'This House believes that the single remedy is the
medicine of experience'

Opposing the motion

Dr June Burgerby:

The motion is that the single remedy is the medicine of experience. Well, after practising for over twenty-five years I can say that it certainly has not been my experience. And it hasn't been mine because I have actually tried to keep an 'open' mind. When I first entered the practice of homoeopathy I did so with the greatest scepticism. I was a regular doctor and I had only practised regular medicine. But it happened that the experience of a patient made me look at this peculiar system of medicine and to start thinking about it and so it was that I came to this august establishment and sat through and I shall remember it to my dying day five courses of a week each. With due respect to all the literature, an awful lot of it seemed to me, at the time, nonsense! I couldn't actually believe that this stuff worked and of course in my day it was not just single remedies being taught but that three doses of the 10M if you got it right would be the cure-all.

Well I suppose the only way to learn is to go out and to practise. I was plunged into the hot seat of the paediatric outpatients of this hospital, relatively newly qualified. As casualty officers in hospitals will know that some of us actually did have to learn that way with Pye's Surgical Handicraft round the screen while we coped with whatever was going in the casualty department, particularly on a Saturday night. And therefore I sat quietly listening to all these profound statements by people whom I respected as people but I was very aware that I had never heard so much passion and religiosity. I won't even mention all the 'isms' that people belonged to, and the intellectuality was at times quite stunning. Fortunately for me the patients were very simple, they were children and they didn't exhibit so much of these 'fevers of passion' which my teachers were breathing down my neck, telling me that this was the only way to practise this particular form of medicine. They were little children whose mothers and father were quite desperate because they had the usual thing: ten courses of antibiotics in eight months, that sort of stuff. Not surprisingly they came here.

Now, there are other practices within medicine that I have a great respect for; I have a great respect for pathology, I have indeed a great respect for some of the modern technology that we now have at our disposal. I am very glad to say that I have access to a magnetic resonance imaging machine and it has proved extremely helpful. First and foremost before we enter the practice of homoeopathic medicine we should be good doctors, diagnostically, even though I will concede that only 50% of patients who are seen at hospital can be formally diagnosed. I do know a few facts but not many because I'm not desperately intellectual! But nevertheless if we have the ability to diagnose we should use it, but then comes the crunch. How to treat it? A very fundamental question indeed. So, having trained conventionally and been plunged dramatically into the homoeopathic scene I had to use what was in the books and what I was being taught.

I remember taking Margaret Tyler's book with me to bed every night for about a month and wondering whether I wasn't (with due respect to her because she was a lovely lady and she wore the most beautiful hats. She was a very caring person - I think her shadow is still in this hospital). But you know what? It was like reading Grimms' fairy stories. I like fairystories and I think I got to the letter 'C' in Tyler's Drug Pictures (you know it's all 'As, Bs and Cs') and I began to think well I just can't accept that it is all like this. And so I realised that the only way to practice homoeopathic medicine was to take the kernel of it and to develop it a bit in your own way and to use it in a way that experience told you actually got the patient better.

And isn't that what the practice of medicine is all about? To get the patient better? It may not be a total healing but if they have their migraines that are plaguing them every weekend reasonably controlled so that they can function far better, or their endometriosis so they are not doubled up in agony once a month for four days with the excruciating pain that it brings them. If you can help to put them out of pain, and those are two instances where patently modern medicine is not succeeding. Not to mention many others that we all know about, I wrote a list, it included things like: severe generalised atopic eczema and asthma, and then in the child leukaemia, in the adult senile dementia and of course, the up to date situations that we are now all being confronted with: post-viral fatigue, myalgic encephalomyelitis (I can never say it), cancer and so on. And is homoeopathic medicine helping us here, I wonder? Is it helping us as doctors to bring the patient some comfort and healing? Well actually I think it is and I wouldn't be practising if it wasn't, but I have never got anywhere using a single dose, because of what experience has taught me (and you can argue well of course she's got plenty of friends in the psychotherapeutic area). Yes indeed I have, some of my dearest friends are psychotherapists and to them it is 'all in the mind', the mental experience of a patient has brought on his illness. So that there is a whole area that we have to look at.

There is also, of course, the area where the patient's personality and feeling, life or whatever you like to call it, has been suppressed. They have had their head down in intellectual activity day after day, week in week out, when there has perhaps been an artist in there trying to get out,or even a singer or musician but they have never allowed it. And of course, therefore if we look at illnesses in their totality which is what we are 'supposed to do' in this branch of holistic medicine, it would seem to me that we sometimes must apply remedies where there has been a grief experience or something in their childhood. If we give something for that suppression of a feeling and then an 'organ remedy' where the physical symptoms manifest themselves, then we might be in with a chance to do something that can perhaps remotely be considered as healing. After three months of practising three doses I realised that I was getting absolutely nowhere. I was just about to chuck it all in, but you see I did somehow know that there was something in it. It was a sort of gut reaction if you like, I didn't do a lot of reading, I still haven't read a lot of books, but somewhere it seems to me in nature it's all out there. It's just us who haven't got the wit to know how to use it.

I respect Sammy Hahnemann very much for what he resurrected and reincarnated, but I do believe that if he was alive today he would be writing different books. By the way Elizabeth Wright Hubbard did not write that book at the end of her career. I think she slightly changed her mind later, and I'm not sure that she did go out in a white Rolls-Royce, she was quite a modest lady. This debate begs many questions and it is unique to have, as Peter Fisher said in his opening remarks, the chance to air some views other than what has been called classical homoeopathy. I don't believe it's classical at all, I never have done, I don't believe there is any such thing as classical homoeopathy. I only believe that there is the homoeopathy of one's own personal experience and that if you take it to its conclusion it seems to me patently absurd to just match a mental remedy and say that is going to do everything. So this debate does have undertones of great significance for this Faculty.

I am reminded of one of my favourite speakers, Rabbi Lionel Blue on Desert Island Discs. Sue Lawley asked him why his favourite record was 'Why has the Cow Four Legs' sung by Cicely Courtenedge, he said that it begged the deepest philosophical questions. When asked what was his pet hate hesaid 'I hate fanatics'. Fanaticism is a modern word and I hope that at the end of this debate we will agree to differ. I believe there are almost as many remedies as there are doctors and that some doctors find one way to practise homoeopathic medicine, others find another and that no one school has the truth.

I wrote this down: if this house believes that the single remedy is the remedy of experience it is deluding itself. Deluding itself not only in the educational sphere, by teaching it, and thereby finding that in quite a high proportion of situations it doesn't work, not only by losing a lot of well-meaning doctors who come to its courses but in making relationships with our medical colleagues. I find this terribly important. I have never lost faith with my medical colleagues in conventional medicine. They will prescribe sometimes the most outrageous things for me on an FP10 if I ask them to, to help the patients, simply because if you try to convince them that one remedy is going to cover the whole spectrum of a disease process then they really give up on you and I can't blame them for that.

But finally, and George did mention this: it has been my good fortune to have used a bit of my leisure since I left this hospital to travel. I have been to many places, but principally to Europe and have visited quite a number of European clinics. If we think in this country that we have the edge in the EEC we are going to have to have another big think because we haven't. We are years behind them in lots of ways and I would commend you to go and visit some of the clinics in Europe to see what they are doing and how they are going about it. And of course the French with their imagination use polypharmacy, the Germans a bit more down to ground, not really down to earth, but heavier would try two or three remedies. They have a huge following in Germany. The Swiss also use polypharmacy. It is therefore my pleasure, Mr Chairman, to be cut off by you and to sit down now and to say once more that the single remedy has not been my experience at all. But you must all go out and try for yourselves and use what you find best for the patients.

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