Dr. Thomas Pablo Paschero says that Homoeopathy, as well as the modern medical school of thought, supports the theory that every disease must be dealt with from a dynamic point of view, i.e. that all sorts of ailments have a psychosomatic basis, since every psychic manifestation is related to a somatic change and every organic change has a specific meaning. The separation of “psyche and matter, or soul and body, is no longer appropriate to the new conception of life in the light of modern scientific discoveries and improvements. Nor can we continue to pursue the sterile though thrilling controversy between mechanism and vitalism. Disease must be considered as a special behaviour of the living being, as a vital phenomenon, full of meaning, that finds expression through an organized structure.

The homoeopath is forced to investigate not only the specific function of a given organ, such as the heart, the stomach or the liver, but also the total complex evolution of a human being as a person, i.e. as a living whole, in adjusting himself to the cosmic and social environment within which he moves. This compels the physician to come in contact with his patient’s subjective word. No objective semeiology or instrumental investigation of the psychic phenomena will provide him with a knowledge of that inner essence or intrinsic unfathomable reality that is the mind.

It is impossible for analytical medicine to make a clear and concise definition of sickness and health. All the results arrived at on homoeostasis, the neuroendocrinal equilibrium, the electrolytic balance and the physicochemical mechanisms fail to establish a close connection with the patient’s subjective, emotional and instinctive world, fail to solve by themselves the particular, special and personal problems of each patient.

He discovers “how” the biological phenomena take place, but he cannot determine “why” they occur, they are interviewed with the patient’s subjective world. In order to have a thorough understanding of the problem, he must view it in its total psychophysical dimension. He must inevitably relate his patient’s disease and present state to the total number of elements which form his biopathography, to the psychodynamic disposition that has made such a disease possible, both from the physical and the moral points of view. Furthermore, he must find out what the meaning of the symptoms is and he must endeavour to study and analyse his patient as a human being rather than concern himself simply with the right or wrong functioning of a given organ. A new clinical approach must be developed, so that the physician may step from the pathological manifestations of the disease to the dynamic underlying strata of the cellular pathology and plunge himself right into the midst of the vital disturbances that form his patient’s personality and the physiological evolution of his whole beings as a biological unit.

It cannot be accepted, as the ancient Semitic-Greek medicine maintained and the present-day organicistic medicine appears to insist, that man’s true being is his physical nature. Nor can we accept that his moral and ethical existence, his emotional fluctuations and moral conscience are the result or the epiphenomena of his bodily physiology.

Life can be no other than a surrogate of the creative activity. That is why in the study of the human being we should not concern ourselves only with his anatomical structures and mechanisms, but rather with man’s whole process of life through which those very structures and mechanism are put to the test by him. We must gain a knowledge of the terms within which his inner world connects itself with the outer world, thus conditioning his own personal life to the rhythm of the Universal Law.

Neither mind nor body fall sick as separate units, nor is the patient ill because his liver or heart, his lungs or stomach are unwell, or because he suffers from some form of neurosis, but because his whole being is sick in the dynamic centre of his personality, in his emotional reactions, his inner will, and that hidden innermost recess of his being where his true self throbs and where we shall ultimately find the reason or meaning of his existence.

Psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry came into being in answer to the urgent demands of the human reality. They were forced, however, to maintain the Castesian doctrine of body and soul, or “psyche and soma”, when confronted with the impossibility of exploring the psyche with the same instrumental methods which were used to examine the somatic phenomena.

The quantitative method cannot be applied to measure and understand a purely qualitative reality, such as the human mind. Lacking the appropriate method, medicine was forced to leave aside the investigation psychological mechanisms and pretend to ignore the importance of psychology, which is like ignoring the patient himself.

Both currents of medical thought, sustained by every deep and serious physician, meet and merge in the belief that man is a psycho-physical unit, based on the truth that the soul is the shape of the body through which that body becomes human. The atoms and molecules come together and form the body as a human body because of the psyche, soul, or vital force conforming it.

It is obvious that this philosophic conception has a tremendous importance for the correct analysis of the patient’s clinical history. The physician must try to understand the emotional background and the development of the individual as a person, the vicissitudes he has undergone during his process of maturation as a human beings, more than actual functioning of the organs and the chemical composition of humors.

Dr. Pierre Schmidt defines “psychosomatic: as a pathogenic concept tending to have psychic influences playing an important role in the determination of functional troubles and even of certain organic diseases. The physicians of the orthodox school are only now discovering the psychosomatic. After cutting a man in two and having isolated his psyche and mind from his soma, they have stuck the two pieces together again to consider him at last as a biological whole.

Psychosomatic medicine aims at an original synthesis which known how to recognize the multiple casuality of morbid phenomena; it studies the sick man as a biological whole among his multiple psychosomatic inter-reactions.

This biological whole has already been evoked by Hahnemann in 1813, in his famous essay entitled: “Spirit of the Homoeopathic Doctrine of Medicine” where he speaks of the living individual unity of the organism. Similarly, in his sixth edition of the Organon he repeats in more than five paragraphs that there exists a biological whole in our organisms.

Hahnemann is thus the true creator of psychosomatic medicine. Although he may not be the first to speak of the relationship between the spirit and the body for Hippocrates and Galen did so before him he is nevertheless the first to have outlined the practical rudiments of possible therapeutic measures to be taken in the ailments which give result.