Therapeutics is the science and art of healing – the treatment of disease. In the use of drugs for therapeutic purposes Homoeopathy stands supreme to-day. The great advances in medicine during the past of century have been in pathology and in finding the causes of disease. The knowledge so gained has been of inestimable value in the prevention of disease. It has been of very little value in the cure of disease. The external manifestations of disease, the objective and subjective symptoms, have not been changed by a knowledge of their ultimate cause.
And this is where the indicated homoeopathic remedy is so important. It fits the symptoms, the only evidence we have that a patient is sick. The knowledge that typhoid fever is always caused by a specific organism that must enter the digestive tract to do its work is of use, because then we can take intelligent measures to keep it out. After the germ has once entered the body and the patient becomes sick, then the peculiar symptoms produced may call for Bryonia, or Baptisia, or Arsenic or some or some other remedy. The typhoid bacillus has no direct relation to our choice of the remedy, nor to the results attained by its use. And so with all other diseases. There is no way to recognize disease except by its manifestations, its objective symptoms. The properly indicated homoeopathic remedy that most closely fits a given case by the objective and subjective symptoms found in its pathogenesis is the one that gives the best results; similia similibus curentur.- From Address by Walter sands Mills at Atlantic City meeting of the A.I.H.
