Even so I find myself irresistibly impelled to advise against any attempt to treat such cases in their own environment, or in any environment improvised by a local doctor. This I do only because I have known so many cases of utter failure, so many cases where the sufferer's final hope has been destroyed by such experiments.
PRIVATE ADMINISTRATION OF TREATMENT NOT SUCCESSFUL
The friendship existing between a physician and his patient must often disarm the former and incapacitate him for the strict dealing that is required in a treatment like mine. The mere fact that in caring for a friend or one of his regular patients the doctor feels unwilling to exact a definite charge in advance is a certain handicap here, as is also the fact that each patient needs continual watching, and no doctor can afford to devote his entire time and constant medical attention to one patient. The average doctor in private practice, moreover, finds it impossible to secure upon demand nurses of sufficient moral responsibility and medical assistants of sufficient technical training to coöperate with him in the work. Above all, I find that only when the patient is on premises other than his own, in unfamiliar surroundings where he is subject to a strict and inviolable discipline, can the best results be obtained. The doctor who administers this treatment, if he is to win, must have every advantage. Hospital surroundings, unfamiliar nurses, and strange assistant doctors are of great value; but payment in advance may be regarded as the most effective means for inducing the patient to complete the necessary course. An amazing number of people have come to me who have confessed that while they have from time to time tried other treatments, they have never completed one of them. Others come in a skeptical frame of mind. I can mention one such who had been three times to Europe, each time on the advice of the very doctor who, as the patient was aware, had been responsible for his forming the habit.
No physician in private practice should ever attempt to relieve a patient from a drug habit in a manner incidental to the conduct of his practice, though it is nevertheless true that the temptation for doctors to attempt this are extraordinary. A patient who becomes aware that his physician knows of a treatment which will bring relief is likely to bring to bear upon the physician every possible pressure in the effort to induce him to administer it. The doctor must be liberal indeed who, having made such an attempt and failed to achieve good results with it, will acknowledge that he was mistaken at the start.