Direction of disease and cure

Direction of disease

The skin has two major functions: protection and elimination.

In protection, the skin keeps disease away. If chronic disease attacks, the skin is the first line of defense and shows symptoms there first.

The extremities will most likely be the first to show signs of invasion in a chronic condition. The disease is progressing if the activity of the disease of the skin moves towards the torso. If the activity moves towards the extremities, the disease is weakening.

Acute disease will attack what it can and is so rapid that you can't get a clear picture of the movement. The body will try to limit the disease to safe, non-vital areas.

During acute and some chronic illness, the skin acts to eliminate disease. This is done through fever, sweat, eruptions, and so on. If the action of a remedy causes one of these things, the action can be seen as good if the patient goes on to feel better after the battle.

The four rules of direction of cure (Hering's Law)

1. Symptoms must appear from above downward
2. From within outward
3. Most important to less important organs.
4. And in the reverse order of appearance of symptoms.

Actually Hering didn’t create this principle of cure, wrongly attributed and wrongly termed a law. Kent talks about it first in his lectures and Roberts also includes it later in his discussion of homeopathic philosophy. But Hering didn’t write about it.

Dr. André Saine asks how psychosomatic disease fits in with this “law.” After much study of the classical homeopaths. he says that we still don’t understand the direction of cure. He also does not believe that all four work at the same time and has not found anyone able to say that they have seen all four at once truthfully. But, you will hear people repeat the law without any clinical proof. It is an unquestioned belief in most homeopathic teachers (other than Dr. Saine) that needs to be investigated more fully. s

Kent does not differentiate between acute and chronic disease since a cure is a cure. Hahnemann mentions that in chronic disease, the symptoms disappear in the reverse order of onset as Hering repeats in an introduction to Hahnemann’s Chronic Diseases.