PS combos

[Manjitpal Kahlon]

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE, if I can suggest, COMBOS too can be put forwarded for PROVINGS.. may be the results, as i find in some provings.. become really homeopathic... We have drug actions of each one of our individual remedies.. single remedies... in Combos.. if it is treated a new drug .. and proved.. sure some outcome may be verified.. and it sure should be useful in normal practice.. and still homeopathic. We normally meet patients, especially in ill treated Chronic cases, where it the Person + Diseased conditions due to Combos of other systems of Medicine, and to cut short the immediate medication Combos do a good job.. before we actually see the things little better.
Seeing all these view coming on Combos, at least i am tempted to go ahead for it.. Suggestions and guidance, if anyone has already initiated such provings for certain Combos, are welcomed.. Thanks.

[John Harvey]

Hello, Manjitpal --

The problem with this approach is the one I pointed out earlier
("Combos"): that the effects of a product resulting from the
combination of potentised medicines are impossible to gauge the
consistency and predictability of, because you're looking not only at
drug synergies, which by definition are unpredictable, but also the
synergistic effects of potencies: on the patient, and, significantly,
on each other in the diluent vehicle. Unless and until we have the
science to understand, predict, and control those many interactions
(seven in two potencies; 49 in three potencies), there is no science
in conducting a "proving" of a combination of potencies. In that
sense, there's no "proving". The point of a proving is
predictability, and such predictability would be at best presumptive;
it certainly would have no basis in an understanding of controlled
repetition.

Kind regards,

John
--
------------------------------------------------------------------

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse."

-- Herman Daly

[muthu kumar]

All combos when proved and used based on the symptoms become single
remedies- what substance can be more combo than a snake venom?

--- In minutus@yahoogroups.com, "Manjitpal Kahlon" wrote:
forwarded for
really
remedies..
proved..
normal
especially in
due to
little
ahead
work, but
they curing
is in
people to
prescribed
against
next ones

[Soroush Ebrahimi]

I think you are making a BIG mistake.

Of course as you state - Any crude substance - such a snake venom, or even
the base for Causticum - can be potentised and proved and then used on the
basis of Homoeopathic principles.

However, to mix a number of potentised substances and then try to prove them
is just asking for trouble and personally, I would NEVER volunteer for such
a proving.

Rgds
Soroush

[Manjitpal Kahlon]

Hello John,
I don't disagree with you, but to my understanding.. the drugs combined in certain properties, have a different action, let me say on a healthy person, chemically a bit changed.. Now their action .. in a calculated formulation.. if scientifically proved with norms of Homeopathic provings.. should give some definite outcome. You might have noticed this has been some or the other way seen earlier by giving a new name to the remedy .. more than one drug action has been now and then ascertained in the past.. and it should sure be done, with little more drugs coming together .. making new remedies instead of uncertain combos.. Well no arguments.. but it should work .. I seem to find it difficult to convince myself that there will be no results.
I just wish to emphasize that it is not necessary to stick to what has already been done.. we have to move forward.. there are no limits to this science of cure and treatment lines...
Regards.

[John Harvey]

Dear Manjitpal,
First, let's set aside the distraction of the mythical "lucky hit"
that a combination prescriber supposedly seeks through one of the
remedies that went to make up a combination of potencies. A
prescription made on the basis that one of the remedies has to be "it"
can just as easily be turned into a number of experiments one after
the other -- and much more knowledge will become available to both
prescriber and patient (whether they're the same person or not) as a
result.

No, the avidity with which non-homoeopathic prescribers seek to
justify potency combinations has nothing to do with lucky hits. What
it has everything to do with is that every element in the combination
is selected to homoeopathically "cure" a symptom of choice: diarrhoea,
say, or piles.

Just wanted to get that out of the way, because it's relevant to what
comes later.
Drug lore and holistic derangement
=================================

First, to quote from just a little of the e-mail I mentioned
("Combos", 6:52 p.m., 17 May):

"Such surprises, such synergies, are extremely common and, by their
nature, completely unpredictable in the interaction of even two crude
drugs in the organism. They are equally unpredictable, for many of
the same reasons and more besides, in the interactions between
homoeopathic potencies in the organism, and unpredictable for still
other reasons in interactions between such potencies in solution (and
very likely in mixed powders compressed into pillules) before they
even reach the organism."

If the meaning of that isn't transparent, let's try looking at it from
another angle entirely:

We've had a long, long history and prehistory of observing (even
poorly) the effects of a substance on a person. Often enough, this
has been in the midst of a fatal poisoning. There is, for instance, a
cultural record of what has happened to those who have swallowed too
many Belladonna berries. Yes, the degree and extent of this will vary
somewhat from person to person; and yes, it will vary even moreso as
the dose is diminished and/or the potency is raised; yet we observe
the same fundamental pattern. At the 3rd potency or the 6th or the
12th, Belladonna fundamentally acts like Belladonna; at no point does
it begin acting like Phosphorus or Pulsatilla instead.

This little axiom, which may be called the axiom of drug identity, may
seem too obvious to bother stating, but that's because it's always
true, in relation to a single drug. It's the truth of this axiom that
underlies the field of knowledge we call materia medica.

Lore on combinations doesn't, and can't, arise from this field of
knowledge, materia medica, because synergy removes the individual
drugs from application of the axiom. And the ability to create a new
field of knowledge of compounds rests on the ability to find an
equivalent axiom of predictability. What we find instead are two
sources of ignorance:

(1) the unpredictability of drug synergy itself, and

(2) the meaninglessness of combining the dynamic action of two potentised drugs.
(1) Unpredictability of drug synergy.

Unlike the effect of individual drugs, no solid body of lore has
accumulated regarding the effects even of two drugs administered to a
patient at the one time. What knowledge we do have -- fairly well
documented in SIMS and Martindale's -- has not yet resulted in a
materia medica of combinations, but has sounded a lot of warning notes
and has come at the cost of many deaths. (Of course, two different
highly potentised drugs administered simultaneously to somebody would
seem unlikely to have such drastic effects -- the point is that the
effects have killed so often because they are not predictable.)
(2) Meaninglessness of combined dynamic action.

What occurs when we give anybody, healthy or sick, a high potency?
What is its immediate action? Observations in Hahnemann's lifetime
alone were sufficient to indicate that the action was -- as with a
crude drug but moreso -- to derange the health in a manner that fits a
certain pattern -- the pattern that emerges in toxicology and drug
provings.

The beauty of the homoeopathic high potency (the high potency
mimicking the patient's totality of symptoms) is double-barrelled: its
similarity renders the patient susceptible to it even in high potency;
and its similarity also allows it to do exactly what one natural
disease will do to a very similar one: replace it entirely. The
immediate result, then, is that the patient's health is deranged in
exactly the pattern that the homoeopathic remedy causes. The dynamic
action of the drug at a single location of the organism creates
throughout the organism the pattern of the entire drug, an entire and
holistic derangement of that subject's health.

Now, what occurs in the application of two patterns to the health of a
patient with an extant (different) pattern? What occurs when two
entire (holistic) derangements are applied to the one pattern of
health derangement simultaneously?

We all know the guesses. But there can be no knowledge -- not until
somebody discovers a basis for that knowledge, a law that can be used
as a universal axiom, if you like, of how patterns of dynamic
influence interact.

Since this is a field that nobody has even begun to study, it would be
a little presumptuous of anybody to state what a combination of
potencies will do to a healthy subject, let alone to a sick one. It
would be a guess, and an irresponsible one.
The administration of a combination of potentised drugs is an action
that physically resembles the administration of a medicine in the
sense that a white tablet is placed on the tongue (choose your vehicle
and mode of entry). But there the resemblance ends. For the reasons
just given, it should be clear that a combination of potencies is not
a medicine in the sense in which that word has been used for time
immemorial; it's not a drug; it's not a potency; it's something
entirely different. We don't know what it is, and we can't picture
what it does. Its entire mode of action(s) is outside the mode of
action of medicines as we know them. For that reason, even conducting
provings of combinations of potencies will tell us only a very little,
as the lore underlying such provings is not applicable to such
combinations.
That essentially is why combination homoeopathic remedies are an
oxymoron, but for your entertainment you might like to try seeing the
same picture through an entirely new paradigm: the field of magic
wishes ("homoeomagic remedies"), which, as we know, skilled and
learned genies grant for the relief of their suffering impatients.
Homoeomagic, oxymorons, and chaotic ignorance
=============================================

Let's assume that two suffering impatients, #1 and #2, in urgent need
of help, consult a skilled and learned genie. Our genie doesn't know
that much about either impatient, but does know that each has an
urgent problem -- much the same urgent problem, as it happens: each
feels that somebody, a nasty pastie, hates him.

Our genie stocks, as it happens, three homoeomagic remedies, magic
wishes, called "Wish one", "Wish two", and "Wish three", and has an
enviable knowledge of the effects of each. The three homoeomagic
wishes are:

• Wish one: I wish that everybody who hates me would go overseas and stay there.

• Wish two: I wish that everybody overseas who loves me would come to
this country and nobody ever leave.

• Wish three: I wish that everybody overseas who hates me would love me instead.

Fantastically, as our genie knows, each wish is applicable to the
particular problem that both our impatients wish to have taken away.
What's more, each wish is sufficiently potent that it will "work" to
remove that problem each time it's applied to it, regardless of who
the impatient is.

(I appreciate that this is NOT the case in homoeopathy; but I'm
allowing for ideal circumstances in order to save arguments.)

Now, impatient #1 doesn't know why Nasty Pastie hates him (the cause)
or even, for certain, from which direction the ill feeling comes (the
aetiology), and our genie may suspect that the perception of being
hated is merely illusion; but let's assume that the problem is real.
In this case, the wishes have something real to work on. The genie
grants the magic wishes, 1, 2, 3, and -- hey presto! -- the nasty
pastie who hates him disappears to Antarctica. Hey presto! -- the
Australian borders are closed, and there's no further overseas travel.
Finally -- hey presto! -- the nasty pastie doesn't even mind being
frozen in Antarctica!

Problem solved.

Of course impatient #1 has other problems -- maybe he's acquired a
reputation for the quick fix -- but there are always other genies
willing to dole out a different set of three wishes, aren't there? So
he's happy for today.
But... what happens to impatient #2?

The same three wishes are granted, only this time they're granted in a
different order: 3, 2, 1.

Hey presto! -- the borders are closed.

Hey presto! -- Nasty Pastie goes overseas... oh, wait a moment, the
borders are closed...

So you can see that there's already something of a problem in making
the final effect of the three wishes consistent from impatient to
impatient unless you control their order. That problem is nothing
compared with the problem of predicting the final effect of applying
the three wishes at once. The question of which wish will take
precedence is the minor question; the major one is: which will alter
the effects of the others? And it's a question we cannot answer.

It's like the question "What happens when an irresistible force meets
an immovable object?" -- it has no answer because the question is
meaningless because it's logically impossible. The application of the
three wishes simultaneously cannot truly have a combined simultaneous
outcome, because it too is meaningless, again because such an outcome
is logically impossible. To imagine that the end result is
predictable is to simply construct a fantasy universe in which the
fundamental constraints on logical consistency -- the borders can be
open or they can be closed, but they can't be both at once! -- are
wiped away, doubtless by our "intention".

It is for this reason and many others that a combination homoeopathic
remedy is not merely an unknown but a logical contradiction, an
oxymoron.
The application of the mixture of a number of potentised substances is
something like mixing three (or more) wishes and applying them
simultaneously. Its end effect is not the result of a sequence of
steps but is merely chaotic ignorance resulting from the
unpredictable, possibly repeated, application of those steps and from
the sometime impossibility of those applications together.
Kind regards,

John
--
------------------------------------------------------------------

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse."

-- Herman Daly

[Manjitpal Kahlon]

Hi John,
Thanks,
I too think so. Let us not get into all these controversies. I think I have failed to send the message as it should have been. May be I am not so used to writing and explaining.
Regards.

[John Harvey]

Dear Manjitpal,

I think that most of what you've said is very valuable; we should be
taking the science forward. The basis of science is something that
easily eludes us artists, though: scientific certainty. It's a kind
of intellectual honesty that good scientists excel at, challenging
themselves and each other when they realise that they've drawn
conclusion that can be doubted.

The homoeopathic community has a long way to go before it grows into
the confidence that its average practitioners will need in order to
challenge themselves and each other over their findings and premature
conclusions. At the moment, we behave, by and large, as though our
egos are somehow attached to our findings and interpretations, leading
to discussion that appears to be on the topic but is really about
ourselves.

We'll know that we've come of age scientifically as a community when,
in revealing discussion, we expect to hear a homoeopath say, as you
have and a good few others have, including me, that we've been pleased
to be wrong, because we learned something new.

Kindest regards,

John
--
------------------------------------------------------------------

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse."

-- Herman Daly