External auxiliaries - auxiliaries or obstacles ?

- BENERJEE.P,

External auxiliaries - auxiliaries or obstacles ? 

While treating a chronic case, the physician should take care of one very important thing. Before he commences the treatment he should invariably enquire if the patient is taking any auxiliary measures either in the shape of internal medicine or in the shape of external use or application for the temporary relief or amelioration of his sufferings. Because, as a matter of fact, these auxiliaries have no power of curing but of only suppressing or modifying the manifestations of the disease. And, if there are any such auxiliaries, they will necessarily obstruct the Homœopathic medicines that may be given, in their action, and may also, at times, make the selection of the correct medicine difficult and even impossible. It is therefore essential that such auxiliaries are entirely stopped and discontinued before the administration of the Homœopathic remedy, nay, before the preparation of the record, because, unless they are removed, the whole case may not stand out in its own natural form of expression, and as such, the record and therefore the prescription may be altogether wrong.

 Let me give you some idea of the auxiliaries that are generally resorted to by the patient in his own anxiety for relief, as also on the advices of our specialist friends.
 In dyspepsia, Soda or Bisurated Magnesia is often taken in daily doses; in rheumatism, colic and diarrhœa, opium habit is formed; in prolapsus of the uterus in females, pessaries, in hernia, truss, and in orchites, suspenders are used as a matter of fashion, these days. There are more such auxiliaries than I can exhaust by mention, e. g., inhalation of Eucalyptus oil for cold, smelling salt for fainting fits and occasional purgatives and douches for constipation, and so on.
 It is however to be admitted that petty auxiliaries are, at times, necessary in certain extreme cases, but those cases are cases of exception and not of rule. If you find in a certain case of hernia that without a truss the protrusion becomes so severe as to endanger the patient's life, of course a truss has to be used and it should not be stopped all at once, but gradually as the Homœopathic medicine brings on improvement and as the patient grows able to go without it.
 Though I have already given some hints as to why I have called these auxiliaries obstacles, let me explain the point still further. Symptoms are the language of Nature that call for the particular remedy required in a given case, and more symptoms you find, the easier becomes the task of selection. As a matter of fact, it is even necessary in cases of paucity of symptoms to develop the latent symptoms to their fullest extent, so that the physician may be able to find out remedies to fit them. But the use of auxiliaries interferes with the manifestation of symptoms, and as such, the language of Nature is rendered mute, and this makes the task of prescribing difficult and even impossible at times. For example, suppose, in a case of prolapsus of the uterus, the patient is using a pessary. Now, this pessary is preventing the protrusion. Not only this but it is also making it difficult to understand as to how and when this protrusion is aggravated or ameliorated and how the patient feels in the other parts of the system during the aggravation. All these symptoms are masked by the use of the pessary, and without symptoms you cannot hit upon any remedy. Then again, owing to the extraneous assistance that is rendered to the system for a regaining of its normal condition, the system itself gradually ceases to make its own endeavour for it. And if the system itself lacks the endeavour for arriving at the normal condition, medicines cannot accomplish the task of cure. So long as there is this extraneous help to the system, medicines will not do much, and even if they do anything at all, there is no means of knowing what they have done and to what extent.

 For the above reasons, it is necessary to remove all external auxiliaries before the use of medicines. And when all auxiliaries have been removed, the symptoms will stand out in their naturalness. This will make correct prescription easy, observation of the action of the prescribed remedy possible, and cure certain.