Organon §285

Correct external application of the homeopathic medicine which is being given internally with success.

Thus, the cure of very old diseases can be furthered by the physician rubbing (on the back, arms, upper and lower legs) the same medicine which is being taken internally and proves itself to be salutary to the patient when taken internally. Any parts subject to pain, cramps or skin eruption should be avoided [§194]. 234

Comment

234 The fact that medicines can be administered through the skin explains those rare miracle cures where chronically crippled patients (whose skin was nevertheless whole and unblemished) were rapidly and permanently cured after a few mineral baths. By chance, the medicinal constituents of the baths were homeopathically appropriate to the old malady. On the other hand, mineral baths have very often done great damage by expelling patients' skin rashes. After a brief period of well-being, the life principle usually allows the inner uncured malady to erupt elsewhere, upon another body site that is far more important for life and well-being. For example, any of the following may arise: paralysis of the optic nerve and amaurosis, a clouding of the crystalline lens of the eye [cataracts], deafness, insanity, suffocating asthma, or a stroke that puts an end to the sufferings of the deceived patient. It is a cardinal principle of the homeopathic medical-art practitioner (which distingushes him from every so-called physician of all the older schools) that he never employ any medication whose morbid impingements upon the healthy human being have not been carefully proven and thus become known to him (§20-§21). To prescribe for a patient a means which is unknown as to its positive actions on the human condition, upon mere conjecture about its possible salutariness in some similar case or because someone says, "This means has helped in such and such a disease," is an unscrupulous, dangerous venture which the homeopath who loves mankind will leave to the unfeeling allopath. For this reason, a genuine physician and practitioner of our art will never send his patients to any of the countless mineral baths because almost all of them are unknown as to their exact positive action on the healthy human condition. Misused mineral baths are to be counted among the most violent and dangerous of medicinal means. Out of a thousand patients blindly sent to the most famous of such baths by the ignorant physicians who have not been able to cure them with allopathic treatment, one or two come back accidentally cured (though often only apparently cured) and praise the miracle to the skies, while many hundreds quietly slink away more or less aggravated. Some of them stay behind, readying themselves for their eternal resting place, a fact attested to by the well-filled graveyards that surround the most famous baths.†