WHY FAILURES IN HOMOEOPATHIC PRESCRIBING


WHY FAILURES IN HOMOEOPATHIC PRESCRIBING. In malignant growths and too far advances organic diseases, there is a great paucity of prescriptive symptoms as the patients entire attention is focussed on the tumor or an intense pain and all the past and present symptoms with prescriptive characteristics and modalities sink into the background and are often forgotten, and in proportion as this happens, he is to be considered incurable.


Homoeopathy is based upon the laws of nature. “Similia Similibus Curantur” is a law of nature as unerring and immutable as the Law of Gravity. As a fruit detached from the tree must fall to the ground, so recovery must follow when a patient is treated according to the homoeopathic laws, provided recovery is possible. The homoeopathic laws cannot make a man immortal as immortality is against the laws of nature. So also, where the disease has advanced so far as to lead to the destruction of organs and tissues, it would be futile to expect a cure. The limitations of Homoeopathy must be understood, and the laws applied rationally if success is to be aspired for.

All sickness expresses itself through sings and symptoms and this is the only channel through which it reveals itself. A diseased condition would be deemed incurable when there are no prescriptive symptoms or when the vital energy fails to respond to the indicated remedy. When the physician fails to find out the symptoms or the patient conceals the symptoms, or when there are no prescriptive symptoms, as often happens in malignant growths or two far advanced organic diseases, they are unknown to the prescriber and the chances of recovery are very feeble indeed.

The expression “prescriptive symptom” means a symptom having value for the purposes of prescribing. To be of prescriptive value a symptom should have certain characteristics and modalities. For example, a pain in the chest conveys little meaning to the homoeopath and will not enable him to pick out the curative remedy for his patient from a list of remedies having chest pain as a symptom, but when the patient qualifies his statement by adding that it is a sort of stitching pain, aggravated at each breath and ameliorated by lying on the painful side, it has a very decisive significance for the prescriber pointing to Bryonia as the indicated remedy.

In malignant growths and too far advances organic diseases, there is a great paucity of prescriptive symptoms as the patients entire attention is focussed on the tumor or an intense pain and all the past and present symptoms with prescriptive characteristics and modalities sink into the background and are often forgotten, and in proportion as this happens, he is to be considered incurable. To illustrate:

A boy, aged 15 years, whose mother had died of uterine cancer, came in for the treatment of a tumour of the size of a large pea on the right side of his lower lip. He was in excellent health otherwise and had nothing else whatever to complain of. The problem was what to prescribe on! One thing struck me as the patient entered my clinic: the lower half of his body was well built and strong while the upper half was comparatively thinner so much so that if you saw both the halves separately you could not believe they belonged to the same person! he clothed himself moderately. This guided me to the selection of Lycopodium which in the 200th & 1000th potencies cleared up the growth in a little less than two months.

Fortunately the sphere of incurable diseased conditions is very small under the homoeopathic system of treatment as it puts the patient in maximum harmony with the laws of Nature.

Some other limitations of Homoeopathy should be clearly understood, if unnecessary disappointment is to be avoided. Hahnemann has clearly said that a physicians duty is to understand and remove the cause of the disease, and this may at times be entirely external or mechanical, requiring purely external means of treatment. Thus, in cases of external injuries, e.g. when there is profuse bleeding due to some artery being cut, or when a bone has been fractured, or a foreign body has got into the eye, ear or nose, or in cases of poisoning, it would be far from wise to attempt to treat the case homoeopathically alone without the application of mechanical or surgical methods. If any dynamic effects are anticipated, e.g. tetanus after injuries, etc.

(Ledum, Hypericum), or if any dynamic effects do actually ensue, as in chronic effects of poisoning or blood poisoning from wounds, etc., Internal homoeopathic medication must be resorted to. When there is a foreign body, say a bullet, encysted in a lung or lodged on a vital place, or if there is an abscess in an internal organ with no external outlet, it would be unwise to suppurate out the abscess or the foreign body, and the matter must be left to surgical discretion. Again, in the class of diseases where malnutrition results from lack of proper foods instead of lack of powers of assimilation, homoeotherapy cannot be expected to take the place of a correction of dietetic deficiencies and errors. In short, all obstacles to recovery must be removed before we proceed to apply the indicated remedy.

The internal and dynamic causes are to be treated by internal and dynamic means while purely external causes have to be dealt with by external means. It may be pointed out, however, that Homoeopathy has considerably narrowed the sphere of surgery, and patients no longer need to run to the surgeon in a routine way for the operation of tonsils, tumours, abscesses and carbuncles, etc. Fortunately, conditions hitherto considered by orthodox medicine to be surgical are now amenable to homoeopathy. One marvelous feature of homoeotherapy is the process of aborting abscesses and carbuncles and promoting a resorption of pus even when the same has been clearly demonstrated by fluctuation.

With this background of a realisation of the limitations of Homoeopathy, we now proceed to consider some other common faults in homoeopathic prescribing which spell failure.

How often we have received the admonition: Treat the patient and not the disease. And just how frequently we forget this basic concept and court failures. There was a very bad case of dysentery, a girl of about 11 years, and the tenesmus was so severe that the girl would double up on account of pain and would go into convulsions and faint. The usual features of mucous, blood and great frequency of stools were, of course, present.

She had been treated with Nux vom. and Merc. cor., but then the patient called me and also requested that a certain physician be called in consultation as in his view the condition of the girl was very serious. Now this physician made a very thorough physical examination and after a percussion on this finding, he suggested Carbo veg. 30., three hourly. But as the patients father entrusted the case to my care. I had to depend upon my own judgement, and was able to bring her round with Colocynth 30.

Another case may be in point as an illustration. A young man of about 30 years was a dyspeptic, suffering from indigestion, flatulence, heartburn and occasional pain in the region of the appendix. He had been drugged with Penicillin, all kinds of allopathic mixtures, and Bismuth and Soda Bicarb. powders till he came to the condition, in an acute attack, when whatever nourishment he took, and even water, was vomited as soon as it reached the stomach. He had great thirst, taking water in small sips, and was mentally and physically very restless. He had not passed any stools for the last few days in spite of enemas.

They asked me to take up the case, and I started with Nux vom. 200. and later gave Bismuth 200., with a little relief to the patient. After two days they got impatient and felt like calling another physician in consultation to expedite recovery and very entreatingly asked for my consent. So this physician came on the scene and after an examination of the patient exclaimed, “Reversed peristalsis! Just give three doses of Asafoetida 30., four hourly, and you will see the difference!” A relation of the patient who happened to be an allopathic physician asked me if I agreed. It would have been a tough job to say that I did not agree; so I left it to them to decide what course they wanted to adopt.

They decided to try the other physicians treatment, and administered Asafoetida 30., three doses, four hourly. At about midnight, the allopathic relation came and reported that while there was no relief in the vomiting, a diarrhoea had been added on and the patient was feeling very weak and much worse generally, with marked anxiety and restlessness. He also disclosed that China 30. had been given since the evening to arrest the diarrhoea but without any favourable results. On his offering apologies for the bungling. Ars. 30. was given in two hourly doses three times, which not only tided over the night, but enabled the patient to go on to recovery, with Placebos, spread over a period of about two weeks.

Now, if failure in prescribing is to be avoided, we must avoid the temptation to treat diseases and pathological states. Every time it is the patient who is to be treated.

The image of the patients sickness is reflected in the “totality of symptoms” upon which alone Hahnemann has advised us to base prescriptions. By this, some of us, and most laymen, seem to understand that homoeopathic prescribing is merely symptom matching in its ordinary sense, and so they administer remedies in which they just happen to see some of the symptoms of the patient regardless of their quality or proportion, interweaving them with their own theories of certain symptoms being caused by certain factors. Such prescribing is just hitting in the dark and may score a solitary cure here and there but it will never make a good prescriber.

R. S. Rastogi
R. S. Rastogi
B.A., M.D.S.
Dehradun, India