ON POTENCY CHOICE AND HOMŒOPATHIC POTENTISATION

  First, a brief review regarding diagnosis which in Homœopathy is two-fold:

  I.  The diagnosis of the disease according to the pathognomonic symptoms, with the help of general clinical status, through a specialist where necessary, through laboratory findings, X-rays, to clinch (a) what belongs to the exact disease, (b) what are conditioned by dietic and basic errors of hygiene, how defective are the home, clothing, care of the body, social life, regulation of life style, nutritional in-take etc.; also what could be set right without aid of medicament.  Further to be considered are intoxications by alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, tranquilizers, sleeping drugs, drugs to calm down or excite etc.  Such objective disease factors must be eliminated just as the physician of the old school does.

  II. The diagnosis of the sick person to ascertain the non-pathognomonic symptoms which do not belong to the disease in question, the rare, strange, seldom, singular and which seem bizarre.  These are symptoms which are contrary to common sense, make us reflect, and which are characteristic for a particular patient.  Allopathy does not take into consideration such symptoms and considers the patient only as a hysteric or at the most handles such cases with suppressive remedies symptomatically which further add to the patient’s sickness.

  When the remedy to be given is chosen: which potency is to be prescribed?

  This question can be settled only from practical experience.  We must know that the HAHNEMANN-oriented physician employs basically every potency, from mother tincture to the highest potencies, M, 10M, CM, MM!

  HAHNEMANN has, during his life time, fairly frequently varied the potency scale, just as the number of succussion strokes to be given in preparation of the potencies.  He experimented, twice, ten  times, hundred times, and more frequently to finally settle for ten strokes.  He invented the centesimal potencies of C1 to C30 which he wrote as:  0/VI that is 0 = globule and VI = sextillionth potency (= C18).

  Regarding the preparation of this small dose HAHNEMANN has, in the Organon, paragraph 269, clarified the basic and essential difference between dilution, attenuation and potentisation.  He wrote:

  “It is heard every day that homœopathic medicine potency is considered as mere attenuation, while it is the opposite of it, real development of the natural substance and bringing out the power lying concealed internally through friction and shaking, wherein a non-medicinal dilutant medium used is merely of secondary importance.  Diluting alone, for example, dissolving a grain of salt it becomes mere water; the grain of salt disappears in the  attenuation with plenty of water and will never by that become ‘salt medicine’ like our well prepared dynamisations raised to astonishingly high strength”.

  And as early as in 1886 the Geneva physician GRANIER wrote: “Production of a curative remedy from a substance is not reducing its powers but to develop the latent powers in it, potentising it, that is, to strip it of its material condition”

  As I have already said, the potency choice is a question of practical experience.  Indeed all homœopaths have once begun with low potencies and have only tarried and without much conviction gone from the mother tincture up to C12.  Others went up to C30 which for long remained the limit for HAHNEMANN and which he did not pass over.

  What then is contained in a C30 which by the method of using of individual glass vials in which drops of the remedy in question are put and 99 drops of 90 percent alcohol is added and 10 strokes given repeatedly has acquired?  And what are the high and highest potencies, the so-called Korsakoff potencies?  The latter are prepared up to thousandth potency by the one glass method from the manually prepared C30, with 10 strokes by machine for every potency.  Beyond the thousandth potency the fluxion method is used.

  Everything regarding preparation of a homœopathic medicine can be found in detail in the Organon.  I recommend to you paragraph 123 as also paragraphs 264 to 272.  With remarkable precision and conscientiousness HAHNEMANN has described there how the homœopathic medicines must be prepared.  Please study it thoroughly and attentively again.

  Contrary to the general opinion KENT and his pupils were not in anyway exclusively high potentists but they required all potencies from the mother tincture to the highest potencies.  But their extensive experience and particularly their results made them give superior values to the high potencies because of their innumerable advantages.

  Please bear in mind that the basis of the homœopathic prescription is not the dose but it is the similie principle.  This principle is of such a wonderful value that infact there is no limitation to the diminution of the concentration of the homœopathic remedy if the actual symptoms of the patient harmonizes with the symptoms produced in the provings on the healthy.

  Indeed the low potentists repeat the same objections as the allopaths do against the homœopaths: how is it supposed to work when in the every day diet and drinking water so much substances in weak doses are consumed?

  I answer:  It is not a question of academical dispute but is a matter of practical experience.  What should one say about a case as follows?  A splendid German shepherd-dog has been under the medical treatment of an eminent French veterinary physician for more than two months.  The entire range of the most modern anti-infectious arsenals, Sulfonamide, the most effective antibiotics, for a sepsis with suppurative Metritis and Peritonitis have been used.  On pressing the udder of the poor animal pus squirted out up to a litre in a day and that since weeks.  This rotten pus stank disgustingly like rotten cheese.  The dog was well looked after, cleaned every two hours and lied only in its owner’s room.  The mouth was completely dry, the weak animal could not move at all, refused food and was lying in a miserable state in the bed room.  After 30 days of intensive treatment the veterinarian advised to give it an injection to put the animal to end since he had used the maximal doses of Sulfonomides etc., and felt that all that could be done had been done but failed and it was cruel to allow the animal to suffer further.

  The owner of this dog who was my patient visited me one day for her monthly consultation and was in tears that she had to put an end to the life of the dog by agreeing to the injection.

  I asked her: “but then why don’t you allow it to be treated homœopathically?”  “But doctor, this is not the time for you to be witty.  It is all right for me, since I have faith in it.  But what would you do with your tiny pills to an animal which as the veterinarian says, is suffering from a Septicopyaemia?”

  “Now madam, give the dog the medicine I will give you now and we will see later”.  I gave first Staphylococcinum 10M thrice a day.  After two days Pyrogenium 10M.  Two days later, because of the pus which was stinking like rotten cheese, Hepar 10M.  Lastly after two more days because of the abundance of pus I gave Medorrhinum 10M.  Now, from the very first dose the quantity of pus came down by 80%, the stink began to fade away slowly and after 8 days the dog was cured; it ran about, ate and slept just as when it was healthy.

  In this of course all the potencies were prescribed in the ten thousandth!  One can make fun of ten thousandth potencies and laugh.  But how could a fatally ill condition  like serious Septicaemia be got over and become normal and health restored?  Materialistic homœopaths will  be easily confused in this.  Behind this is nothing other than the grand law of similars discovered by HAHNEMANN.  In paragraph 160 he says:

“As the homœopathic medicine can never be made so small as to not be able to overcome its analogous, non-long-standing, yet-unspoiled natural disease, could even thoroughly eradicate and cure, it can be understood as to why a dose which is not very smallest possible suitable homœopathic medicine aroused always during the first hours after taking it, a perceptible homœopathic aggravation”.

  And in paragraph 249a : “Since according to all experiences, almost no dose of a highly potentised specifically suitable homœopathic medicine can be prepared which would be so small as not to bring about clear improvement in the disease for which it is suitable, so will it be injudicious and harmful to treat, if one were to repeat or increase the dose in the mistaken belief that its small aggravation or non-improvement, was because of its negligible quantity (its far too small dose and it cannot therefore be of use).”

  And in paragraph 279:

  “These pure experiences point that ... the dose of the homœopathically chosen highly potentised curative medicine for commencing treatment of a serious diseases (particularly chronic) can never as a rule be prepared so small as not be stronger than the natural disease, that it cannot, at least overcome a portion, eradicate atleast a part of the sensations of the vital principle and thus cause commencement of the cure”

  Ladies and Gentlemen, read these again and again and meditate on these observations of HAHNEMANN, strikingly corroborated here.

  It is six months since that the dog became cured of a sepsis, a sepsis which materialistic allopathy with its “heroic” medicines could not treat, but on the contrary the condition became worse day by day and the veterinarian had given  up all hopes.

  How could it be argued against the allopath, the veterinarian and the low potentists?

  I doubt much whether the C3 or C6 would have succeeded in a situation as this.  Such a healing reveals four unquestionable facts:

  1.  Homœopathy brings about cures when allopathy despite its modern toxic arsenals is powerless.

  2.  Homœopathy, on the basis of the law of similars discovered by HAHNEMANN is able to make microbes and viruses, harmless.

  3. The homœopathic medicine in infinitesimal doses works qualitatively and not through  its quantity.

  4. Also that in an extremely serious, evidently fatal disease, the cure can be effected totally – “cito, tuto, et jecunde” as HAHNEMANN has impressed in the note to the first paragraph of his Organon. 

  I had a similar case of septicaemia  from perforation of appendix and generalized peritonitis in a 10 year old child who had become parched and was lying in the Geneva Medical College Hospital awaiting his end after surgery.  Neither the child nor the parents nor the Professor knew, who had cured him.  Only a single, really a single dose of Arnica 10M and then Pyrogenium 10M.  I respect 10M.

  To exclude every influence of direct or indirect suggestion, I have purposely chosen the case of an animal, so that the sceptics are convinced.

  I will point out to you, that high potencies are of invaluable worth, that these small doses do not ever lose their therapeutic powers if they are protected from odours and had been prepared with due care.  I own high potencies from HAHNEMANN’s time, JENICHEN’s for example.  I have further such from the previous century as from FINCKE, SWAN, ALLEN, KENT which are still effective and dependable.

  Innumerable physicians like NASH, KENT, CARLETON, Erastus CASE, GLADWIN, SHERWOOD, CUNNINGHAM, FINCKE, MAJUMDAR, Gibson MILLER, Mrs.TYLER, Sir John WEIR and others have published cures by high potencies.

  HAHNEMANN, the founder of the homœopathic principles had begun naturally from the mother tinctures, substantial medicines, materially and chemically analyzable.  Later he began to make the concentrations lesser by attenuations or triturations and observed that despite progressive division these substances remained more effective.

  During his long life, ultimately he was 88 years old - HAHNEMANN was, in the opinion of his epoch, an exception, a revolutionary and in opposition to all practice and traditions.  He went up to C30 wherein he used 30 separate 10 grams glass vials with 100 drops of alcohol in each.  In the first vial he put one drop of the plant tincture or 5 grains of a chemical substance or the 3rd centesimal potency of an insoluble substance with which every passage was further attenuated in ratio of 1 to 100.

  At the last stages of his life differences of opinion arose amongst his pupils.  Some thought that under  no circumstances should one go above the C30.  Others among them his best pupil HERING and GROSS and others experimented with potencies upto 1000, 1500, 2000 and higher, saw with happy astonishment further successes.  To avoid misunderstandings and hostilities from his pupils HAHNEMANN remained in the range of C30 although he had appreciated the efficiency of such high potencies.

  Nevertheless, as researcher and experimentor he had recognized two interesting facts:

  1. Some medicines possess, in specific potencies, an optimum efficiency in each case, whereof in the Materia Medica PuraHAHNEMANN indicated the third, sixth, twelfth and 30th as the most efficacious.

  2. At the same time he observed that in general, the second, fourth and seventh potencies so to say, have a “shallow”, decreased, reduced, curtailed efficacy - in short: a not excessively strong action is displayed, and that positive intervals between the individual potencies must be given.  For this reason his family medicine chest contained  only the following potencies; 1- 3 - 6 - 9 - 12 - 24 and 30. 

  There was a time when FINCKE, ALLEN, SWAN and others were successful by employing highest potencies.

  At a particular time there were high potentists, as they were called, who after the choice of the medicine according to symptom picture gave it in the highest available potency immediately at the beginning of the treatment.  Dr. A. NEBEL who practised here for quite long prescribed, for example, a CM or DM right at the first go, frequently with the best results, since the medicine chosen had been accurately specific.

  KENT, a systematically experimenting mind endeavoured to find by innumerable experiments a rule or at least a scale method.  After many trials over many years he set his scale method  which I call the KENT scale.  As KENT’s pupils have since then corroborated, adherence to the following spacing gave the best results: 30, 200, 1M, 10M, 50M, CM, DM, MM.

  KENT held, on the basis of  his experience, the C30 as an excellent preparation to begin the treatment of a case  since it brought no, or hardly any, initial aggravation and with the 200th potency he considered them as low potencies with which, as already stated, treatment can be best commenced. He kept them particularly for the acute cases or chronic cases with objective and progressive organ changes.  Otherwise he recommended in chronic cases the 1000th potency from which with appropriate time intervals which he could define after many years of experience, to go up to higher potencies.

  After many years KENT could define the average duration of action of his high potencies.  We have to respect these before repeating the dose.  These are:

  For  200:  3 to 4 weeks

    M:  at least 4 weeks   

    10M  5 weeks

    50M   50 days

  CM  3 months 

    DM  6 months 

    MM  1 year

  Naturally these figures are to be considered as approximation, but all pupils of KENT have found these to be of superior practical value.  Not in every case will it be suitable to repeat doses before expiry of this interval but only in combination with the other golden  rule, that no repetition before progressive amelioration ends.

  The question of repetition of the dose, pharmacopollaxy as I would call it, was again modified by HAHNEMANN at the end of his life, in that he recommended continuous repetition of the dose daily despite favourable reaction.  This method also I and many others have practised for a long time in the hope that it will render better and particularly speedier cures in chronic diseases.  But soon because of the difficulties encountered by the patients regarding the taking too much or insufficiently, they attenuate it poorly and at will, repeat in irregular intervals, etc. - this method which is remarkable, is possible only in exceptional special cases which as I can vouch for, in actual practice is rarely seen.  This reservation is so much more valid as through the KENT method also thoroughly  remarkable successes can be obtained.  Had HAHNEMANN known KENT who represented HAHNEMANN’s continuance, he would have, without doubt, agreed with KENT’s view, because it confirms absolutely to the essential principle of his teaching, “watch and wait”, the careful observer’s.

  Today the knowledge that low potencies work better in acute, high in chronic cases, is more or less accepted by most of the homœopaths.  It all depends upon what one understands by low and high potencies.

  The advantages of low potencies, including the C30 and 200 according to KENT is that it can be repeated without risk of severe aggravation.  Why?  Because a whooping cough, a diarrhoea with a frequent evacuation, tooth-aches, acute pains in general, the acute states so to say exhaust, consume, weaken the remedy so that in all cases where there is no reaction or where recurrence occurs such repetition is justified; for example in repeated vomiting repetition of  the remedy once every two hours.  It should be given after every vomiting.  It can then be seen that the attacks become rarer until it passes off completely.

  In chronic cases, the intervals suggested by KENT, which has been verified, is to be followed.

  The relapse of earlier symptoms, amelioration coming to a stand-still, status quo or the disease progressing further, are all indications for repetition of the dose.

  Indeed it can be said that a master homœopath is capable of results which the beginner is not able to.  For example in some acute cases in which symptoms are painfully aggravated, like Sciatica, Otitis, Gastroenteritis, Acute Joint Rheumatism, a 10M produces a result which impresses by its rapid cure.  It is like what WILLIAM TELL who with a single arrow directly pierced the apple on the head of his son.

  I recommend to you, to first try C 30 and later go to the C 200.  Now and again you can venture with a 10M if the indications for the medicine are clear and precise.

  In coryza and minor colds Aconitum napellus 200 has at least 90%  success.  In certain chronic constipations immediate and sustained success from a single dose of Nux vomica 10M or Bryonia 10M is perceived.

  I have cured the owner of a big restaurant who had been suffering for 14 years with a chronic constipation and who had been thoroughly stuffed with innumerable laxatives.  There was nothing more which he had not tried.  He had, however, further symptoms of Nux vomica, in his character, in his desires and aversions.  A single dose of Nux vomica 10M has definitely cured him.  Since then he has daily stool, “soft and gentile” as MOLIERE says, and he can have stools regularly with satisfaction.

  A lady complained of headaches which localized in the occipital protuberance accompanied by constipation and eye pains which compelled her every 3 - 4 months to lie in a dark room since she could not bear the least light, and could not at all bear the sun.  Every jolt, even walking aggravated.  She also couldn’t bend forward  without the pain radiating to the neck.  A single doe ofBryonia alba 10M at the close of an episode has put an end once for all her migraines which had been troubling her since 5 years for which she had taken a good quantity of  various medicaments.

  These cases are not rare which you do not experience almost every day.  When it happens: what happiness to the patients in the first place and also to the physician when he sees such conspicuous  undeniable efficacy of the small doses which prove the value of the similie rule, the true basis of Homœopathy.

  Those who merely disparage and shake their heads have no idea about it and cannot gain the experience and observation.  Of course, naturally the indications for the remedy  prescribed  must be exactly specific and symptomatology as defined by HAHNEMANN, KENT and their pupils, and not based otherwise on some one or the other.  Because if the foundation is not based upon these propositions only failures will occur.  If therefore Homœopathy and high potencies are condemned it is not these but the prescriber himself who is at fault.  Why is it that while others obtain successes it should be otherwise with him?

  Study the Materia Medica thoroughly and diligently, study the Organon again and again and the philosophy of KENT.  One of these days you will be compensated richly for that.  Because Homœopathy makes great demand of course but it compensates with high rewards. It is certain: Homœopathy, practiced by earnest, persevering physicians with pleasure in their work, procures full satisfaction in material, intellectual and spiritual respects.

  (Translated by Dr.K.S.Srinivasan, Madras, for Private circulation only).