4. Medical advancement

How far has medicine advanced?

In medieval times, doctors were as they are today – pompous adherants to theoretical medicine and bunglers in its practise. What was needed and sorely lacking was honesty about the state of knowledge regarding the patient and his problem. If a patient died under the ministrations, the disease was balmed for his demise. This is today not a single iota different from 5 to 600 years ago. It is in effect an admittance of incompetence and inability. The admittance of incurable disease falls in the same category of ignorance and incompetence.
There is however a way, in which the physician can live up to his high and only mission – to cure the sick. There is the need to listen to the patient, since he is an expert on his own suffering – he knows exactly what is wrong, what makes it better or worse and all other little details, necessary for the doctor to know to enable a proper prescription. The physician must be well-versed in his remedial means, so that he can expertly prescribe – he must know his medicines as his best friends; trustworthy and certain. Thus the meeting between doctor and patients becomes a meeting of experts.

These are the qualities that a doctor needs, according to Paracelsus. He did not use the same words, but his intentions were like that. In his time, mathematicians wasted their time and talents on fruitless combinations of letters that would give the key. He who found it would be the master of all secrets, for it would confer on him the power ‘to make appear what had been occult, or hidden’ and ‘bring to perfection what is imperfect’. He would instantly know all the harmonies of the universe and thus follow his destiny.
By his process he would influence Nature through his consciousness and Nature would be doing what she always does best, in an optimum manner. Knowledge ended in universal Love, just as the Veda teaches. Paracelsus used a similar testimony as Trithemius. He postulated that the lover of Nature will obtain her secrets and receive the power to use her forces.

Therefore, the logical conclusion that the application of this principle brings about, is the rejection of Galenius. He stated that contrario contraris, or contrary cures contrary. They applied cold to get rid of heat and vice versa; moist was used to drive our dry humours and when one had frostbite, they stuck your feet close to the fire or in very warm water. This is still the case today – burn victims are put in cold baths, which keeps the heat inside and can cause hypothermia, especially when much of the skin is burned.
Folk doctors knew that when you burn yourself with an iron, the same iron will take the burn away. No blacksmith or baker is ever the victim of a burn. Every experienced cook knows that putting the burn close to the flame for a few seconds or by running warm water over it the burn will not develop a blister and the pain will be gone in ten to thirty seconds. They knew that like cures like. This famous maxim, this law of nature, was revived by Samuel Hahnemann in 1790, who is the founder of the homoeopathic school.

With good reason, we count Hippocrates and Paracelsus among our spiritual and methodical ancestors since they advocated that poison, when given in appropriately small doses will be the cure for a disease that resembles the action of that poison. The oldest reference to the Law of Similars, which Hahnemann traced back as far as Hippocrates, who derived the idea from the Arab physicians, who in turn took it from Vedic India, is found in the Bhagavat Purana, which was written 5.000 years ago. There it literally says, amayā yas ca bhūtanam yayate yena suvrata tad eva hy āmayām dravyām na punāti cikītsitām. ‘Oh good soul, does not a thing, when applied therapeutically, cure a disease which was caused by that very same thing?”
This is the only logical conclusion anyone can arrive at in the treatment of disease. We come now to another important part in the treatment of people, which I feel should be given the utmost attention, since it often neglected in the treatment of disease, even among the homoeopathic fraternity. This is the absolute necessity of the administration of the single remedy. Paracelsus also stressed the use of what he called specifics.

In order to fully appreciate the concept of the single remedy, it is useful to understand the following analogy. When a person, animal or plant is sick, it is comparable to being locked into a room. The tumblers in the lock represent the different symptoms, the totality of which needs treatment, if the lock is to be opened. At the same time there is only one key that will open the lock, although many different ones can be inserted, without being able to turn the lock. Therefore, there is only one remedy that will fit all the tumblers and open the lock so that the patient can be set free of his symptoms.

Paracelsus also worked along those lines in his parlance; gift meant potion or poison, medicine or an aphrodisiac. As he said, poison is in everything and nothing is without it. It depends on the dose whether it is poison or medicine.

There are some that think Hippocrates and Paracelsus have nothing much in common with Hahnemann, but these are the ones that neither understand what homoeopathy is about, nor about the fact that it was common knowledge in antiquity – and in further recesses of time than they can imagine.
Their doctrine of like to like was based on thinking that there is nothing in heaven that is not in man. This is non-different from the homoeopathic approach, which says that the mentality in the plant much match the mentality in man. The plants are equally governed by the stars as man and all else on this planet, regardless anyone’s denial. As above, so below is true for all creatures and from the harmony occasioned by the right remedy, this correspondence is only further borne out.

Please comment.