Whatever happened to allopathy?

S. PATHIRAVITANA

A little over 40 years ago there appeared a book by the name of ‘Fringe Medicine’ published by Brian Inglis, who was the editor around that time of one of Britain’s leading political reviews, The Spectator.

What was called ‘Fringe’ was actually one among many other systems of treating illnesses in Britain and Europe, all of which have been described before as being a ‘mish mash of religion and magic and empirically acquired ideas and practices.’

Little by little the form of treatment which is predominant in the West today and sat alongside the others, pushed them aside and tried to become the sole occupant of the bench. Today it has even dropped its name allopathic and is now referred to as medicine.

Surprised

When British tourists visited France they were surprised to see in chemists’ shops a name like allopathy alongside the name homeopathy, where apparently both systems were still placed side by side. Allopathy according to the OED means ‘The treatment of a disease by inducing an opposite effect.’

This principle was so simple says, Brian Inglis, “and so obvious that it came to be thought of as no more than applied common sense; that when the body’s workings deviated from the normal, a counteracting procedure should be applied. Thus, a man suffering from constipation would be given a laxative; if he was feverish, ways would be found to cool him - and so on.”

Description

How tenaciously the allopaths held to this view may be seen in this extract from a description by Sir Arthur Bryant of the death-bed scene of King Charles 11:

“...an ever growing number of physicians cupped, blistered, purged, scarified the king’s tortured body. Three things only they denied him - light, rest and privacy; nothing else was left untried.

As evening came on, they prepared against the night a whole array of violent remedies - scarcely a quarter passed but the remedies were applied - purges forced down the mouth, sneezing powders to the nose, burning plasters to the feet, thighs and arms, shoulders and head - and when the plasters were ripped off, the doctors rejoiced if the pain was acute, because it showed theirs patient’s faculties were unimpaired.”

The allopaths don’t seem to have quite grasped the nature of illness or disease. Though among their forbears, one of whom is even today usually referred to as a father of medicine in Britain, Thomas Sydenham, explaining what it was said “how prejudicial soever its cause may be to the body, is no more than a vigorous effort of nature to throw off the morbific matter, and thus recover the patient.”

In other words the body knows quite well what it is doing when it has fever and such other disabilities and it should be helped not obstructed to throw off the ‘morbific’ matter.

This was the attitude taken towards disease from the days of Hippocrates when it was accepted that Nature has an innate power of healing; the physician having little else to do except assisting not obstructing this process.

Except for taking the oath of Hippocrates physicians belonging to the allopathic school today seem to be ignoring this valuable observation about vix medicatrix naturae meaning that it is the life force that cured disease.

However, in Britain it is the practitioners of herbalism, which is similar to our deshiya treatment, who with their herbal treatment try to aid the life force in its curative treatment.

It is interesting at this point to consider the impact of our deshiya treatment on a physician like John Davy who was attending on Governor Robert Brownrigg as his personal physician during the time when this island passed into the charge of Britain.

Davy was here just about the time when herbalism, which was also associated with astrology in Britain as in Ceylon, was on a downward swing. Davy had come under the influence of scientific views current at that time.

He carried with him a thermometre and measured Ceylon’s temperature wherever he went. And his dismissal of our herbalism and astrology was therefore immediate. Yet he left, rather oddly, a sort of ‘kind’ word to “this fanciful system” of medical treatment in the following words:

Indications

“The general indications, in their practice, first, are to ripen or maturate the disease; and, secondly, to remove it. As they leave a great deal to nature, (i,e. the vix mediatrix naturae - ed, ) their ignorance and false principles are not very mischievous; and they probably do, on the whole, though little good, more good than harm.”

Herbalism in Britain has not got totally wiped out even today. In its day it was set up by an act of Parliament in the time of Henry V111. But two new concepts, astrology and magic, were drawn in to reinforce the strength of herbal lore.

In his book English Physician and Complete Herbal the author, Nicolas Culpeper, emphasised it was not so much the power in the plant like Knapweed that was able to staunch blood in a nose bleed as the power of the planet Saturn which influenced it.

Commenting on this Brian Inglis says: “At the time he wrote, his views would not have been considered eccentric in the medical profession; the physicians of that time did indeed detest him; but that was because he translated their pharmacopia into English revealing their trade secrets to the public; not because of his belief in astrology.

They also accepted magic - in the case of say a witch’s spell; and they accepted that it was the spell rather than the ingredients of the witches’ brew that accounted for its potency.”

Interesting part

The most interesting part of this book begins with the discovery of germs by Louis Pasteur. That discovery gave the orthodox school the scientific theory they were lacking up to then. From that time the body became a battleground where man has tried time and again to overcome the microbe.

This battle has achieved some little success for man, but the microbe because of its protean nature or rather like the nine-headed Hydra monster of the old myth, which grew two heads when one was cut off, was reborn even in a more violent form.

Officially this is known as the ‘side effects’ of drug use. Side effects from drugs have not been overcome still and every patient invariably has to act the role of a guinea pig for a while when he swallows a pill.

Dr William Evans of the London Hospital writing to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1954 about drugs for hypertension said that he had seen in the course of his medical career no fewer than 58 of them put on the market with the usual recommendations.

The earlier ones, he said, though failing to do good, did no harm, but ‘latterly the more potent drugs have produced uncomfortable and often distressing side effects’ and he went on to list the distressing ones as causing among others, nasal stuffiness, conjunctivitis, depressive psychosis, suppression of urine and paralytic ileus (a painful obstruction in the intestine). And his final words on these drugs were ‘The discontinuance of these drugs is overdue, they have no effect on hypertension.’

Ath vaasi

Another most embarrassing event in the history of modern medicine is the role that the concept known as the ‘placebo effect’ plays. The dictionary defines this concept as a medicine given ‘intended to cure by reassuring the patient rather than by the physiological effect.’

Brian Inglis puts it better - ‘At what precise period of history’, he asks and answers the question, ‘was this first discovered that cures could be effected by giving coloured water and pretending it was a potent medicine is not known, but it had been an aid for doctors as well as quacks for a very long time.’

One cannot really quarrel with doctors for choosing this technique of healing for this has something to do but less with tangible things and more with the intangible, which, alas, is something that is beyond their scientific outlook.

Sometimes I have heard mothers say that Dr So and So has a lot of ath vaasi meaning that just to see him and talk to him was alone enough to get well. The ath vaasi doctor was generally a kind, sympathetic man full of metta; qualities that are most often lacking in modern physicians who have to work not leisurely but to a busy schedule.

Better results

The embarrassment I spoke of earlier in which medical science was placed with regard to the placebo effect happened, says Brian Ingliss, once when drugs were being tested for their effectiveness.

A set of dummy pills were given to one set of patients and the real pill to another. The results were baffling because the dummy pills gave the better results.

More bewilderment followed another test. A doctor once tested a new drug on an asthma patient. The patient responded to it. To make sure he tried a placebo on the same patient.

This time the asthma returned. Just as the Doctor started feeling happy about the results the firm that supplied the drugs wrote to say they had made a mistake and sent not the drug but only a packet of placebos by mistake. So much for trying to test the placebos!

Brian Inglis’ Fringe Medicine introduces the reader to a variety of healing methods in current use. Among them are the better known ones like Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Osteopathy and Chiropractic and the lesser known ones like Radiesthesia, Auto-suggestion, Hypnotherapy, Healing and Christian Science - they are all ways of overcoming illness he says.

Why should there be more than one profession, asks an American Osteopath, Dr Irvin Korr. And he answers the question, “As so often happens,” he says, “the question begins to answer itself when it is reversed, ‘Why shouldn’t there?’

Why should there not be two, three or even more professions of medicine? In asking the question that way we begin, immediately to destroy a myth with which most people of this country have lived so long that they have forgotten its origin in human conceit and human design.

“This is the myth; that there can be one true profession of medicine - the one, of course, that dominates, and has long dominated, the scene; that only its members, holders of certain degree from certain approved institutions, are the bona fide, rightful, and exclusive inheritors, custodians, proprietors, practitioners and judges of medicine; that only they are and they can be physicians; that they alone have the divine right to control all aspects of practice; indeed, this is so inexorable a fact of life that only they and their organisations are medicine.”

This is just the book for the final year medical student. Reading it will help to expand his mind, broaden his outlook and also help him to look at patients not as ciphers but as human beings.