Organon Paragraph 25

[Dr. Jeff]

This is a paragraph that applies to any form of medicine that is based on "symptomatic" treatment.

Now, however, in all careful trials, pure experience,1 the sole and infallible oracle of the healing art, teaches us that actually that medicine which, in its action on the healthy human body, has demonstrated its power of producing the greatest number of symptoms similar to those observable in the case of disease under treatment, does also, in doses of suitable potency and attenuation, rapidly, radically and permanently remove the totality of the symptoms of this morbid state, that is to say (§ 6 - 16), the whole disease present, and change it into health; and that all medicines cure, without exception, those diseases whose symptoms most nearly resemble their own, and leave none of them uncured.

1 I do not mean that sort of experience of which the ordinary practitioners of the old school boast, after they have for years worked away with a lot of complex prescriptions on a number of diseases which they never carefully investigate, but which, faithful to their school, they consider as already described in works of systematic pathology, and dreamed that they could detect in them some imaginary morbific matter, or ascribe to them some other hypothetical internal abnormality. They always saw something in them, but knew not what it was they saw, and they got results, from the complex forces acting on an unknown object, that no human being but only a God could have unravelled - results from which nothing can be learned, no experience gained. Fifty years' experience of this sort is like fifty years of looking into a kaleidoscope filled with unknown colored objects, and perpetually turning round; thousands of ever changing figures and no accounting for them!

The better the symptom and dose match, the better the effect.

Regarding experience, Hahnemann is making a distinction between the practices of homeopathy and allopathy.

He's saying that having lots of experience in the non-scientific administration of "complex" prescriptions doesn't help you know what to do.

In contrast to having experience with matching of symptoms and doses.

The observer (doctor or patient) can then mindfully decide if the effect was curative or not

Use a single (vs. complex) medicine at a time and try not to change other variables to determine what causes what.

What is a common, non-homeopathy, example of changing one thing at a time in order to know what might be causing what?