Organon §22

Similar, dissimilar and opposite symptoms produced by medicines and diseases

Medicines cure by engendering a disease state that removes the one to be cured.
Since:
1. nothing is exhibited in diseases that must be taken away in order to transform them into health besides the complex of their signs and symptoms, and

2. medicines can exhibit nothing curative besides their tendency to engender disease symptoms in the healthy and to take them away from the sick, it therefore follows that:

1. medicines only become remedies [curative means], capable of annihilating diseases, by arousing certain befallments and symptoms (i.e. , by engendering a certain artificial disease state) thereby lifting and eradicating the symptoms already present, namely, the natural disease state we wish to cure, and

2. for the symptom complex of the disease to be cured, that medicine must be sought which has proven to have the greatest tendency to engender either similar or opposite symptoms, according to what experience shows to be the kind of medicinal symptoms (those similar or opposite to the disease) to lift disease symptoms and transform them into health most easily, certainly and permanently.

Comment:
The other possible manner of employing medicines against disease besides these two [the homeopathic and the antipathic] is the allopathic method. In the allopathic method, medicines are prescribed whose symptoms have no direct pathic reference to the disease state; the medicinal symptoms are neither similar nor opposite to the disease symptoms, but rather entirely heterogenic to them. This practice plays an irresponsible, murderous game with the life of the patient, as I've already shown elsewhere [see the Introduction], by means of:

1. medicines, given in large and frequent doses, that are dangerously violent in their actions (and whose actions are unknown) and that were chosen based on empty presumptions,

2. painful procedures that are supposed to direct the disease to other locations, and

3. decreasing the patient's vitality and bodily fluids by emptying him from above and below, by making him sweat or salivate or, worst of all (as the currently reigning routine would have it), by blindly and unsparingly wasting his irreplaceable blood.

These procedures are used on the pretext that the physician should imitate and assist diseased nature in its strivings to help itself. However, it is completely irrational to imitate and further these highly imperfect, mostly inexpedient strivings of the merely instinctual, intellect-lacking life force, which was only instilled in our organism to continue our life on a harmonious course as long as the organism is healthy, but not to cure itself in diseases. If it had an ability so worthy of imitation, then it would not allow the organism to get sick at all. Once the life force has fallen ill due to malignities, it can only express its mistunement by means of the disturbance of the organism's healthy course of life and by feelings of suffering whereby it calls upon the intelligent physician for help. If help does not appear, then it strives to save itself by intensifying the sufferings-primarily however, by violent evacuations. This often involves tremendous sacrifice, sometimes the sacrifice of life itself. The morbidly mistuned life force has so little ability to cure that it certainly does not deserve to be imitated, since all the symptoms and changes in condition it engenders in the organism are indeed just the disease itself! What intelligent physician, who is unwilling to sacrifice his patient, would want to imitate it?