Results of Treatment

          The period of treatment, improvement index, the medicines indicated and found effective are all exhibited in IIIA, IIIB, IVA and IVB respectively.

          These patients had been under treatment in the IPD of this hospital for 2 weeks to 40 weeks. The maximum improvement by the treatment was noted among the adults (13 out of 21) and middle age (11 out of 18) where as the least was in adolescence (1 out of 3) on the whole 32 out of 50 patients improved to various degrees. Classification wise the catatonic variety and the paranoid variety have better improvement rate (13 out of 19 and 9 out of 16).

Discussions

          The study of 50 cases presented in this paper is confirmative as regards the distribution pattern of the aetiological factors like heredity, learned experiences, socio-economic status, age, sex and occupation. When we see our results of treatment we find that out of 50 patients, 6(M4 + F2) have excellent improvement , 20 (M16 + F4) have moderate improvement and 6 (M4 + F2) have mild improvement, where as only 18(M13 + F5) have no improvement, none got worse during the period of treatment. The improvement index is highly encouraging especially in the context to the longer duration of the suffering and prolonged allopathic treatment even with the number of shocks (ECT) exceeding the recommended limit of 10, and the fact that the cases having been either declared incurable or the family members having no satisfaction with the previous treatment, had come to us as a last resort. The patients even with excellent improvement, discharged from our hospital may have recurrence but this is not the theme of this paper.

1. The improvement found in the patients of Schizophrenia is highly encouraging and we can deduce that Homoeopathic medicines can come forward as the most subtle, gentle and nontoxic substitute against other modes of harmful treatment.

2. The most effective medicines depending upon the symptomatology are Sulphur (200,1000,10M), Natrum muriaticum (200,1000), Stramonium (30, 200, 1000), Nux vomica (30, 200, 1000) and Hyosyamus (30, 200, 1000). Here also, our findings are in conformity with the Homoeopathic philosophy and Organon where Sulphur is mentioned as the medicine of the “Ragged philosopher” which depicts the stage of the indifference and apathy to self and the environment, which is an important symptom of Schizophrenia.