TERTIARY ACTION OF THE DRUGS
TERTIARY ACTION OF THE DRUGS
In my last article, entitled: Rock Solid Facts About Homeopathy, I launched a thesis that, in homoeopathy, drugs also had a third action along with the Primary and Secondary ones.
Conventionally homeopathy recognizes two actions of the drugs.
- The Primary Action: the gross action of the drug, for which it is utilized or prescribed by all the systems of medicines.
- The Secondary Action: the vital reaction, or response, of the body or the organism to the primary action of the drug, in simulation of which homeopathic similimum is mainly selected.
These both phenomena conjointly are termed as the pathogenesis of the drugs, which is the subject-matter of the Homeopathic Materia Medica, which contains the both, i.e. the primary and the secondary action symptoms, indiscriminately. We seldom recognize one from the other. It was Hahnemann’s desire that they should be so incorporated in the Materia Medica.
But there is a third action to the homeopathic remedies in the dynamic phase (that is in high and the highest potencies) which has not been recognized so far. That is the Tertiary action. It is for this action that homeopathy is homeopathy. Tertiary action is the highest homoeopathy, and it begins after 200, or from 1M to MM potencies. Homeopathy is not homeopathy if it does not cure chronic—homeopathically speaking—diseases. Below this homeopathy is an alternative therapeutic to heal acute (or sub-acute, or—allopathically speaking, chronic) diseases and infections.
In the said article I have given seminal ideas under the Level IV of my classification of drug action. [For this I would request my readers to refresh their memory by revisiting my said article.] I quote, with elaborations:
“This fourth action is the dynamic action. It is for chronic (miasmatic) diseases where disease and the patient have merged into one dynamic sick personality—you cannot tell one from the other. Disease becomes inseparable, indistinguishable from the sick person. Every sick symptom (at this stage) is not a symptom of some particular disease, but a habit or a character trait of the patient. Symptoms and temperament lose their distinction: they have merged into each other. There can be intolerance of certain foods by birth or since very early infancy. And patient takes it as his natural limitation. The dynamic potency disentangles the two, by annihilating the one and liberating the other, that paves the way to cure. This marvelous feat is a simple miracle to witness. A new person is born—a nascent and new personality, for the pleasant, or otherwise, surprise for the patient himself and the people around him. It is here that we see that from a meek, sick, personality, a ferocious jackal is born; or from a cruel and crooked person, a noble, moral and honest personality is laid bare.”
Mark of homeopathy is that it disentangles the miasm from the patient. It liberates the patient from the eternal and abiding subjugation of the chronic miasm. The miasms can have hereditary chronicity. A child is born warped and woofed intricately in chronic stigmata. You can’t envision the real person. He partakes of chronic stigmata of the mother’s and father’s linage. [In such cases when the miasmatic effluvia is born with the patient, total liberation sometimes becomes well-nigh impossible. You can mitigate the intensity of their suffering to a tolerable limit by systematic antimiasmatic treatment, to disentangle the complex miasmata.]
As everything in this universe has humors, every living being, including man, is born with humors, and in humors, with any one of the 3 humors being prominent in any person; and that prominence in one respect determine his temperament, as phlegmatic, oxygenoid. Carbo-nitrogenoid. (In antiquity it was four humors that were considered normal, i.e. sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. In homeopathy we usually accept Grauvogl’s classification.) With any one humor that is prominent in an individual at birth does not mean that that child is sick. That child is quite normal, balanced and healthy, but that one predominant humor determines his temperament in life. Now every temperament has its own affinity or proclivity for one particular miasm. The phlegmatic, for example, draws in the Sycotic miasm; oxygnoid the Syphylitic, and the carbo-nitrogenoid the Psora. I, in spite of being a person of scientific bent of mind, fully believe in the classical theory of humors and temperaments. They are undeniable facts. My constant encounter with the sick for forty-five years’ practice more than convinced me of their veracity, and beyond doubt their factualness. I believe that:
- Constitutions with their peculiar temperaments are facts. They are healthy and balanced at the time of birth. It is the miasms that render them chronically sick. After annihilating the miasm, the constitution is liberated with its original temperament, and humor.
- Every person is born with some definite constitution in a balanced form. The longer it remains balanced, to that extant the person enjoys health.
- Constitutions are constitutions with one of which every person is born; and miasms are diseases, constitutional diseases, that throw out of balance the constitution with which one is born. Miasmatic treatment loosens the hold of miasms over the constitution.
- Constitutions are not diseases; nor miasms. They determine the kind of an individual who is born with it, therefore he is in his pristine health. The miasm is a climbing virus, a sort of an all-encompassing dodder that spreads its tendrils to encircle the constitution to bring about its slow decay and final annihilation.
- Diseases (miasms) relevant to constitution are magically attracted to it and catch roots; and after the cure of the same, the basic constitution re-emerges. After the cure of arthritis or the gout, for example, the phlegmatic constitution re-emerges with its pristine health; but it will remain prone to arthritis or gout.
Similia’s jurisdiction ends at the third level, the ‘therapeutic level’.—Read (or again refer to) my above article for proper understanding of the divisions of four levels of drug action. So the law of similia has a therapeutic limit. Similarities to symptoms end here. Now similarity shifts from the conglomerate of individual symptoms or complaints to the similarity of diseases or miasm as a whole. Drugs from mother tinctures to 30 or 200 potencies can’t perform such feats.
But when you have become tired of ‘curing’ (so to say) an ailment, times and again, and could not stop its re-emergence, it is now time to switch over to Level-4; and find the miasm, or the constitution, and prescribe accordingly.
A patient has been coming to you for recurrent sore-throat, sometimes with fever and sometimes without fever. But always with lingering cough after the throat has been cured. Such patients might be coming to you for years, and having been redressed within few days, without any stigma left. Such patients are everywhere, on all clinics; but getting homeopathic treatment they have consolation of being ‘cured’ without side effects. But a conscientious doctor feels compelled to peep behind the scene. He finds an appalling tubercular history in his family. He decides to give a dynamic jolt of antimiasmatics. After receiving a dose of Bacitub his visits become few and far between.
This is a prototype case. This will happen always when you prescribe at the fourth level. But there are some definite protocols for working at this level.
- You must realize that you are not treating now on the therapeutic level. So you won’t ask him to report so frequently; nor will you judge the progress too soon, i.e. within two to four days.
- As there would be no repetition of the dose, nor a decision for another selection, you won’t heed patient’s relating to you new symptoms or their new modalities.
- After having given the miasmatic remedy for which you intend to wait, if very characteristic symptoms of some homeopathic medicine come out—as for example, 2 A.M. aggravation of cough or a respiratory attack, don’t hurry to give the indicated remedy, as for example, Kali Carb. Beware the patient and all his symptoms are in a total flux. Let the dust settle down.
- Tertiary action of miasmatic remedies is restorative action. You will simply marvel what a stupendous range of symptoms, what a mountain of pathologic complaints are redressed. You can never find such a conglomerate of complaints that have been so completely wiped away in one go.
- Contrarily you will wonder what a gigantic structure of varied pathologic ailments is built on the ground of a hereditary disease, as cancer, tuberculosis, vaccinosis, etc. when the relevant nosode creates a tremor the whole superstructure gets demolished.
- Nosodes are the most powerful medicinal tools, making a radical clean sweep.
- Morbillinum, Typhoidinum, Pertussin, Psorinum, Parotodinum, Medorrhinum, Syphylinum, Tubeculinum, Bacillinum, to name the few, are the trusted dynamic tools.
- Mineral and chemical agents come after the nosodes and are less pervasive. They are mostly indicated after the nosodes, when the nosological ground has been clean sweeped by the relevant nosode and the real temperament, with its humors, emerges on the scene.
- Here, if the constitution that has emerged is healthy and pristine, no further treatment is required. If it is crooked and lopsided in any respect, a constitutional treatment would be required. In most of such cases nosodes won’t be indicated now.
- Hierarchically constitutional treatment comes after the nosological treatment, when the miasm has been done away with.