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Introduction
Homoeopathy is a medical
system which successfully treats all man’s diseases,
whether acute or chronic, whether of the body or of the
mind. It is a most complete and scientific system of
healing the world has ever seen.
There appears to be an
in-built mechanism in man for resistance to change.
Throughout the history of man, innovations were bitterly
opposed and resisted by the so-called scientific
establishments. When Copernicus discovered that it was
actually the earth that moves around the sun, this went
against the common experience. A hundred years later
Galileo was thrown into prison for having the courage to
proclaim that the earth moves around the sun. What the
scientific establishments invoked was, in fact, the
fashionable option of the time, since scientific
discoveries themselves were subject to change.
Homoeopathy was not any exception and it was bitterly
resisted by those practicing the orthodox system of
medicine of those days. In addition to the free use of
chemicals, the most fashionable treatment of those days
was blood letting either by venesection or by the
application of leeches, for it was believed that
plethora was responsible for diseases. More blood was
shed perhaps by bleeding the patients than was shed in
the wars. It was against this background that
Homoeopathy made its advent and had to struggle for its
survival. The Allopathic system of medicine has
undergone rapid changes subsequently and has taken great
strides in the preceding decades. However Homoeopathy
has not undergone any change in its principles, for they
were the outcome of combination of science and spirit.
Spirit is constant and ever unchanging and therefore the
principles underlying it are also unchanging.
In the first aphorism in
his famous book “The organ of the art of healing,”
Dr.Samuel Hahnemann says, “The physician’s highest and
only mission is to restore health to the sick, which is
called healing.” Perhaps one may wonder as to what is
strange about this statement. There was a news-item in
“The Hindu” dated 6.5.1976:
“LONGEVITY HAS NOT
BROUGHT HAPPINESS"
Geneva: May 5, 1976.
Living longer does not
make people happier. Dr.Halfdan Mahler, Director General
of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said, ‘while
modern medical and health care had prolonged the lives
of millions, longevity had not brought the happiness
many assumed it would.’ He told WHO’s annual three-week
conference here.
Long life without
improvement in the quality of life is one of the tragic
sequels of technological development in many countries,
Dr.Mahler said, ‘Many acute diseases of major public
health importance have almost disappeared, only to be
replaced by chronic debilitating, physical and mental
diseases. The mere prolongation of life, unaccompanied
by an improvement in its quality, may not be as
sacrosanct a goal as it appears in certain societies.
Support for this contention is to be found in other
societies that have for centuries pursed a rather
different philosophy of life’.”
Then what about the
Iatrogenic diseases. Though the modern drugs control the
original disease, they leave the legacy of dependence on
them, thus creating a secondary disease of dependency.
Thus, some may become addict to the dosage without which
they cannot manage.
I am sure that no changes
have taken place after Dr.Mahler’s address during the
WHO conference in Geneva in 1976, to warrant making
corrections to his views. It is only under this context
that we will be very much impressed by the first
aphorism of Dr.Hahnemann that the physician’s highest
and only mission is to restore health to the sick.
Therefore, first of all, the concept of health and
sickness shall have to be defined. If we examine the
Homoeopathic principles, we will notice that they are
surged with the Spirit. Does science state that matter
exists without energy? Can energy be defined except by
its effects? Yet there is a relationship between matter
and energy. Spirit has analogy to energy. Spirit and
science do have a relation, yet science cannot define
spirit. In Homoeopathic principles, there is a wonderful
blend of spirit and science. Homoeopathy is beyond the
reach of the present day science because its principles
are bordering on transcendental science (the spirit).
What is health? A man can
be stated to be in health when he is in harmony with his
environment. He is sick when discord prevails. If we are
able to cope effectively with the world around us and
are at ease in it, then we consider ourselves in good
health. The stresses of civilization are exacting a
price from man. If it was one type of stresses that
afflicted the primitive man, it is the stresses of
industrialization and urbanization that have overcome
the present day man. There appears to be need to
redefine health in relation to the price man wants to
pay for the technological progress. People have come to
me and asked, “Cannot this allergic cold be permanently
eradicated?” With all the noxious fumes that are being
freely discharged into the vicinity from the Industrial
centres, we have to pay a price for this. Nature exacts
a price from those who dare to reorder her ways with the
human organism that she has designed, or with the world
in which she has placed it. The price that each
individual pays may vary according to the individual’s
adaptability and susceptibility.
So long man is in health,
all the functions within his body are directed
harmoniously. When he becomes sick, it leads to
dysfunction of the parts within his body or it may lead
to invasion of parasitic micro-organism from outside,
which we call bacteria or virus. As per Hahnemann these
tiny creatures are quite harmless because they cannot
survive in a healthy body. Only when man is sick, the
body becomes habitable and hospitable to the
microorganism for its growth and the disease progresses.
These microorganism, in fact, come as scavengers of
nature, to prey upon the diseased organism, for
recycling purpose. Those that live in villages or on the
borders of forests would have chanced to observe that
whenever there is dead animal, a big host of vultures
congregates for devouring the carcass. Hahnemann adopts
similar rationale in respect of health of the body. If
our bodies were healthy, no invading organism can thrive
in the body.
Therefore, though the
health cannot be defined in absolute terms, Homoeopathy
makes an integrated approach, blending Spirit and
Matter.
How Scientific is
Homoeopathy
In his book on Principles
and Practice of Homoeopathy Dr.Wheeler, an English
Homoeo doctor wrote that very few of those who condemned
the practice of Homoeopathy, had any knowledge of its
principles and therefore it is fair to say that in a
court of Science their testimony, however valuable and
dogmatic, must be considered invalid. Hahnemann and his
followers made definite statements concerning the use of
drugs for the relief of disease, and claimed that their
findings were based on clinical experiments, which had
been repeated many times. These experiments have been
continuing for more than 150 years and have been checked
and rechecked many times.
It all started in 1796.
Hahnemann who was very famous by that time throughout
Germany not only as a doctor in orthodox medicine but as
an author and a chemist, was in despair. With all the
knowledge of orthodox methods, and with all his
experimentation along those lines, his results were very
disappointing. He all but gave up his practice and
devoted more and more of his time earning a living by
translating foreign medical books. And then, suddenly,
while working on a translation of Cullen’s Materia
Medica, he had an experience which was to change his
thinking and as a result, his life.
William Cullen, a most
distinguished Scottish Physician and Professor of
Medicine at Glasgow was the author of the Materia Medica.
While translating it in 1790, Hahnemann found himself
disagreeing utterly with the famous physician’s
explanation of the action of quinine in the treatment of
malaria. Like a true scientist, he decided to conduct
experiment to find out the truth. He decided to test the
drug on himself and here he had the stroke of good luck
such as blesses the Isaac Newtons in the world of
science. Hahnemann found that he was sensitive to
quinine; he had a definite idiosyncrasy or reaction to
it. He found that after taking few doses of quinine
(four drachms of good cinchona bark twice a day for
several days), he was soon suffering from the symptoms
of an illness similar to those he had frequently seen as
a medical student in the marshlands of lower Hungary. In
short, except for the fever, he was experiencing the
symptoms of malaria. It occurred to him that if this
drug could produce symptoms similar to those of malaria,
it then might be the cure for malaria. It is then that
he first applied the words to his theory, SIMILIA
SIMILIBUS CURENTUR. Like will be cured by like, which is
the slogan of the Homoeopathy. Like every true
scientist, he decided to concentrate on producing
evidence to prove or disprove his newfound conclusion.
He set out to experiment with other substances. He
continued to investigate the action of substances on
healthy people for over a dozen years before he
proclaimed his theories. In 1810, his Materia Medica on
67 remedies was published. In the same year, the Organon
was also published.
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