Snoopy posted the following to me - and below (in a new post) is my response. I move this to a new thread - to leave Hans thread in case he wants to get back to the Herscu discussion.

posted 18. October 2002 03:42
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Dear Austin,

I would have liked to have responded sooner to your post but there is so much to respond to, it can't be done in a matter of minutes. Yes I agree, there is much confusion in the Organon about dose and I too wish there had been a glossary. I have margin notes that say, "Hahnemann means material doses here", which later have been crossed out to read, "Hahnemann means potentized doses"; so, you see, even I have been back and forth with some of this!

Even so, you made a flat out misstatement regarding para. 276, one of the most important paragraphs in the Organon, which I must address. You said, "Snoopy, ... he [Hahnemann] was not saying, 'the worst scenario is high potencies with frequent repetitions (275, 276).'" Yes he was, Austin, here's what you left out:

"For this reason a medicine, although homeopathic to the case, does harm when it is given in overdose. In strong doses the more homeopathic the medicine and the higher its potency the more harm it does." And then he goes on to say it's even worse if there are frequent repetitions of this--that's the part that YOU quoted, but you omitted the part about high potency being a factor in "overdose"; and I would have to wonder why, because it would seem rather disingenuous or convenient, so to speak, to do so.

"Too large a dose", you are claiming, means too much physical material, which would tend to mean, given that most of our remedies are poisons, a toxic dose. Then, reconcile that with what Hahnemann says in 275:

"A medicine given in TOO LARGE A DOSE [Hahnemann's emphasis], though completely homeopathic to the case AND IN ITSELF OF A BENEFICIAL NATURE [my emphasis, because a toxic dose could not be of a beneficial nature as it would cause suffering, so LARGE cannot mean toxic], will still harm the patient by its quantity [amount of water or pellets--a factor in "dose"] and unnecessarily strong action [potency--the other factor in "dose"; when he says "strong action", he means power]."

So, not surprisingly, the dose consists of the amount of water or pellets, and the potency. Then in 276 he says, "overdose" coupled with frequent repetitions, is the worst of all--the worst case scenario.

You seem to be wanting to acknowledge that a potency like 1M is indeed a high potency--meaning powerful--but at the same time you want to be able to say that it's "a small dose" because of the absence of physical material. I forget exactly what Avagadro's number is--12C? 24C? Some relatively low number; but your point is, past Avagadro's number, the dose gets smaller and smaller and hence gentler and gentler because there's less and less physical material in it, and my question is, once you hit zero (zero molecules of original substance) at 12 or 24C, how can you get any smaller and smaller ? How can 30C be a smaller dose than 12C, and 200 be a smaller dose than 30 and 1M be a smaller dose than 200...? You hit zero way back at 24, it can't get any smaller than zero so how does it get gentler and gentler the higher you go if it got as high as it can go back at 24C?

In proof, you only have to stay around the BB long enough and wait and watch the high potency victims write in, and you can always tell who they are because their topics generally begin with "Please Help!", (and RDS is only just our latest example, though he's been a very good sport about it), and compare that with the people I help who never aggravate. Even just recently, the Nat-sulph case, the child with diarrhea, the mother chose to give a 6C, and had given 3 doses when she wrote back to say the remedy worked; frankly, I would have suggested a 30C, but the 6C was her idea. When we give a 200 when a 6C would have worked, what have we done?

We can understand that a person needs a shove when they're in harm's way; and that's good. But if they're shoved too hard, they have a new problem, recovering from the unnecessary use of force. This is what Hahnemann is saying in the last part of 276: Sure, they've been saved from their disease, he says. That was accomplished when they were hit with an overdose of medicine; they no longer suffer from the natural disease; but now they're even sicker from the medicinal disease caused by the practitioner's unnecessary use of force.

Snoopy

[ 18. October 2002, 04:17: Message edited by: Snoopy ]