor is it known what symptoms the remedy produces in the healthy. We do know, however, that some of these drugs produce a powerful “hangover.”.
Among other remedies that have cured eczema are Arsenicum and Sulphur. These remedies are not the same in their actions, but they cure varieties of the same disease. By proving on the healthy, certain symptoms are brought out that serve to differentiate the one drug from the other. No one disease is always the same. There are variations in the symptoms; hence the remedy must be moulded to the symptoms. When we prescribe a disease or diseases without regard to its suitability as established by provings on the healthy, we are simply making guinea pigs of our patients. Hahnemann was not foolish enough to do that.
Hahnemann later in his life classified diseases into acute and chronic. In his earlier years he made no such distinction. He classed them all alike, but he found out later that some of his cures did not stay cured. From the years 1816 to 1827, he devoted eleven years to intensive study of diseases in order to find out why some diseases did not stay cured and that others were not cured by the ordinary short acting remedies.
He was a careful and accurate observer. He said he devoted these years to “increasing meditation, indefatigable research, careful observations and the most accurate experiments to discover all ailments and symptoms inherent in the unknown primitive malady.” This primitive disease evidently owes its existence to some “miasm.” He taught that there are three chronic miasms.
