Rheumatism is confessedly a very difficult disease to cure by old school treatment. Seldom is a case of the inflammatory form completely cured by them. The great majority of their cases run from the acute into the chronic form, and last for life. They are often drawn all out of shape (their patients), or left with incurable valvular heart trouble.
This is not the case under homoeopathic treatment. On the contrary the patients treated homeopathically are generally cured, and very seldom left with any heart trouble, even if the disease commenced there, as it sometimes does.
Oftener, of course, it begins in the back, extremities or joints generally, and then if treated allopathically with local applications it is driven to the heart, which cannot be reached with local applications, hence stays there until exudations occur and hardened deposits form upon the valves. Any homoeopathic physician guilty of treating a case this way, with such results, ought to lose his practice and his diploma.
I do not say this unadvisedly, for I have lived and practiced for thirty years past in a decidedly rheumatic district and know where of I affirm.
When we homoeopaths of East condemn those of the West for the Quinine (In material doses) treatment of intermittent, we are reminded that we do not live in miasmatic districts so we are not authority and we can only reply that we know many physician who do live there who cure their patients without the abuse of Quinine.
But in this verdict of mine on rheumatism I cannot be turned off that way.
Rheumatism is one of those diseases that present plenty of symptoms and modalities to guide to the choice from a long list of remedies of the one appropriate to the case in hand. There is such a great difference in the results of applying the remedy according to symptomatic indications, and those arising from simply pathological prescribing, that one does not need long to experiment to be convinced.
Indeed the pathological condition in this complaint does not figure largely in the account, for purposes of prescribing. But sensations and modalities do.