[Omeo33] Art 1185 - Homeopathy, 2011, 100 (1), 73-75

[Gino Santini]

The recovery of man in medicine
Llewelyn R. Twentyman, B.Ch. Cantab

A great deal of interest has been directed during the last few years  
to the auto-immune phenomena in disease, in which immune reactions of  
antigen antibody type take place between the organism and one of its  
own tissues or organs. The research workers have been busy unveiling  
these immune phenomena, originally discovered in relation to  
Hashimoto’s disease of the thyroid, in an ever widening range of  
diseases, notably the so-called collagen diseases, including  
rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatic fever, scleroderma, dermatomyositis,  
periarteritis nodosa, lupus erythematosus, and in certain non-specific  
granulomata, particularly ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, as  
well as in such conditions as virus hepatitis and cirrhosis of the  
liver. Certain problems of carcinoma are also being studied from this  
point of view and there are reports from Japan of successful results  
following the transplantation of portions of a patient’s turnout into  
another and healthy part of the same patient. There is a divergence of  
opinion as to whether these auto-immune reactions are the cause of or  
merely attendant phenomena to the disease processes. A considerable  
amount of evidence supports the view (certainly in respect of the  
collagen diseases) that these phenomena arise subsequent to the  
disease, and depend on the same causes, perhaps disturbances of enzyme  
systems, as do the rest of the disease phenomena. That the enzyme  
disturbances themselves are only an effect and not causative in any  
ultimate sense is also obvious and so long as we stay within this  
essentially mechanical realm we will remain outside the realm of real  
causes.

It has also become well established that arthritis clinically very  
similar to rheumatoid arthritis may manifest in the course of  
carcinomatous disease, not only in cancer of the lung, but also in  
cancer of practically any organ. Following the removal or control of  
the primary tumour, all the joint symptoms may clear up in a few days.  
It has been suggested that these phenomena also belong to these auto- 
immune reactions, as well as the arthritides associated with colitis  
and other conditions.

Now all these phenomena have forcibly posed the question as to how the  
organism distinguishes between self and not-self, and how it comes  
about that some of the self becomes, in the course of disease  
processes, not-self. This is, of course, the old question of the  
wholeness of the organism turning up in a new and most interesting  
form and we arc learning that in certain diseases an organ, or tissue,  
or perhaps cell, can emancipate and behave, judged by these  
immunological reactions, as a foreign body. Obviously all these  
problems are also involved with the question as to how the foreign  
stuffs which we eat and digest are transformed from foreign into  
integral elements within the organism. It is indeed interesting how  
these refined immunological techniques may display whether the  
wholeness of the organism is dominant or whether subversive elements  
leading to autonomy are triumphing. The notion of self as used in  
these researches signifies the wholeness of the organism. Modern  
scientific research, directed essentially to discovering mechanisms of  
ever-increasing refinement and subtlety, is leading one nevertheless  
to the observation of these distinctions of self and not-self, with  
which philosophy has wrestled for thousands of years. These researches  
remain entirely mechanical in conception and great inventiveness is  
displayed-one may mention the clonal selection theory of Sir Frank  
Macfarlane Burnett-in producing theories of a mechanical nature to  
explain these phenomena. The great weakness of all such mechanical  
approaches is that they never approach anywhere near the world of  
actual human experience and the body and its processes remain divorced  
from the essential human being.

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