Organon §276
A too-strong dose of a homeopathic medicine does more injury than the same dose of an unhomeopathic medicine.
For this reason, a medicine that is homeopathically appropriate to a given case of disease, but that is given in too large a dose, does much more damage than an equally large dose of a medicine that is allopathic to the disease. In strong doses, the more homeopathic the medicine is to the disease state, and the higher its potency, 230 the more damage it will do-much more than an equally large dose of medicine that is unhomeopathic, bearing no relation to the disease state (i.e. , that is allopathic to the disease state).
Frequently repeated, too-strong doses of a homeopathic medicine can endanger the patient's life or make his disease almost incurable
As a rule, all-too-large doses of an apt, homeopathically selected medicine give rise to great misfortune, especially if these too-large doses are frequently repeated. Not seldom, they endanger the patient's life or make his disease almost incurable. Too-large doses certainly do extinguish the natural disease for the feeling of the life principle-the patient suffers no more from the original disease from the moment the all-too-strong dose of the homeopathic medicine acts upon him-but the patient is then more strongly sick from the quite similar, only far more violent medicinal disease which is very difficult to expunge. 231
Comment
230 The recent praise by some homeopaths for the larger doses is due to one of the following reasons:
1. they continue to use low potentizations of the administered medicine, dynamized in the hitherto manner (as perhaps I myself did 25 years ago for want of better knowledge),
2. the medicines they used were imperfectly prepared by the manufacturer, or
3. the medicines they used were not homeopathically selected.**
In other words, homeopaths who have praised the larger doses do so for one of two reasons:
1. The potencies they are using are so low that they require larger doses to have an effect. This follows Hahnemann's point in §276 that the higher the potency, the smaller the dose that is needed to alter health (and the more harm that is done by a too-large dose).
2. The medicines they are using are not homeopathic enough to the disease state to work in small doses.
This follows Hahnemann's point in §276 that the more homeopathic a medicine is, the smaller the dose that is needed to alter health (and the more harm that is done by a too-large dose).A medicine that is poorly manufactured may fall into either of these two categories. For a brief history of Hahnemann's progressive development and use of different doses and potencies, see "Lecture XIV: Homeopathic Posology" in R.E. Dudgeon's Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Homeopathy.
231 [Examples of damage done by homeopathic medicines used in large and frequent doses:]
1. In this way, almost incurable mercurial wasting sicknesses arise from the persistent use of aggressive allopathic mercurial means, prescribed in large doses against syphilis. Yet in a few days, one or several doses of a mild but effective mercurial means would certainly thoroughly cure the whole venereal disease, along with the chancre, provided the chancre had not been dispelled by external measures (as always happens with allopathy).
2. Likewise, allopaths have given large, daily doses of cinchona and quinine for intermittent fevers where cinchona was correctly homeopathically indicated and where one very small dose of highly potentized cinchona would have unfailingly helped (i.e. , in cases of intermittent swamp fever, with those patients who are not suffering from manifest psora [§242]). The allopath thereby engenders a chronic quinine wasting sickness, while psora is developed at the same time. If this does not gradually kill the patient (by corruption of internal organs important for life, especially the spleen and the liver) it at least makes him suffer in a sad state of health for years on end. It is hard to conceive of a homeopathic antidote against this sort of malady, engendered by the excessive use of large doses of homeopathic medicines.