When Should Homeopathy Be Used?

The disease of the patient might pause due to some joyous occurrence, or an external circumstance. The Homoeopath might then consider him as fairly recovered.

The patient himself, if he good-naturedly overlooked some passable moderate ailments, might consider himself as healthy.

Still such a favorable pause would never last long. The return and repeated returns of the complaints in the end left even the best Homoeopathic remedies less effective the oftener they were repeated. In the end, they hardly passed even as weak palliatives.

But usually, after repeated attempts to conquer the disease which has changed form, residual complaints appeared which the Homoeopathic medicines could not eradicate.

The chronic disease could, despite all efforts, be merely delayed in its progress by the Homoeopathic physician. It could grow worse from year to year.

This was, and remained, the quicker or slower process in such treatments in all non-venereal, severe chronic diseases, even when these were treated in exact accordance with the Homoeopathic art as hitherto known. Their beginning was promising, the continuation less favorable, the outcome hopeless.

Nevertheless this teaching was founded upon the steadfast pillar of truth. The attestation of its excellence, yea, of its infallibility (so far as this can be predicted of human affairs), it has laid before the eyes of the world through facts.

Homoeopathy alone taught first of all how to heal the well-defined idiopathic diseases:

• the old, smooth scarlet fever of Sydenham
• the more recent purples, whooping cough, croup, sycosis, and autumnal dysenteries

Even acute pleurisy, and typhous contagious epidemics must now allow themselves to be speedily turned into health by a few small doses of rightly-selected Homoeopathic medicine.

Whence then this less favorable, this unfavorable, result of the continued treatment of the non-venereal chronic diseases even by Homoeopathy?

Why did thousands of endeavors to heal the other chronic diseases fail?

Might this be caused, perhaps, by the still too small number of Homoeopathic remedial means that have so far been proved as to their pure action?

Homoeopaths have hitherto thus consoled themselves.

But this excuse never satisfied the founder of Homoeopathy because even the new additions of proved valuable medicines, increasing from year to year, have not advanced the healing of chronic (non-venereal) diseases by a single step.

Acute diseases (unless these, at their commencement, threaten unavoidable death) are not only passably removed, by means of a correct application-of Homoeopathic remedies, but with the assistance of the never-resting, preservative vital force in our organism, find a speedy and complete cure.

Why, then, cannot this vital force, efficiently affected through Homoeopathic medicine, produce any true and lasting recovery in these chronic maladies even with the aid of the Homoeopathic remedies which best cover their present symptoms; while this same force which is created for the restoration of our organism is nevertheless so indefatigably and successfully active in completing the recovery even in severe acute diseases? What is there to prevent this?

The answer to this question, which is so natural, inevitably led me to the discovery of the nature of these chronic diseases.

From 1816-1817, night and day I have been thinking of why Homoeopathy medicines failed to bring a real cure in the above-mentioned diseases, despite the incontestable truth of the Homoeopathic Law of Cure.

The Giver of all good things permitted me within this space of time to gradually solve this sublime problem through:

• unremitting thought
• indefatigable inquiry
• faithful observation
• the most accurate experiments made for the welfare of humanity.*

Known homoeopathic remedies might remove non-venereal chronic diseases. But those diseases always returned in a more or less varied form and with new symptoms, or reappeared annually with an increase of complaints.

This fact gave me the first clew that the Homoeopathic physician with such a chronic (non-venereal) case, yea, in all cases of (non-venereal) chronic disease, has not only to combat the disease presented before his eyes, and must not view and treat it as if it were a well-defined disease, to be speedily and permanently destroyed and healed by ordinary Homoeopathic remedies, but that he has always to encounter only some separate fragment of a more deep-seated original disease.

• I did not allow any of these unintermitted endeavors to become known to the world or my followers. This was not because they were frequently ungrateful to my troublous but not joyless path of life. I left it unmentioned because it is hurtful to speak or write of things still immature. Not until the year 1827 did I communicate the essentials of the discovery to two of my pupils, who had been of the greatest service to the art of Homoeopathy, for their own benefit and that of their patients, so that the whole discovery might not be lost to the world if perchance a higher call to eternity had called me away before the completion of the book - an event not so very improbable in my seventy-third year.