ABSTRACT: The use of the Unique Remedy permits to vary the power of the dynamization and thus administer different potency and decide according to variations on Hering's law.

(Papers of the Transnational Conference: "THE HOMOEOPATIC REMEDY-NON-MEDICINE. A PROPOSAL FOR RECOGNITION" - Rome 12th and 13th december 1988).

Authorities, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Colleagues.

My experience as a country doctor has taken me to brief considerations which I here wish to communicate to you as simply as possible.

If there are orders and laws to govern the universe, the recovery of an individual must also be governed by a law.

This simple observation was carried through and analyzed by a well-known homoeopath: Dr. Costantine Hering who established, in a simple manner, easily understandable by everyone and not only by doctors, the way the recovery of a diseased individual must come about.

FIRST SLIDE

The first slide regards the enunciation of the law.

Hering's law states that: recovery proceeds from top to bottom, in the physical sense of the term, from the inside to the outside, from the most important organs to the least important and in the opposite order to that in which the symptoms appeared.

To prove this, I want to tell you of a case I experienced at the beginning of my life as a young doctor. A difficult case which, like all difficult things of life, greatly changed my life as a doctor and perhaps also as a man.

I wish to tell you of a case of "LES systemic erythema or lupus". This case was treated successfully though I have had other cases which, unfortunately, did not end in the same way though clearly and positively affected by Homoeopathy.

I was asked by a friend to help treat a thirty-two year old woman who had been suffering from "LES" for many years. At the age of 17 she started suffering from rheumatism of the joints and after a year's therapy it was decided that she should go to the nearest hospital. Once in hospital, realizing the seriousness of the disease, it was decided to take the young woman to a more specialized clinic of the University of Naples and subsequently, the patient herself asked to be moved to the University of Rome.

Here the disease was ascertained under all points of view also through a bioptic examination.

From the age of 17 to 32, many therapies were followed but it must be mentioned that the patient had chosen to be buried alive, I dare say, because she would stay home all day and go out only to see doctors.

How did this effect her personality? Her social relations? A complete closure towards the world, a childish autism which reached its peak when the patient refused to talk to our honourable Professor Negro, causing me great embarassment. Actually, she had interiorized, not only the physical pathology, but also all the problems connected with the use of certain substances and the disease itself.

I believe that the way I started treating this case is very important. I employed a complex homoeopathic product and the patient started to improve. As the patient already showed signs of chronic kidney insufficiency, light though this may have been, as well as a high degree of high blood pressure and pains in the joints. I decided to treat her with a "complex". The patient improved, as we could see by her blood tests, and various parametres that I had held in great consideration, which were taken at the University where she lied that she was having a conventional therapy.

When the patient came to our Centre of Homoeopathic Medicine to be studied, her condition had already improved. The same could not be said for her character. She refused to be questioned by my colleagues despite the improvement which the analyses confirmed.

When I submitted the case to Professor Negro, he smiled in a fatherly way and explained that the law of Homoeopathy remained valid also as regards "LES"; the law of similes and that I was not to fear a severe disease because a severe disease expresses itself in a unique organism which cannot be repeated, unique as it is genetically, physically and socially.

This was very fortunate for me because it was at this point that the Unitarian Homoeopathic Remedy started.

As regards the law of recovery, my patient did something that could be considered revolutionary: while with the "complex" treatment the blood values changed, her global condition was always pretty much the same. After administering the Unique Homoeopathic Remedy ARSENICUM ALBUM some of the symptoms which had previously been suppressed and had been absent for years began to show once more.

Of course, this greatly frightened my patient for she thought that the disease was getting worse, but it did not frighten our School, and the doctors. The pains which before were especially present in the rhachis started moving towards the peripheric joints and the classical rash of the "systemic erythema of lupus" returned. Later, othe minor symptoms came on which had been there at the beginning of the disease as well as a temperatura which I accurately registered and noted down.

Was our patient getting worse or was she improving? According to Hering's law she was improving. Let us see why. First of all because the symptoms were moving from top to bottom and that is the pain was moving to the peripheric joints. Secondly, because the disease moved from the kidney, one of the most noble organs of the hierarchy, to the skin, the least important, if I may say so, of the hierarchy of the apparatuses and systems of the human body.

What does this mean? It means that the doctor has the prognostic and therapeutic possibility of establishing if the drug is the right one, if prognosis is good or bad. I am speaking of a severe pathology, commonly labelled non curable.

Moreover, a third condition had developed in this patient and that is old symptoms reappeared in an order which was exactly opposite the one they had appeared. Symptoms do not always appear in this manner, but if we want to formulate an adeguate prognosis it is enough that one sole condition appear to give a positive or negative judgement on it.

SECOND SLIDE

In the second slide I have tried to put the different organs in order of priority and at the centre I have put the brain, then I have put the heart, the hypophysis, the liver, the lungs, the kidneys, the testicles and the ovaries, the bones, the muscles and the skin.

As you can see, in our case we passed from a pathology which concerned the kidneys to a pathology which involved the skin and the brain. That is, from a more important organ to a less important organ, from the inside to the outside.

Without any doubt the answer is: the Unique Remedy, which gave me the possibility of evaluating the evolution of the symptomatology and asking my patient to bear up with some temporary disorder because she was getting better, she was going towards an improvement.

It is thus a problem of methodology. I can state that the administration of more substances may result in an improvement, but then the method does not exist any more. This is the reason why I chose the Unique Remedy which is necessary because it respected a scientific methodology.

After two years of therapy the case evolved positively and we treated this patient till 1986. Since then she has been well and we have not administered her any more drugs. As the Honourable Doctor Kent rightly says: "There is no need to stir up a body which does not need to be stirred up".

What happened after this positive symptomatic evolution? The patient returned to normal blood pressure values, her kidney disorders improved and then reached normal values. Proteinuria decreased, hematuria disappeared and, what is more, her attitude towards life changed completely. The woman who did not want to go out, who wanted to stay at home alone, waiting for death and who had reliquished all her parents wanted to give her in favour of her two brothers, finding herself recovered in a manner that no longer belonged to her, which she did not feel her own, managed to escape from this situation thanks to the Homoeopathic Remedy and the help of friends. She phoned me no more than 30 days ago and she said that she wished to get married and she asked me what would happen if she had a baby. I was very pleased to know that not only had she overcome the physical disease but also that childish autism, closed to life and the world.

The above are not strictly technical elements but important because it summarizes in a simple manner what Hering's law represents for the Homoeopathic oriented mind and, I would say, for any mind guided by common sense.

While the official medicine goes towards the specific, towars an aimed research of the antibiotic, towards the pharmacologic monitoring and towards the subtle choice of the quantity of drug to be administered, now we are arguing over a concept which has been overcome by science in all respects. We are trying to establish whether it is better to administer something highly specific or more things put together of which we do not know the sinergic effect. In this case, moreover, another bearing post of Homoeopathy would lose its force and that is the Pure Experimentation and that means that there is no experimentation of complex drugs.

Must then these drugs be eliminated from the market? Not according to me. They may be labelled in another manner. Homotoxicology, for example. It does give results, but these are limited. Why is this? If I had continued to give my patient my complex, she would have become accustomed to it, the result would thus have become steady and little by little the case would have slipped through my fingers.

The use of the Unique Remedy permitted me to vary the power of the dynamization and thus administer different potency and decide according to variations on Hering's law. A skin rash disappeared and another deeper symptom came up. For the Homoeopathic doctor it was a medical language which indicated the administration of a higher potency. This is impossible with a drug which contains potencies already registered by the Ministry of Health and by the producers. I believe we have no doubts in defending the strict method in favour of consumers. It is the State that must safeguard consumers and not lend itself to the pressures coming from specific interests, but must heed the pressures of authentic science as already said by Professor Negro.

One of Professor Negro's teachings is the following: act in any case because there are no cases or pathologies that Homoeopathy cannot treat, therefore there is no point in saying: "yes to epilepsy and no to 'LES', or vice-versa; no to acute kidney disorders and yes to Malta fever", I believe that this is not part of our cultural heritage nor of our technical knowledge fron a clinical and medical viewpoint and thus we have to abandon this psychological idea of inferiority as regards methodologies which might have the merit of having isolated the virus of a certain pathology, but which do not have the merit of preventing and treating without harm.

I am coming to the conclusion. My mind goes back to the statesman who first had the courage to accept, institutionalize amd make Homoeopathic Medicine public.

THIRD SLIDE

I am speaking of the great Gandhi, a man who, through non violence and good sense, gave a sense to his own life.

"Homoeopathy", said Gandhi, "is the last sophisticated method of treating patients, economic and non violent; the Government favours it and sponsors it in our Nation".

We, Italian Homoeopathic doctors, expect the same thing from our political class. This is what all sick people who have benefitted in body and spirit from Homoeopathy, expect as regards the future of Homoeopathic Medicine.