Metals-Precious or Priceous
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1998 May / Jun VOL VII NO 4.
Dr Manu Kothari
Dr. Lopa Mehta
Platinum, Palladium, Gold and Silver are christened precious for the adjective is rooted in price. They could as well be called pricey - "high in price; charging high prices". Platinum and Palladium are terms derived from platina meaning a plate [of silver], for they are silvery in colour. The tragicomedy of manently stays blemish free and immortal. Hence man's lure for marble and mausoleums, Tajmahal and the tomb of Tutankhamen. The last named was a king of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt who flourished about 1348 BC and whose mummy was encased in a 6ft coffin containing 2448 pounds of gold, not to mention many precious diamonds and a host of other trinkets. The nobility of the precious metals has meant the unending ignobility of mankind through the ages. India as a nation, however religious and other worldly is the largest importer and hoarder of gold and silver, through means more foul than fair.
In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare told a monumental truth in three words: "Saint-seducing gold." Virgil, who preceded Christ by half a century, lamented:
"To what cannot you compel the hearts of man, O cursed lust for gold."
James Grainger mused:
"What is fame? An empty bubble;
Gold? A transient shiny trouble."
To whom is gold - representing all pricey metals - the terrible, shining trouble? More than to mankind, gold has meant colossal trouble for the Mother Earth; Gold ore is extractable by aqua regia [strong HCL+HNO3] alkali cyanides and free chlorine. Therefore wherever gold and the likes are extracted from the earth, an oceanic amount of the extracting poison is driven into the Earth. It's gold for man but cyanide for plants and animal kingdom. The soil around any gold mine is richly acidified, cyanided, and chlorinated. And of what divine use, pray, gold is?
The utter uselessness of gold was driven home for the discerning by Daniel Defoe through Robinson Crusoe, who, shipwrecked on an island with a ton of gold with him, is salvaged by a stray grain of corn that survived in his waste basket and which, falling to the Earth, populated the whole island with amazing maize that fed Crusoe and his Man Friday. If Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussain, Nawaz Sharif and we were to engage in a final Diwali using only atom bombs as crackers, it may happen that the surviving mankind may be left with a Himalayan-high pile of gold and diamonds on one side, and a grain of rice and wheat on the other. What would man choose? The Himalayan pile is a burden. One grain of wheat with its ready potentiality of becoming a million and trillion is the saviour. Teach yourself and your children that a grain of rice - like Solzhenitsyn's grain of truth - outweighs all the riches of this gold-obsessed world. But man is stupid: "No matter how much gold is extracted from the ground, man never seems to possess enough."
Largely gold and the likes have been an unmitigated curse; smally-ly, they offer some boons. Silver has 'the highest thermal and electric conductivity of any substance.' Platinum's usefulness resides in 'its resistance to corrosion or chemical attack and its high melting point of 1769 0 C'. Palladium, the lightest of the six platinum metals, has been used for the making of astronomical and other fine instruments, for dental alloys, and as a substitute for platinum in jewellery and electrical contacts. Gold, in its pure form, is the most malleable and ductile of all metals. It can be beaten to 0.00001 mm in thickness, a 'leaf' (as on the Cover) that is translucent, transmitting greenish light. A single gram of gold has been drawn into a wire 2 miles long. By far the largest use of gold is as the 'backing for the world's currency" Mankind has chosen to forget that diamonds, gold, silver and currency notes do not consititute wealth, for wealth means weal or the greatest good of the greatest number. Gold, like an atom bomb, is a possession as much dangerous for the one who possesses it as the one who does not. The world and mankind would surely have been truly wealthy had Satan not lured us with gold and its likes.
Some closing remarks for the therapeutic virtues of the precious metals, which in allopathic reality, are few and far between. Gold salts have been used against arthritis, but gold's penchant for damaging skin, bone marrow, brain, liver, kidney and what have you has forced allopaths to fall back on it when no lesser toxin is available as a therapeutic measure. Cisplatinum or cis-platin has the honour of being the sole heavy metal compound used in cancer chemotherapy. Like all other anticancer agents, it is shamelessly cytotoxic, heavily nephrotoxic and most emetic. The platinum base makes it frightfully expensive. Ayurvedacharyas - right now the blue eyed babies of the world, thanks to Deepak Chopra, Chandrasekhar Thakur and Co. have been fond of giving diamond or gold ash as 'bhasma' for this malady or that, and could rightly be called Bhasmasuras. Homoeopathy, capable of converting the oddest element into a therapeutic gold, surely has some incontrovertible ways of putting the pricey metals to some precious uses. Since they believe in progressive dilution, the one consolation that the patient could have, is the assault of his systems by only some microdose of these metals. The treatment, then, wouldn't be costlier than the disease.
It is a HydHel Universe. Of the 1084 atoms that comprise this universe, 75% atoms are of hydrogen, 24% of helium and a meager 1% is comprised by all the other 104-106 elements put together, amongst which gold and the like form a microscopic trace. We need to allow the trace to remain a trace without having the jewelers vulgarly displaying their wares, when Earth and its denizens go begging for a little more kindness and a little less cyanide.
