TRADITIONAL MEDICINE AND HOMOEOPATHY


Traditional medicine dates from time immemorial. In its long history it has outgrown innumerable practices and made countless new discoveries. The history of medicine, like the history of nations, records many glorious achievements and likewise many dismal and tragic failures.


Traditional medicine dates from time immemorial. In its long history it has outgrown innumerable practices and made countless new discoveries. The history of medicine, like the history of nations, records many glorious achievements and likewise many dismal and tragic failures.

In the realm of research, diagnosis and technique the regular school of medicine has made and is making phenomenal progress. In the matter of practical treatment of the individual sick patient the average physician has received very little help from his long and arduous medical training. He has had woefully little instruction in dietetics and practical case management and when it comes to drugs he may try this or try that, but he has no fundamental principle or law to guide him. True, he may prescribe a diuretic, cardiac stimulant, sedative, tonic or laxative, but that is prescribing for a single symptom or single part of a patient at a time and not for the entire patient as an individual entity. Moreover, such methods of prescribing are often suppressive in effect as the disease expression may be diverted or driven to a deeper level to the detriment of the patient.

There are also specific and glandular and serum therapies. Many treatment are founded solely on theory, some even on hypotheses and these ever change as the swift seasons roll.

The drug houses and biological concerns are continually covering the medical profession by means of letters, circulars, advertisements, samples and smooth and clever detail men. People who have never even matriculated at a medical college will come in and recite their piece, telling us the most up to date and accredited manner of treating our patients. Commercialism in medicine! Physicians, medical organizations and institutions, boards of health and the public, all are influenced, persuaded, boards of health and the public, all are influenced, persuaded, preyed upon, even coerced by large manufacturing interests, not for the welfare of humanity and the protection of the public as they so loudly proclaim, but in their own interest and solely for the cold coin of realm.

Homoeopathy, rediscovered by Samuel Hahnemann over a hundred years ago, is based on a law of nature, the law of similars. Homoeopathic practice has also developed the potentization of medicines. This is a process of liberating the drug energy from its limiting material vehicle or envelope, and finally the minimum dose-the least possible that is capable of producing a reaction.

A vast materia medica has been painstakingly built up through a system of drug provings on healthy persons. Minutes doses of a given drug are repeatedly given to a group of men and women until symptoms begin to appear. These persons are known as provers. A few controls are given blanks.

Before commencing the proving each individual, including the controls, lists any symptoms from which he may be suffering so as to avoid confusion of the symptom picture of the drug that is being tested and studied.

Take Nux vomica for an illustration, as it is a drug known, more or less, to physicians everywhere. If minute doses of this drug be repeatedly given to a group of provers they will in time, usually in days or weeks, begin to express symptoms which are characteristic of Nux. They will awaken in the morning unrefreshed, groggy and irritable and it wont do to rub the fur the wrong way. They will become oversensitive, easily offended and very touchy. They will tend to become chilly and averse to going out in the cool or cold air. Stuffing up of the nose may alternate with a thin, watery, irritating coryza. They will quite likely become constipated, with a frequent, ineffectual desire for stool. It at all feverish, instead of wanting the covers off they will want them piled high and well tucked in around the neck, the least movement or turning in bed causing marked chilliness. What is the matter with these people? They are giving forth symptoms characteristic of Nux vomica. The controls show no such symptoms.

No matter when or where such a proving is carried out on a group of individuals the same drug will always bring forth the same characteristic symptoms.

So we have something more than hypothesis or theory to work on. We have in fact, a materia medica composed of drugs, the pathogenesis or disease producing power of which is very definitely known, having been determined by repeated and verified scientifically controlled experimentation.

When a homoeopathic physician is called to see a patient he elicits all the symptoms, both subjective and objective. He then, from his knowledge of materia medica and with the aid of a repertory or symptom index, determines what drug in its provings has produced an essentially similar symptoms complex or ensemble. The indicated remedy is therefore homoeopathic to the case and properly administered will be expected to bring about a curative reaction in the patient.

The diagnosis or name of the disease plays a minor role in homoeopathic prescribing. Take pneumonia for example. In regular or old school practice the disease is, as it were, treated instead of the patient. The treatment is, if anything, too routine, too cur and dried and as a rule altogether too stimulating and the death rate admittedly, in fact appallingly high.

In homoeopathic treatment any of a number of remedies may be indicated by the symptom picture. In fact any drug in the materia medica may be indicated for the case in hand. If the patient has the symptoms listed above in considering Nux vomica then Nux is his remedy. If, however, he cannot endure the least motion or jarring of the bed, if he must lie on the painful or affected side, if he holds his hands to his sides when coughing, if hard pressure or tightly strapping the chest on the affected side relieves the stitching pains, if the cough is hard, dry and unproductive, if there is great dryness of the mouth and thirst for large quantities of water at long intervals, he needs Bryonia.

The next pneumonia patient may have Phosphorus symptoms, the next may present the symptom picture of Kali carb. (or Potassium carbonate) and so on, differentiating and individualizing in each case until the correct remedy is determined upon, for after all it is the sick patient we are treating and not pneumonia as a distinct entity in itself. Some patients have right-sided pneumonia, others left-sided, some have very limited areas of hepatization, others extensive consolidation.

Certain patients show marked pleuritic involvement, in others there is very little. One patient presents a besotted appearance and the symptoms of an overwhelming toxaemia and the next may be alert, restless, nervous and apprehensive. The diagnosis of pneumonia is fully justified in each of the above cases from the symptoms and physical signs, but would it not seem, to say the least, unreasonable to prescribed an identical treatment or remedy for all these patients?.

This process of individualization and the differentiation of remedies in pneumonia and all other acute conditions is not at all difficult. In fact an experienced physician can often “see” or know the indicated remedy in a very few moments and the death rate in pneumonia treated by the real followers of Hahnemann is definitely less than one per cent, believe it or not.

Pneumonia takes a terrible toll of valuable lives every year. As an experiment let any old school physician try treating a few cases without any medication whatsoever, only careful nursing and no food save perhaps fresh, raw, unsweetened fruit juices, and watch his death rate drop to well under ten per cent, perhaps even to five per cent. Having satisfied himself on this laissez faire policy plus good nursing and conservative and sensible diet management, let him then undertake careful homoeopathic treatment; let him become well acquainted with and proficient in, say a dozen of the most frequently indicated remedies in pneumonia and then see actual and severe cases of this disease quickly aborted and the death rate fall to not over one per cent. I have used pneumonia merely as an appalling example. I could as well have used any other acute disease, influenza, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or what not, the procedure is ever the same.

The death rate in acute disease under careful homoeopathy is almost nil.

I will not discuss homoeopathy in respect to chronic disease, except to suggest that one coming from old school medicine, as i did, should if possible first learn to treat acute cases as Hahnemann and his followers treated them. If careful, studious and painstaking he is absolutely certain to become completely sold on homoeopathy. As he gradually works into chronic cases, let me assure you he will not be disappointed in his results.

But there are many who call themselves homoeopaths who do not differ much in their practice or in their results from those following other systems or therapy. I grant you this is true, but let me regretfully say that such are unfaithful and unworthy followers of Hahnemann and Homoeopathy. The genuine and the counterfeit always coexist.

Eugene Underhill
Dr Eugene Underhill Jr. (1887-1968) was the son of Eugene and Minnie (Lewis) Underhill Sr. He was a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. A homeopathic physician for over 50 years, he had offices in Philadelphia.

Eugene passed away at his country home on Spring Hill, Tuscarora Township, Bradford County, PA. He had been in ill health for several months. His wife, the former Caroline Davis, whom he had married in Philadelphia in 1910, had passed away in 1961. They spent most of their marriage lives in Swarthmore, PA.

Dr. Underhill was a member of the United Lodge of Theosophy, a member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the Pennsylvania Medical Society. He was also the editor of the Homœopathic Recorder.