Ferrum phosphoricum CaseA 45 year old woman has high blood pressure. It was discovered two years ago during a routine check, but recently she has felt uncomfortable with it. She has a headache on getting out of bed, a feeling of pressure in the forehead and on the vertex.
She doesn’t sleep well, wakes up at 2 am or 3 am, worrying ‘how to do this and how to do that’.
She is tired, listless and irritable.
Her vision is disturbed, a sort of tunnel vision < watching television.
She has suffered from migraines since she was 24. Now it comes at the time of the menses. Beforehand she feels hurried, with nausea and pressure in her head. During the migraine the pain is on the right side, above her eye and ear. It is as if her head is very big. Her right eye is sensitive with burning tears and diminished vision. Discharge from her nose, toothache, feverish. Her stomach is also upset, she vomits with great straining and she has diarrhoea; both ameliorate the headache. The headache is < chocolate and cheese, > cold applications and sleeping for a few hours. The migraines started when she was working too hard when she was the head of an institution.
General characteristics:
Location: right sided.
Temperature: cold, she likes fresh air, woods (2), mountains (3). Fear of thunder when she was young. Perspiration when stressed.
Time: < morning, 7 am.
Desires: sweet (2), meat (2), salt (2), coffee.
Aversion: Strong spices, eggs. < strawberries, gives her urticaria.
Red face after alcohol.
Menses: copious.
Sleep: wakes up worried around 2am to 3am.
Mind: Lately she has been very irritable, as if she is losing her grip on things. She also panics easily.
She does like to have contact with many people, talks very spontaneously. She used to know everybody in her old town. Since she moved house she has had high blood pressure. She doesn’t know many people in this new town yet, and the new friends that she did make have let her down recently, because her daughter finished her relationship with their son.
She works a few days each week in a foster home. She likes spending her energy on this kind of work because she gets a lot of happiness and attention in return. But the director of this home is giving her some trouble. He is not very considerate to his employees, so she feels that she herself has to take extra care of the welfare of her colleagues.
She is worried about her husband, especially since he has had a serious illness. She also worries a lot about her children.
She works hard and is compulsive in keeping the house tidy, sometimes not stopping until midnight. She has always been a persistent and hard worker, from childhood onwards.
Her parents came from a simple background and they were content to send her to the most basic secondary school. But she wanted to go further and try a more difficult school. They agreed on the condition that she had to do her very best, otherwise they would take her away from that school. She did do very well and got high marks, but she often dreamt that she had not done her homework, or had lost her books etc.
AnalysisHere we have various characteristics of
Ferrum: red cheeks, < wine, high blood pres-sure, < 3 am, right-sidedness. We also have several symptoms of Phosphorus: sympathetic, homesickness, > sleep, right-sidedness. This alone could be sufficient to solve the case.
We can also find Ferr-p by repertorising. Ferr-p is found in some symptoms which were very marked in this patient: ‘head pain, cold applications ameliorate’, 'head pain, pressing vertex’ and ‘face discoloration red, circumscribed’.
Finally we have the Ferr-p theme from the group analysis, the feeling that she had to do her best to be allowed to study. In this case the theme had already occurred in her childhood dreams. It shows us once again the importance of recurring dreams.
What makes this case interesting is that it can be solved using three different methods: combining the elements, repertorisation and group analysis, all three giving the same result: Ferr-p.
ReactionOne month after taking Ferr-p 1M she felt much better. She felt more peaceful and less irritable. Her sleep was good, the headache was less and her vision was much better.