Arthritis Yet-One-More-Tower Of Babel
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1999 Mar / Apr VOL VIII NO 2.
Dr Manu Kothari
Dr Lopa Mehta
The inherent flaw in the theme of this issue is: The term arthritis has been dictionarily declared wrong for, more often than not, there is no inflammation nor infection. So, arthritis rather becomes arthrosis, or a little more comprehensively, osteoarthropathy. The term-inal confusion is modern medicine's fundamental handicap, come Hippocratic allopathy or Hahnemannean Homoeopathy. Yet, the readiness with which all medicos employ the term arthritis is their public admission of their suffering from mental constipation and oral diarrhoea.
The diarrhoeal aspect becomes all the more evident when learned lexicons. Dorland, for example, set about classifying and sub-classifying diseases. Having been sufficiently ambiguous or dementic on the term dementia, another dictionary goes on to give 58 subtypes, including dementia praecocissima, or dementia praecos, for both of which the dictionary gives no place. Sub-classifying it into 40 different types compounds the intellectual ambivalence on arthritis. No wonder that a magnificent tome titled Arthritis, has, at its very first statement, a down-to-earth admission: "The cause, the course, and the cure of human arthritis remains unknown." Good enough reason for NJH to make it a lead-issue, for may be, Homoeopathy may succeed when allopathy has confessedly failed.
Erich Segal, of the Love Story fame, has Doctors as his latest creation, wherein she cites a dean, addressing the newcomers to the Harvard Medical School: thus "Gentlemen, I urge you to engrave this on the template of your memories: there are thousands of diseases in this world, but Medical Science only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. The rest is guesswork".
We happened to read Charak-Samhita, predating Christ by 600 years, describing and classifying cancer with clarity and precision matching today's oncology and revealing thereby that in that much-wanted field, there has been no progress or change in the last 2500 years. Much the same holds true for arthritis.
Lucian of Samosata 114-200 (AD) was a celebrated Greek writer given to "melancholy, of despairing under a veil of cynical levity." In this The Triumph of the Gout, his cynicism and melancholy was eloquent, and for the right reasons:
Then unperceived, she (Podagra, the foot-tortures) drives her piercing Dart,
And Wounds the inmost Sense with secret Smart.
Thro' every Joint the thrilling Anguish pours,
And gnaws, and burns and tortures, and devours,
Till length of Suffering the dire Power appease,
And the fierce Torments at her bidding cease.
What's true of gout, is true of many a form of arthritis. The patient is in misery, the drugs only add to it, and surgery, affordable by the elitist few, is a far from a good answer. The whole burden of arthritis rests on the well-recognized principle of what is powerful, for good can be potent for evil. The animal marvel called a joint, works miraculously through its very rich proprioceptive innervation, that is absolutely silent in health but desperately noisy in disease. An inflamed joint-ineffective or immunologic-is a source of pain reminiscent of a life in hell. And all that all pathies offer, is palliation interspersed with desperate attempts to check the progress of pathology. In the absence of intellectual clarity about many a problem that bothers an arthritic, anything from Gulgul to Gold is offered as a panacea. As of now, much of arthritis is as mysterious and ineluctable as aging and senescence. No amount of genic theorising by Allopathy, miasmic theorising by Homoeopathy, and tridoshic theorising by Ayurveda has been of any avail in elucidating the Cause, Course and Cure of arthritis.
It would pay all pathies to appreciate why an afflicted joint cannot be, so to say, disafflicted. A joint-in a galloping horse, leapfrogging kangaroo, crawling infant or stick-walking aged person, is an inscrutable miracle the real nature of which medicine as yet knows not. During embryogenesis, the joints are the first to be fashioned, the bones much, much later. Hence, it is not that the knee joint is between femur and tibia, but that femur is between the hip and the knee much as the tibia is between the knee and the ankle. This clearly means that the bones are designed to suit a joint which is a coelomic space charged with water, called synovial fluid, that is replenished and removed at almost every heartbeat. The synovial fluid forms a cushion that takes all the weight and impacts, allows the most complicated and rapid movements, keeps the bones at bay by charging the so-called cartilage with water to convert it into a hydrodynamic cushion, the entire operation being orchestrated by a Niagra of proprioception and immaculate, concerted muscle action. The joint is, like Brahman, stronger than Indra's missile and gentler than the petals of a flower. That's wherein, if things go bad, they tend to get worse because of the too many vascular and vector forces at work. Nowhere is the adage - Prevention is better than Cure - more relevant than in arthrology.
The piece ought to end on a note of cheer. The arthrologist-call him rheumatologist-thrives on easing whatever the dis-ease, which largely comprises the drug or that, which while easing the joint pain, certainly sets the stomach afire. But the rheumatologists have no choice.
Theirs is not to reason why?
Theirs is to ease the cry.
Many a times, the rheumatologist reaches the end of his wits to cry out, in despair, like in Shakespeare's Hamlet:
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite.
That ever I was born to set it right.
Christopher Marlowe who, but for his very short life, could have been as great as the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon, aphorised: "Where the philosopher ends, the physician begins." The modern allopathic miracle is that joint replacement can take over where drugs and diet have utterly failed. Yet, the artificial joint, heavy, expensive and cumbersome, is a far cry from the joint made by God. Whatever it is, an artificial joint is an outstanding achievement of human ingenuity and material advances.
May the Homoeopaths, allopaths, ayurvedacharyas, and naturopaths make no bones about their being out-of-joint on the issue of arthritis. Arthritis, to borrow Churchill's telling words, continues to be "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Allopathy has lost and gone mechanical. Homoeopaths could lead the world out of the arthritic chaos.
