Potency
Since I, among living homoeopaths, have had the greatest and most extended experience with high potencies, ... I consider myself sufficiently equipped to give here the advantages of these higher dynamizations as compared with the lower potencies, and even with the thirtieth potency.They have induced me to use the higher dynamizations almost exclusively, not only in chronic, but also in acute cases, not only with men, but with animals of all kinds, and everywhere with the most favourable results.
These advantages as observed also by others, are especially stated in brief hereunder:
- The sphere of action of medicine continually enlarges, the higher the dynamization is carried: consider especially those remedies which in their raw state excite few symptoms, e.g. Calcarea, Silicea, Natrum-mur., Aurum met., Argentum-met., Alumin-met., etc. The immediate consequence of this is that they correspond to an ever-increasing number of ailments as their homoeopathic similia, and therefore in chronic ailments they hasten the cure.
- In acute disease the after-effects or curative effects appear more quickly ... There is nothing worse to be found than the exclusion of high potencies from the treatment of acute, and even of the most acute cases. One has only to witness their rapid effects to be convinced.
- By continual dynamization, remedies get more and more withdrawn from the laws of chemistry. A dose of Phosphorus highly potentized can lie in a paper envelope in a desk and if taken after a year, will show the full medicinal power, not of Phosphoric acid, but of the undecomposed Phosphorus itself. If protected from wetting and strong smelling substances, they prove their undiminished virtue even after twelve or more years.
- The higher the dynamization used, the less the damage or interference from a defective diet which, especially in cities and in the higher social ranks, frequently spoils the best cures.
- The avoidance of toxic or physiological effects and of all the dangerous concomitant symptoms which lie outside the symptomatic sphere of the disease in question (i.e. side effects in present-day parlance). How great this advantage is, must be manifested to every one who knows the injurious, even poisonous, effects of even the smaller but unpotentized doses.