Medicines in homeopathy are not used on the bases of their compostions or alkaloids

Opium – one of the worst abused, because frequently used, remedies of all schools of medicine. I must explain. I said all schools. The true Homœopath does not abuse it, but many members of the school calling themselves homœopathic do.

A teacher in one of the homœopathic colleges defended its use in narcotic doses in many cases to produce sleep and relief from pain.

I will say just here that any homœopathic physician that feels obliged to use Opium or its alkaloid in this way and for this purpose does not understand his business and had better study his Materia Medica, and the principles of applying it according to Hahnemann, or else go over to the old school where they make no pretensions to have any law of cure.

In the first place Opium in narcotic doses does not produce sleep, but stupor, and it only relieves pain by rendering the patient unconscious to it. How many cases have been so masked by such treatment, that the disease progressed until there was no chance for cure?

Pain, fever and all other symptoms are the voice of the disease, telling where is the trouble and guiding us to the remedy.

The true curative often relieves pain even more quickly than Opium, and does so by curing the condition upon which it depends. And even in cases where it does not so quickly stop the pain, it is often far better to suffer awhile until the curative can get in its work.

Probably ninety-nine in a hundred of those suffering from the terrible habit of morphine eating are first led into it by physicians who prescribe morphine to “relieve pain and procure rest and sleep.”

And when we take into this account the abuse of stimulants, under the name of tonics, habitually prescribed by the same class of physicians it is no wonder that they are often heard to say, I don’t know whether I have done more good or harm.