Why medicines are better at curing than are natural diseases §50-§51 Organon §51

Disadvantages of diseases as instruments of cure:  [As instruments of homeopathic cure, natural diseases are lacking for the following reasons:] 

Number of curative natural diseases available 

1. Great nature itself has almost only the few established miasmatic diseases as aid: the itch diathesis, measles and smallpox. 118 Consequently, few diseases can be cured by other natural diseases. 

Safety of use 

2. Some of these disease potences (namely, smallpox and measles) are more life-threatening and atrocious than the maladies to be cured. 

Duration of action

3. Others, like the itch diathesis, [are chronic]. After they have accomplished the cure of a similar disease, they themselves need curing in order to be eradicated in their turn. Both of these circumstances [points 2 and 3 above] make their use as homeopathic remedies difficult, uncertain and dangerous.

Number of disease states curable by the fixed miasmatic diseases

4. How very few human disease states there are that find their similar (homeopathic) remedy in smallpox, measles or the itch diathesis! That is why, in the course of nature, only a very few maladies can be cured with these dubious and precarious homeopathic means. 

Strength of the dose 

5. Success shows itself only with danger and great ailment because the doses of these disease potences do not lend themselves to reduction according to the circumstances as can be done with medicinal doses. On the contrary, someone who is afflicted with an old similar malady is covered over with the entire dangerous and troublesome suffering-the entire disease of smallpox, measles or the itch diathesis-in order to recover from the old malady. Nevertheless, from this fortuitous concurrence, we have some beautiful homeopathic cures to exhibit. These are all so many speaking vouchers for the single, great curative natural law that governs in them: Cure by symptom similarity!

Comment

118 And the above-mentioned skin-eruption tinder, found in the cowpox lymph [§46, p. 91-92].