2.7 - Primary and after or counter effect of drugs.

In reality most mental alienations are bodily diseases only. These mental and emotional symptoms develop in some cases more or less rapidly; assume a state of most conspicuous one-sidedness, is finally transferred like a local disease, into the invisibly fine organs of the mind, where they seem to obscure the bodily symptoms. In short, the disorder of the coarser bodily organs is transferred, as it were, to the almost spiritual organs of the mind, where the physician will search in vain for their cause.

In recording the totality of symptoms of such a case, we must obtain an accurate description of all physical symptoms, which prevailed before the disease degenerated into a one-sided mental disorder. We compare then, these early symptoms with their present indistinct remnants, which occasionally appear during lucid intervals, and add the symptoms of the mental state as observed by the physician and attendants of the patient.

Though a patient may be relieved of an acute mental disorder by non-anti-psoric medicine, no time must be lost in perfecting the cure by continued anti-psoric treatment, so that the disease may not break out anew, which will be prevented by strict adherence to well-regulated diet and habits. If neglected, psora will be usually developed during the second attack, and may assume a form, periodical or continuous, and much more difficult to cure.

Mental diseases, not the result of physical or bodily affections, and which have not yet undermined the physical health too seriously, admit of the speedy cure by psychical treatment, while careful regulations of habits’ will re-establish the health of the body, but as a measure of precaution a course of anti-psoric treatment is advisable, in order to prevent a recurrence of the attack of mental aberration. The physician and attendants must strictly enforce proper hygiene and physical regiment of the mind. The treatment of insane persons should be conducted with a view to the absolute avoidance of corporal punishment or torture. Physicians and attendants should always treat such patients as if they regarded them as rational beings.

Intermittent diseases also claim our attention. Some return at a certain period. There are others, apparently non-febrile affections, resembling intermittents by their peculiar recurrences. There are also affections characterized by the appearance of certain morbid conditions, alternating at uncertain periods with morbid conditions of a different kind. Such alternating diseases are mostly chronic and a product of developed psora. In rare instances they are complicated with syphilitic miasma. The first needs purely anti-psoric treatment, the latter an alternation of anti-psoric with anti-syphilitics.

Typical intermittents recur after a certain period of apparent health, and vanish after an equally definite period. Apparently non-febrile morbid conditions, recurring at certain periods are not of sporadic or epidemic nature, they belong to a class of chronic, mostly genuine psoric diseases. Sometimes an intercurrent dose of highly potentized Peruvian bark extinguishes the intermitted type of the disease.

In sporadic or epidemic intermittents, not prevalent endemically in marshy districts, each attack is mostly composed of two distinct stages, chill and heat, or heat and then chill; still more frequently they consist of three stages, chill, heat and finally sweat. The remedy, usually a non-anti-psoric, must have the power to produce in healthy persons the several successive stages similar to the natural disease, and should correspond as closely as possible with the most prominent and peculiar stage of the disease; but the symptoms which mark the condition of the patient during the pyrexia, should chiefly be taken for guides, in selecting the most striking remedy. The best time to administer the remedy is a short time after the termination of the paroxysm, when the medicine has time to develop its curative effect without violent action or disturbance and the vital force is then in the most favourable condition to be gently modified by the medicine and restored to healthy action. If the apyrexia is very brief, or if the after effects of the preceding paroxysm disturb it, the dose of the medicine should be administered when the sweating stage diminishes or when the subsequent stages of the paroxysm decline.