disease versus patients or was that patients versus diseases!

[elham mohajir]

Dear all,

I had a quick glance at all the letters, and I don't see why there should be any confusion.
Potentially everyone of us is a patient, but few of us have manifest diseases.
Ten paople (patients) are exposed to freezing cold temperatures, one of them dies, two come down with pneumoni, two catch cold, two get a diarrhoea and two are apparently healthy.
Why? Because they had a predisposition or as some would like to express it a weakness in their VF that predisposed them to react the way they did.
They present with disease but before the disease took place they were already patients that is why they presented with the disease.
Prescribing a medicine: Our medicines can not directly attack the disease. They can only attack the patient. By attacking the patient the vital force realizes the chink in its armour and immediately repairs it, in the process getting rid of the disease.
That is why we say treat the patient not the disease. If you try treating the disease then all cases of cold, or diabetes, migraine etc. should need one medicine, but that is not the case in homoeopathy. Because we treat the patient then each patient with the same disease needs a medicine best suited to him.
Thus for example when we treat a disease we try to put the common symptoms of the disease aside and prescribe for the symtoms of the patient.
If in a case of diabetes you try to precribe by repertorizing, unquenchable thirst, dry mouth with thirst, thirst at night, frequent ueination, cramps and so forth you are on your way to make a wrong prescription. But if you ignore these symptoms and prescribe for the patient (maybe simply a strange dream)that is where you will find success.
That is why Hahnemann gave so much stress on the uncommon and peculiar symptoms as these are the symptoms of the patient not the disease.

In conclusion there are patients who are attacked by diseases and we try to cure the patient so that he is not attacked by diseases.

I hope I have not added to the confusion.

best regards
elham
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[Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD]

You wrote:
" In conclusion there are patients who are attacked by diseases and we
try to cure the patient so that he is not attacked by diseases."

This is PREVENTION, in which case we treat the patient and the patient
only.

In your example of exposure to cold, we treat a PATIENT WITH HIS
DISEASE; therefore, as you rightly point out, we cannot separate the
patient and the disease.
A disease exists ONLY when there is interaction between a patient and
"pathological entity" whatever it could be.

My understanding of H telling us in the Organon to treat the disease is
exactly that. And as you very rightly again point, we must focus on the
remarkable, peculiar symptoms that a patient suffering from a disease
presents in order to have an individual treatment. No discussion about
that.

Where it becomes more complicated is when the patient has had
interaction with more than one "pathological entity", has reacted to
each one and now presents a complex picture of many symptoms
interlocking, but belonging to different reactional modes.

Ideally we should pick up only the SRP symptoms of the whole picture,
match it with a remedy that would be the all encompassing Simillimum and
presto, health is restored.
It works.........only in minority of cases....... at least in my
practice.
Maybe I am not good enough; that is one explanation.
But I still have to treat them while trying to get better............

And one way to do that is to address separately and in reverse order of
appearance the different diseases (not conditions, but real diseases as
defined earlier) with the appropriate remedy at each step of the
treatment, that would cover at the same time the actual situation we
treat and be compatible with the patient's constitution, and that is not
necessarily the patient's constitutional remedy.
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, MD, PhD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind".