HOMOEOPATHY AND COMMON SENSE.
MOST homoeopaths, and particularly some of the most eminent representatives of homoeopathy, are most anxious to cure their patients homoeopathically. They take down in full detail all the important symptoms and then endeavour to base their prescription on the constitutional needs of the person before them in accordance with the old-establish rules which are to be found in the textbooks.
Homoeopaths who carefully base their prescriptions on the totality of the symptoms, and who give only a few doses of medicine in a high potency at very long intervals often imaging that they are true Hahnemannians, that they act in accordance with the teachings of the founder of the new art and science of healing.
Unfortunately most homoeopaths are so completely absorbed by the technicalities of case-taking and prescribing that they do not realize how far they diverge from the methods employed by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. Most homoeopaths, while professing to carry out the directions of the founder, do not know how the founder acted because they have not read his life and his numerous writings.
Hahnemann was not only a great scientist and investigator of medicine, he was a man of common sense, and he was great as a dietician, as teacher of sanitation, etc. He was endowed with wonderful common sense. In many of his writings he insisted that doctors should not give drugs to their patients until all common sense measures necessary had been taken. Hahnemann was aware that illness is frequently due to faulty nutrition, faulty methods of living, absence of fresh air and of exercise, non-use or abuse of baths, and so forth. Hahnemann has written copiously on hygienic. He was an eminent hygienist.
If he saw a patient, he enquired not only into all the symptoms which would enable him to only into all the symptoms which would enable him to prescribe, but he enquired particularly into his diet, etc. He enquired whether he slept with the window open or closed, whether he slept in four-poster beds with the curtains drawn, whether he took adequate exercise, inadequate exercise or no exercise, what clothes he wore, what baths he took, etc. Very frequently Hahnemann gave at the first interview only hygienics and dietetic directions and asked the patient to come again for medical prescription.
As I have stated in the foregoing, most diseases are caused by faulty living or are terribly aggravated by mistakes in the management of ones life. I have seen hundreds of patients who have been treated by English, American and continental homoeopaths, and only too often I was told that the homoeopathic doctors consulted gave only medicine and no common-sense advice whatever. They had forgotten, or did not know, that Hahnemann would have acted quite differently.
There is, of course, something to be said for not altering the diet and way of life on a patient. If one makes considerable alterations in these matters and gives at the same time some homoeopathic medicine, one cannot tell whether the improvement effected is caused by the medicine or by the dietetic or other changes effected. It may be a great satisfaction to homoeopathic doctor to be able to say: “I cured a serious case of tuberculosis with six doses of Drosera given in extremely high potencies in the course of eighteen months,” or “I cured a case of duodenal ulcer with a single dose of Arsenic in the 100,000th potency.”
If no dietetic or other changes were made, one can assume that a cure was due to medication alone. The consciousness of having effected such a cure may be very precious to the prescriber, but after the art of curing should be exercised on the principle of acting for the good of the patient, not for pleasing enthusiastic homoeopaths who imagine that they act in accordance with the recommendations of the great founder.
1, personally, have never had the heart to rely on medicine alone in order to be able to boast: “I cured such and such cases with so many or so few doses of medicine.” It is relatively unimportant to me exercises given, or the other changes, or whether the disease was overcome by homoeopathic medicines. My only aim is to cure the patient as quickly as possible. I do my level best to select the right medicine, but I am equally keen upon reforming the unhealth-creating factors which may have caused the disease of the patient. Therefore I give to every patient the diet, exercise, fresh air, baths, etc., which he or she may need.
There are people who take far too much exercise and others who take far too little. There are people who take too much food and others who do not eat enough. I once put an elderly man who ate a lot of meat on a lacto-vegetarian diet, and told him in my directions to take two or three eggs a day. After two or three days he complained of indigestion. He was afraid that he would lose his strength if he went without meat, and he therefore ate between six and eight eggs per day, prodigious quantities of cheese, and drank incredible quantities of milk. Funnily enough he blamed the fleshless diet and the homoeopathic medicines for the gastric upset from which he suffered.
As I have explained elsewhere, I place nearly all my patients on a vegetarian diet because it cleanses the system and starves out the organisms of putrefaction. I give to my patients a diet rich in vitamins and mineral elements by giving them the most natural foods in the most natural condition. I forbid artificialities of every kind, tinned food, white bread, white sugar, white flour, etc. Improvement is, as a rule, instantaneous, and neither I nor anyone else can say whether the improvement has been caused by the health-giving diet or by the medicine. To me it is a matter of indifference so long as the patient flourishes.
I am an enthusiastic homoeopath, but I would not jeopardize the health of my patients by relying on homoeopathic medicines alone. It is unreasonable to expect that a patient can get well if he takes fifteen cups of boiling hot, poisonously strong tea with four or five lumps of sugar in each cup, or if he smokes fifty cigarettes a day, take cold baths which chill him to the bone, takes no exercise while over-feeding, or takes an undue amount of exercise, weakening himself.
I have met delicate women who complained of anemia and extreme chilliness, women who complained a anemia and extreme chilliness, who took two or three hot baths every day, lying in them for three-quarters of an hour or longer because they felt most comfortable in a hot bath, and that was the only time they were warm. I had to explain to them that this procedure, while temporarily warming, leaches their strength out of the body and makes them far more susceptible to colds. People who catch cold easily are told to take only very short baths, and to follow up the bath by rubbing oil into the skin as did the athletes of ancient Greece and Rome.
Many troubles are due to smoking, I know many men who smoke forty or fifty cigarettes a day, inhaling the smoke. I never allow my patients to draw tobacco smoke into their lungs. Formerly lung cancer was almost unknown. It is becoming terribly frequent, and I imagine that the increasing incidence may be due to injury done to the lungs either cigarette smoke drawn into them or from the smell of motor-cars breathed in.
There are doctors and nature curers who act in a way similar to mine. They give a vegetarian diet to the patient, and frequently they notice with dismay that such diet, though theoretically perfect, upsets the patient badly. There are numerous patients who are unable to digest vegetables, especially coarse vegetables such as badly cooked cabbage, particularly if the cabbage is put on the table in an insufficiently cooked condition or over- cooked.
Vegetables which have been boiled in salt or soda lose the precious juices which contain the health-giving elements. I suggest to people that the water in which vegetables have been boiled should be taken in soups, stews, or drunk at some convenient time. Naturally, I forbid the use of soda or bicarbonate of soda, which may give to the vegetables a starting green colour but which ruin them as food.
There are thousands of people who cannot digest vegetables, and especially coarse vegetables. If they have been living on a devitaminized and demineralized diet, one must give them vegetables, salading, etc. In such cases one must introduce patients gradually to a reformed diet. For instance, I may start them on ordinary porridge or on basins of bread and milk. Patients are told at the same time that on improvement of their digestive apparatus they should take brain in the form of bran porridge, and so forth.
Some vegetables contain thick and thin ribs which are tough, and which hold up the leaves. If people suffer from indigestion, particularly after having taken coarse vegetables, raw fruit, etc., vegetables, especially coarse vegetables, frequently produce violent indigestion and very severe flatulence, etc. In cases where it is doubtful whether a patient can digest vegetables, one can start him with vegetable juice. It can either be expressed cold from the raw vegetables, and most people can digest raw carrot juice and other vegetable juices, or one can give the vegetable essences in the form of vegetable water, which means water in which vegetables have been boiled without salt or soda.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.