Hans says:
I see a caveat here though, in relation to our discussions: Allopathic medicine recognize discrete diseases, like flu and laryngitis, where we claim that the first one is caused by a virus, the latter by bacteria. However, the way I understand you, since homeopathics do not recognize individual diseases like that, you would look at the total symptom complex for that particular patient.
So what is apples for me might be oranges for you. In other words, an allopathic will say that the patient has flu and laryngitis (i.e. two diseases), thereas a homeopath will say that the patient has this set of symptoms (i.e. one disease). And in that context, with the way homeopatics view a disease, it may be proper to say that the stronger disease replaces the weaker one.
This is a little better, Hans.
You are, however, making some fundamental mistakes worth correcting without derision.
We recognize diagnostic categories, just like allopaths.
Those things are conveniences, i.e., ways of imparting lots of symptoms by invoking just one word or term.
They are, however, identifications of nothing more than the statistical abstractions they represent since the only symptoms so identified are the ones that large numbers of people have in common: common symptoms.
Everybody has uncommon symptoms, though, too, and those are the ones that permit us to isolate the medicine that person needs.
Those common symptoms do not lead to a single drug, i.e., they do not lead to an unambiguous prescription, but uncommon symptoms do.
We don't really care what causes it unless that causative agent or influence also appears in the case as a sustaining cause of disease.
Such causes extend far beyond mere pathogens and have to be removed before we can see the accurate disease picture without such interfering factors.
Allopathic drugs ALL act as these interferring factors because they 1) suppress natural symptoms and 2) produce artificial symptoms called side effects of their toxicity.
Allopathic drugs thus have to go.
That's very difficult in our times, for most people are addicted to them, and we often receive such patients and have to do the best we can under the circumstances.
The pathogenic cause of a disease has nothing to do with homeotherapeutics, for it sets in motion disease processes but does not indicate a single drug for cure because the processes include those common symptoms AND uncommon symptoms.
Only the uncommon symptoms will indicate a curative medicine, so the cause is irrelevant.
That's why we have symptom rubrics in the repertory for the various diseases by name.
Those permit us to know which drugs have been curative of that disease, but that listing does not of itself indicate any drug over another one, for the uncommon symptoms permitted earlier homeopaths to cure those diseases.
That's how we always do it.
The fact that a drug has cured a disease means nothing, for potentially any drug can be called for in a given case.
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When we pass from infectious diseases into the hyper-realm of chronic diseases, we will hopefully get you to see why these uncommon symptoms are so important, for no causes are involved in them.
Disease Entity Theory brought allopathic medicine to the paradigm of Disease Mechanism Theory and now to DNA Theory.
But none of them are providing, nor will they ever provide, the means for individualization with ultramolecular drugs.
When we look into chronic disease, we often see that these are cases in which the organism is going hay wire itself.
Nothing physical is causative of it; if a pathogen is behind it, that becomes an infectious case.
For example, cytomegalavirus (CMV) is indicated in a very large and expanding percentage of cases of restinosis.
(For those who do not know this word, it means recurrent coronary blockage and thus recurrent angioplasties.)
CMV in heart disease thus splits that category about in the middle with half of the cases being classed as chronic in nature and half as infectious.
It makes no practical difference to us which classification it falls into, for we treat all cases the same way, but it shows that such pathogenic causes serve to identify infectious from chronic diseases.
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The disordered or no-longer integral etheric pattern seems to be indicated as the key feature of all cases.
Hahnemann called it the vital force, but etheric pattern is much more scientific since we are in a world recognizing lots of non-physical particles and energies.
In infectious diseases, the disordered etheric pattern would be the key because it permitted infection as well as being the hindrence to restored health.
In chronic diseases, the disordered etheric pattern would be the key because the symptoms are the only way for us to know how to restore lost health.
I said the same thing in both cases.
We really look at it about like this, for it appears that the only way to understand what ultramolecular drugs could be doing in curative prescriptions is restoring the etheric pattern to its optimal state.
Restated, lost health is lost health no matter how it occured, and homeotherapeutics shows us how to restore it.
What actually happens is still a mystery, but we know how to do it because natural laws guide us like a compass.
Tim and I are looking for an explanation of homeopathic pharmacology, for that seems to be resolvable in our times and may lead to other findings.
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The deviations or disorderings of cellular mechanisms are always going to be nothing but effects of a systemic process.
Allopaths are thus incapable of even addressing, let alone curing, these cases because they are stuck in the notion of a proximate cause when none will ever be found and wouldn't do any good anyway since no prescription from it will be unambiguous nor will chemical drugs be able to precipitate the four Laws of Cure.
These are totally insoluble problems with allopathic medicine.
The only way to cure diseases has been through Hahnemannian homeotherapeutics and clearly will be the only way forever since natural laws exist permitting us to gain command over disease phenomena.
I am not saying this is easy.
That is hardly the case when we deal with patients, but it is the way Hahnemannians have cured diseases.
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I thought of another recent example in a case of an uncommon symptom you might find more helpful.
After asking an elderly gentleman with heart disease about his position during sleep, he told me that he sleeps on his sides because he gets dizzy if he lays on his back.
Ignoring that I almost did not learn this pivotally important symptom because he did not think it significant, there is no physiological mechanism to explain this, and that tends to be a good criteria to be able to identify them.
We thus look up that symptom and find a list of drugs that have produced it in the healthy and cured it in the sick:
http://homeoint.org/books/kentrep/kent0100.htm#P101
VERTIGO [while] lying, back, on (K101): alum., anan., merc-sul., merc., mur-ac., nux-v., puls., sil., sulph.
If you find three of those in a case, you are going to be able to find the medicine the person needs.
For this reason, Constantine Hering considered the equilateral triangle to represent homeopathy, inside of which he wanted these words written: By This Sign We Conquer.
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Irregardless, uncommon or characteristic symptoms are strange, rare and peculiar.
The person who is curable will have them; the incurable person will not, because we can't find the drug that will cure the person without them.
Happily, most people have these.
Most often what happens in the cases of the elderly today is that their cases are very complicated by allopathic medicine, so we cannot readily identify which medicine they need.
Then some crisis occurs and allopathic medicine regains total control over the case and the person then dies.
The homeopaths of the 19th century did not have such problems because they had patients for life without allopathic complications.
Those patients presented problems that challenged the skills of the homeopath, and it mostly happened that a missed prescription failed the patient, who then died.
Here is where modern allopathy today has a place.
They should be there as a safety valve for us, like antibiotics, but no further.
That ain't going to happen till they understand their inferior position to us.
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By the way, anybody who wants to blaim a homeopath for missing a prescription should first try to do it.
This is all the more tragic because it's very difficult to come to Hahnemannian status, and there are lots of people in HPH misleading others and setting them lose as graduates before they're actually ready.
Mostly one comes to Hahnemannian status by simply discerning that there are mistakes made by others.
So Hahnemannians are historically very few people in the world at any given time.
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We will thus name the case the same way allopaths do, but our prescription will have nothing to do with the name of the disease.
I hope that is helpful.