The Concept of Miasms

Having successfully practiced homeopathy for some time, Hahnemann came to the conclusion that even alter homeopathic treatment, symptoms recur; at that time he only had a few remedies like Bryonia, Aconitum, etc. He followed the homeopathic principles, but the symptoms kept coming back. He was not satisfied at all because he was very self-critical. Something was not correct. He spent twelve years taking hundreds of cases; asking about the history of the disease, the diseases of the parents and grandparents, the great-grandparents – going back as far into the past as he could and then he analyzed the results with statistics. He discovered that there is a deep weakness within man that makes him susceptible to certain diseases and named it `miasm‘. Bacteria or viruses do not make us ill, they just take advantage of this existing weakness. By his study of cases Hahnemann found out that there is a line you can follow, that diseases occur in a special order. So he could draw certain conclusions from current diseases to former ailments. He also noticed the connection between the patients‘diseases and the ones in their family history.

Miasms (or our deep weaknesses) are like cracks in the vital force. Often minor causes are responsible for so called refractory diseases like allergies: “After having switched jobs I am suffering from hay fever.” There was a lot of stress, an unfamiliar situation; the apartment stayed the same; the birch trees too, the carpets and the cat, but nevertheless the hay fever appears with his switching jobs. How can we make a cat responsible for this? How can we blame the beautiful woods or pollen and dust? They have been there before, they did not get more “poisonous”, and other family members are not suffering either. They are all part of the universe. Each one has its own mission and task. The human being is weakened and suddenly produces an allergic reaction towards his environment. We should cure these weaknesses instead of senselessly hunting for cats or pollen.

Hahnemann saw the connections. The patient develops hay fever because his father used to suffer from skin allergies. The only difference is that the father had allergies on the skin, whereas his offspring are having them in the bronchial tubes or in the mucous membranes of the nose. The disease changed its location, but the problem remains the same. Due to a small cause, like changing jobs (too much stress at once), the crack in the vital force opened. To manifest his theory: in former times the patient was treating himself with Allium cepa or Aconitum.

The symptoms vanished but returned after a short while. This means the remedy choice was correct, but the remedy could not cure deeply enough to reach the roots of the disease, because his father had the same problems before.

The roots of the disease go back to former generations. How can we expect that antihistamines or acute remedies like Allium cepa or Aconitum could bring a cure?

The rightness of Hahnemann‘s theory has been confirmed by generations of homoeopaths. For example, a patient mentioned that his grandmother was depressed and finally committed suicide. Her daughter had polyarthritis since her twentieth birthday and by the age of thirty she already had to sit in a wheelchair; furthermore she was suffering from uterine prolapse. What does this depression have to do with the prolapse of the uterus? What is the connection to polyarthritis? This is the speciality of homeopathy and no other specialist knows about it. But thanks to Hahnemann‘s observations, homoeopaths do know what it is all about. There are people coming to me and I can often tell them a lot about the diseases in their family. They are quite surprised sometimes, but it is not clairvoyance, it is the study of the concept of diseases. This miasmatic concept is Hahnemann‘s masterpiece. The development of homeopathy, including the law of similars, is wonderful; the discovery of relations between diseases, the study of miasms is absolutely perfect. No word written by Hahnemann two hundred years ago needs alteration and all this without using a laboratory or a microscope. This science is a gift from God.

Abstracted from the book “The Journey of a Disease” by Dr. M. S. Jus