Aphorism 260 footnote: reading in bed is bad for you

[Vera Resnick]

I just put this up on my blog - bit of a spoof on the footnote but can help fix it in memory.
I was trying to find a way to make this footnote significant for me – some will be aware that I have great difficulties with some of Hahnemann’s objections – reading lying down, staying up late, and eating celery, asparagus and onions to name a few.
So when this idea came knocking at my door, late at night after parsley and oregano soup followed by spiced chocolate and punch, I couldn’t resist the over-exertion of mind, although some would call it unnatural debauchery to spend so much time with the Organon in the wee hours of the morning. So if you’re tempted to excessive passive exercise (yes, slumping in front of a computer screen counts), have a tendency to read x-rated literature, and tend to be inappropriately drawn to play (pac-man, video games or chess, it’s all the same to me), put your grief aside, allow your anger and vexation to emerge as you pick your way through the marshlands of this Hahnemannian (i.e. long) paragraph and identify all the errors of diet and regimen that I’ve included here. I have excluded several for the sake of brevity and because thinking something up for all of this was too much of a strain on my usually over-active imagination.
As you get up in the morning and reach for the coffee from your coffee machine (tea? everyone knows that’s unhealthy!), you start feeling the after-effects of the previous night’s long swim after dinner – or was it that steak tartare that seemed to be, how to put it gently, long, long, long, past its prime – you wonder if you really should have eaten that meal yesterday. Was it the meat? Was it that herbed vegetable beer that no-one dares admit tastes of… well…herbed vegetables? Was it the chocolate mousse and wine for desert? Or just that you went to bed sucking on a bottle of whiskey?
Probably the whiskey, you muse, as you pull on the woolen underwear your mother insists that you wear in winter. She tried to put water in your wine last night at dinner – but you weren’t having any of it, no watered down wine for you. Even if your mother was paying for the meal. Even if you are forty-five and living at home because you can’t afford to rent your own place. Well, no time for a shower – the after-shave will just have to do. Again.
Someone at work mentioned recently that you have some strange habits. “How odd,” you think, “I wonder why they should think that,” as you stick a jaunty asparagus stalk into the brim of your hat, and set off for your first major exercise of the day – driving to the office. Well, you have a stick shift – that means you get to use both feet! A real workout.
OK – time to check the footnote – how many did you find? I’m not sure wearing asparagus counts, by the way…
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Vera Resnick
Classical Homeopath
054-4640736
e-mail: vera.homeopath@gmail.com
www.jerusalemhomeopath.com
www.materiamedicastudymethods.wordpress.com

[John Harvey]

Vera, you may have started something here! Love it.

John
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"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."

-- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major.

[Homoeopathic Doctor]

Hi Lois,

Thanks for the input. These are some of the things we were also taught about like chocolates etc. But the basic question remains...if such things are to interrupt a constitutional remedy, what if the patient uses some other food article about which the homoeopath does not know that it has any medicinal properties. In that case, if the correct simillimu has ceased to act from the very start, how could it be judged and rectified???
Zaidee.

--- In minutus@yahoogroups.com, Lois Hoffer wrote:

[Lois Hoffer]

Homoeopathic Doctor wrote:

Hi Zaidee...

I suppose, if nothing at all happened from a remedy you were really SURE
of, you can always repeat it...but if the patient is constantly
antidoting it, then even that won't help. I guess this is why knowing
all of the lifestyle, diet and habits in chronic cases is so important
to H.

extinguishing the remedy was Aph 259...so, he DID worry about it, but
the list of things we're talking about, the ones to keep your patients
from doing is a footnote to **Aph 260**, which instead mentions that
these are obstacles to cure, in that they can aggravate the chronic
disease, which I assume means that you will be seeing more Sx than are
actually native to the disease, because the lifestyle or diet is adding
more. Interesting, in the NEXT few aphs, he says that in acutes, the
patient probably knows instinctively what the best thing to eat and
drink is for palliative relief, and the family should just not oppose or
force it. So, there's a definite sense that H thought chronic cases
were different from acutes, more subtle, easier to confuse the case with
diet/lifestyle problems/excesses (because of there being so few Sx left
to go on from the original disease?), more sensitive to being aggravated
by outside influences.

Lois