Arsenic

[Sandeep Saluja]

May I please ask which arsenic preparation is used for arthritis therapy?

[John Harvey]

Hello, Dr Saluja --

If you're referring to their use in homoeopathic therapy, then your question as to which arsenical preparations are used in treating arthritis presupposes that homoeopathy reserves certain preparations for treating that condition. The presupposition is a mistake easy to make.

In fact, a condition such as arthritis may be irrelevant to the homoeopathic selection of the remedy for the patient's state of ill-health; unless it takes a highly unusual form, the condition's presence in the patient is not likely to assist in the remedy's selection. The remedy homoeopathic to the patient's state takes account of many aspects of that state, most particularly those aspects that are most peculiar to the patient. Arthritis in general being fairly common outcomes, only peculiar aspects of a particular patient's arthritic condition will be of significant help in choosing the remedy homoeopathic to the patient's entire state.

If this isn't making a lot of sense to you, it may be useful to revisit the fundamentals of what exactly homoeopathy is: the medical use of the substance selected as being capable of most closely reproducing the patient's "totality" of symptoms -- intellectual, emotional, and physical -- in healthy volunteers. Such symptoms include, most usefully, those that are least characteristic of the illness under consideration and consequently most peculiar to the patient. In that regard, "arthritis" as a marker of the patient's state is as about as useful as "tired".

There are a number of books that explain this better than I have here and that go into useful clinical detail. Amongst those I've particularly enjoyed are Herbert A. Robert's The Principles and Art of Cure and George Vithoulkas's The Science of Homeopathy, part one, but others here will gladly recommend further possibilities. For somebody with a good attention span and a medical background, there may be no better start than the textbook on the subject by its inventor, C. Samuel Hahnemann: The Organon of Medicine (6th edition).

Kind regards,

John Harvey

[John R. Benneth]

I think this post by John Harvey contains one of the best definitions of homoeopathy that I've seen: "the medical use of the substance selected as being capable of most closely reproducing the patient's "totality" of symptoms -- intellectual, emotional, and physical -- in healthy volunteers."
Yes! Note here that John doesn't qualify the remedy as being dilute, which the uninformed take as being necessary to produce the homoeodynamic response and which the skeptic thinks solely constitutes homeopathy's pharmacy, but rather John astutely calls it a "substance." It doesn't have to be dilute to work homoeopathically; but, as we know it now, matter in the ionized state serves best for most aps.
. . I also like John Harvey's equivocating the label of "arthritis" as being about as useful as that of "tired." Good one! As with investigating any crime, look for evidence that is strange and unusual . .
In a message dated 3/15/2014 2:37:34 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, John.P.Harvey@gmail.com writes:
John Benneth, Homoeopath
PG Hom - London (Hons.)
http://johnbenneth.com
SKYPE: John Benneth (Portland, Oregon)
503- 819 - 7777 (USA)

[John Harvey]

Thank you, John B! My apologies for taking so long to get back to our earlier conversation…

John (H.)

[Paul Booyse]

I would prefer to add - most closely reproducing the patient's "totality" of characteristic symptoms -
The non-charcteristic symptoms can sometimes overshadow the characteristic (primary) symptoms, which are the most useful in determiniung the simillimum.
regards,
Paul
From: jrbenneth@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 10:00 PM
To: minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Minutus] Arsenic

I think this post by John Harvey contains one of the best definitions of homoeopathy that I've seen: "the medical use of the substance selected as being capable of most closely reproducing the patient's "totality" of symptoms -- intellectual, emotional, and physical -- in healthy volunteers."
Yes! Note here that John doesn't qualify the remedy as being dilute, which the uninformed take as being necessary to produce the homoeodynamic response and which the skeptic thinks solely constitutes homeopathy's pharmacy, but rather John astutely calls it a "substance." It doesn't have to be dilute to work homoeopathically; but, as we know it now, matter in the ionized state serves best for most aps.
. . I also like John Harvey's equivocating the label of "arthritis" as being about as useful as that of "tired." Good one! As with investigating any crime, look for evidence that is strange and unusual . .
In a message dated 3/15/2014 2:37:34 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, John.P.Harvey@gmail.com writes:
John Benneth, Homoeopath
PG Hom - London (Hons.)
http://johnbenneth.com
SKYPE: John Benneth (Portland, Oregon)
503- 819 - 7777 (USA)

[John Harvey]

Yes, it may be more useful to think of it in that way, especially in the context of Dr Saluja's particular enquiry. Thank you, Paul.

For the purpose of explaining homoeopathy to somebody completely unfamiliar with it, it may be just as useful to leave aside that particular refinement. The revelation that a substance is in general capable of inducing more than a couple of symptoms -- symptoms that magically happen to oppose and overwhelm the symptoms the drugs are targeting -- as well as a couple more possible side-effects is enough for many people to deal with. And on top of that, we ask them to deal with the concept that these symptoms may, if we've looked around well enough, resemble the entire illness of our patient; that we find such resemblance desirable; and that we seek to exploit it by giving the patient what looks like more of the same… Actually, I find that once I've put the case in the simplest terms so that my listener understands the concept that we're matching as closely as possible an entire pattern of dynamic derangement, as seen in symptoms, with a medicinal pattern of such symptoms as similar as possible, and seeking to have the organism respond to the substitute illness -- once that light has gone on, which I invariably find it does instantly, then it's possible to speak of one or two refinements -- such as quantity, potency, and peculiarity -- without confusion. The basic concept, though, of an entire match between natural and medicinal symptoms is far easier to get in the instance than something as abstruse as a match of the most characteristic of them.

That said, your refinement seems perfectly appropriate to include in explanation of it to somebody who has already encountered something of the idea: the idea not of treating the whole person, mind you, or of treating with small doses, but of treating by the greatest possible degree of similarity.

Cheers!

John