Philosophy is defined by Webster as “the knowledge of the causes of all phenomena both of mind and matter; a particular philosophic system; and calmness of temper.” The same authority defines empiricism, “an observation or practical experience apart from scientific knowledge; the practice of medicine without the usual medicine training or qualifications, quackery”.
In the realm of healing, homoeopathy is the only therapy based upon natural law and that has evolved a comprehensive philosophy that governs every step in the application of drugs for the relief and cure of human sickness. The homoeopathic concept of life in relation to growth, development, health and disease on all the planes of nature, spiritual, emotional, mental and physical, stamps it as complete in the knowledge of health and the causes of its decline and loss, together with the means and methods to restore such loss back to normal states.
Perhaps in medicine, more than in any other human endeavor, must action and progress depend on philosophic procedures. Socially, economically and scientifically there is also need of the guidance of philosophic thought to insure success and progress. Man reaches his highest state of development under the philosophic urge. A social order or a therapeutic system built upon the tenets of empiricism is unstable and inadequate for satisfactory accomplishment. It involves too much of the trial and error formula wherein error prevails preponderantly over success.
Empiricism in medicine has produced more harm than good to the race. One so-called miracle drug after another has been tossed at the world in a constant stream to be tried on myriads of hapless human guinea pigs and then discarded as dangerous or unsatisfactory. Long after the dispensers of such drugs have discontinued their further use, the public remains free to purchase and abuse them to the most dangerous degree. Only after much harm and even tragedy has occurred are any warnings from medical experts sounded or legal steps taken to prevent wholesale poisonings.
Empirical medicine is closely ailed with commercial medicine. Annually large profits are amassed– millions of dollars– at the expense of a gullible public both from the standpoint of wealth and health.
The physician must know the cause of disease as well as the means to remove them. Since the realm of cause operates on the unseen planes of nature only, a philosophic approach alone will insure success in the restoration of health to the sick individual. Also, if the causes of illness are known, the physician through the process of laws discovered and known to him, will be able to prevent a great deal of illness thereby dispensing with the necessity of cure.
Empiricism may observe and learn some facts relating to life and occasionally produce some happy result but where one such result is accomplished, many other experiments turn out failures and disappointments. In the world of mechanics the trial and error routine, while expensive, may lead to an occasional success with the expenditure of much time and energy. Certain good effects in medicine may be accomplished only to be offset or neutralized by the evil results produced by the remedy used in the treatment.
To illustrate: the frequency of long lasting sufferings that follow immunizing doses of serums and vaccines are a matter of record. We need cite only the recent wholesale cases of sickness and death produced in the army recruiting centers after the yellow fever shots administered for yellow fever prophylaxis, given without the consent and against the wishes of many of the soldiers ad sailors, compelled to submit to such unscientific and purely empirical methods.
Also, we may note that the so-called curative effects produced by the sulpha drugs against infections are too often followed by blood changes and prolonged weakness and devitalization. The destructive effects of x-ray and radium therapy for the treatment of cancer and other growths together with many forms of skin disease, are among the common things met with every day and all to no purpose, because such agents, allopathically and empirically applied, never produce cure. The suppression of malaria chills with quinine and its derivatives and synthetic substitutes not only fail to cure, but complicate and aggravate the malarial patient with the development of liver, spleen and blood diseases as sequences which are more difficult to cope with than the uncomplicated malarial infection.
In the treatment of syphilis, empirical medicine has traveled from mercury to kali iod., thence to the arsenicals through the series from 606 to 909, thence to bismuth and the very latest, penicillin. They are still looking with longing eyes for the perfect specific that will cure all cases without complications or sequential effects by way of the ideal antisyphilitic that only exists in the imaginations of earth-bound empirical specialists who proceed by a common pattern always in circles, like lost wanderers with no compass or guide, no philosophic chart or habit of thought, no plan to show the way; only a blind incoherent haphazard march in search of the magic myth, a specific remedy for all in a given disease.
The bitter irony of it all is the fact that for the past one hundred and fifty years they have trampled upon and kicked aside the very object of their long arduous and illusive search. Like worn weary prospectors searching for virgin gold who have crossed and recrossed over the sought-for prize, but because they failed to recognize its presence in a strange though common form they lost it, and are destined to go forever in a vain searching, destitute and hopeless, doomed to perpetual failure.
Homoeopathic philosophy holds that magic key that unlocks the armamentarium of all specific medicine, as each individual case of sickness regardless of its diagnostic name, receives its own specific remedy, based upon unchanging law, confirmed by numerous cures wrought by many physicians from many lands and upon peoples of all races, who have suffered with every kind of sickness known and named by medical lore. The homoeopathic physician obtains his knowledge of the action of drugs by proving such drugs on healthy individuals of both sexes. These provings or symptoms produced make up the homoeopathic materia medica, a veritable storehouse of medical knowledge for the healing of the nations.
The proven Law of Similars is the basic foundation upon which the superstructure of homoeopathic philosophy is erected to give to the world an edifice of great beauty and use. Every well proven remedy– that is, every remedy tested on many individuals– constitutes an image of sickness; and in that image is reflected the power of that remedy to cure a like picture of sickness to be met in the field of disease. It is necessary to give that remedy in a potentized or attenuated form where cure is desired because if given in the crude or toxic form that produces sickness in the healthy, a severe aggravation or even serious harm may come before cure is obtained.
This method precludes all experiments on the sick and eliminates all consequential drug effects that almost invariably follow empirical medical procedures. For how can one measure and harmonize the reactions in the test tube with those of the human organism? Or how can the sufferings, emotions, mental end physical, of the guinea pig be known or applied to human needs? Surely not by the pathological end results known only after killing the guinea pig.
By and through the constant application of the homoeopathic law of cure to many cases of sickness treated by master prescribers and keen observers through the years, has the homoeopathic philosophy been built and expanded from time to time. Without the knowledge of this philosophy the physician might often be confused and fail to cure certain very chronic and difficult cases of sickness. Because sickness has an order of procedure, a direction in its symptomatology and a pace of action, all of which helps determine its nature, acute or chronic, relapsing, periodic, etc.
In the same way must the provings of our remedies be studied to ascertain their relation and application by their similarity to disease states and conditions. One of the most valuable observations to remember is the fact that the last symptoms to appear in any sickness are the first to disappear under the action of the indicated remedy; that symptoms get well in the inverse order of their coming. Another observation many times confirmed that patients get well of their symptoms and complaints from center to circumference, from which out and from above downwards, from more vital to less vital parts.
Whenever disease and symptoms take the opposite direction, there is suppression and danger for the patient. An eruption suppressed by powerful ointments or x-ray or radium applications often is followed by alarming asthmatic states or violent inflammations of the gastrointestinal tract or congestive headaches and violent neuralgias may supervene. Sometimes after rubbing powerful ligaments to rheumatic joints there is serious cardiac involvement with pain and dyspnoea.
In his book The Collected Works of Arthur Hill Grimmer, Grimmer spoke out against the fluoridation of water and vaccinations. Grimmer wrote prodigeously, Gnaphalium, Homeopathic Prophylaxis and Homeopathic Medicine and Cancer: The Philosophy and Clinical Experiences of Dr. A.H. Grimmer, M.D.