Author:
Rajan Sankaran
Book:
Interhomeopathy
Type:
Theory/Case
Chapter:
2015.08.03
The evolution of homeopathic practice
by Rajan Sankaran
Case 3
This is a case of a man with fibromyalgia. He also came with recurrent cold and cough that he gets three to four times a day, and for which he had to take antibiotics (Augmentin 1000 for fifteen days). He is only better when he is taking the antibiotics. Occasionally with this condition, he also gets breathlessness. In his history, he reports that he has been operated for sinusitis. His blood tests reveal that he is deficient in Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D.
Patient: “My feet are not able to take my weight. I have a disturbed sleep; I am tired throughout the day and feel very sleepy. I am the head of marketing and for the past one to two years, I feel a loss of confidence. I feel breathless and need to take a rest. I am also losing hair for the past fifteen years or so. I have had dandruff for a long time; someone has even said it is psoriasis.
“I have two kids. A younger daughter, who if I carry her, I feel I will drop her. I cannot hold her properly. I use to be very short tempered and now I am too irritable. I shake when I am angry and feel I will fall down.
“There is constant burning sensation in my eyes even after a good sleep. I have cramps in my legs, especially when going to bed, and my legs are in a lot of pain. I get tired very soon. When talking, I am feeling very tired and breathless.
“My weight is stable at 74-76 kilos for the past three to four years. Every part of my body is shrinking, my bones are shrinking; my entire body is shrinking. I get pain not only in my legs but also in the lower back when sleeping or when walking for long periods of time. I have flat feet. I am getting pain all over my body.
“My job is OK, not that much stress. I don’t travel a lot, my life style is good, but my food habits are bad. I also get acidity which is troubling me a lot. There is problem in my stomach. The acidity is affecting my throat. I have observed that when my stomach is not well, then it disturbs my throat and my sinuses get infected.”
After he narrated his complaints, I asked what was the effect of these problems on him.
P: “I am not able to concentrate on my job. I need to think a lot, I need to communicate, and I want to be an innovator. I am not able to concentrate at present; no one is raising a doubt but it is breaking my confidence. I feel I will not be able to survive.
“For any product to be launched you need innovation. It’s a new experience in life for everybody, something that is nonexistent in the world has come up. You need to be very well-versed with the requirements of the customers. One needs to be fresh, confident, concentrated and thoughtful, thinking about something that is to be newly launched.
“I take care of advertising the brand, communication, and thinking. I am not confident. I feel breathless, my saliva has become thin, so I have to spit when talking, my speech does not flowing naturally; I have to put 110% in that. I had to give a presentation, but I couldn’t speak for five minutes, it was the worst presentation of my life. I felt guilty towards the company and the brand, everyone was looking at me. I felt like, ‘what will they be thinking? What a joker he is, he is not capable of presenting a brand!’ I just wanted to vanish and not be visible to anyone.”
I asked him how he experienced this situation.
P: “I was shaking, I wanted someone to take me out physically, I was psychologically broken for five or ten minutes. I was not able to speak, I lost my confidence. What a fool I am!
“I was just not able to look at myself in the mirror, not able to convince myself that I will be good. These days, I have to be in front of a crowd much more often than in the past.
“I feel discomfort when talking, I feel I need to have proper oxygen. Initially, when I started to talk to you, I was feeling breathless but now I am a little more relaxed.
“I need a deep breath when talking, more when starting to talk and better after twenty minutes. I feel a dryness in my mouth. I spit while I am talking. What will others think about me during the presentation? Everyone will be laughing, feeling that ‘he is not capable of taking responsibility’. You need to take a deep breath.
“My voice gets affected, I am not comfortable, I lose control of my speech, and the words are not right. When this happens, you feel you have not done well, you feel uncertain about the future, like you are hopeless.
“There is always this fear of failure crossing my mind; the feeling that I may have to give up due to my health. What will become of my family, of myself? I believe I am very intelligent but now I tend towards the extreme point of hopeless.”
I asked him what else was bothering him.
P: “In 1993, I suffered from typhoid. After this episode, I started feeling weakness and abdominal pain; I felt a lump in the right side of my abdomen after eating food. When I passed stools, the lump got better. It was like a spasm, a cramp-like colic. I could not lie down during the pain and I had to sit bent forward and apply slight light pressure. Then, I underwent diagnostic surgery, but no diagnosis could be made; they removed my appendix but the pain persisted. I took ayurvedic treatment for this and my motions became very clear whereas previously they were very hard and irregular. The right side of my abdomen was more distended after eating, with bloating and gas formation; after a while it slowly decreases. I become restless with the pain, needing to stand up or down in order to relax. Pressing slightly on my abdomen helps to relieve the pain by passing a little wind.”
After understanding this problem fully, I asked him about his dreams.
P: “I don’t get many dreams as my sleep is disturbed. For the past six to twelve months, my energy is very low and I always feel very sleepy. I do not have any positive dreams, mostly negative. I dream of losing my parents. I have two daughters. I lost a baby boy; during my wife’s delivery there were complications and the child died, but even before losing my child, I dreamt of carrying my child’s body.”
I asked him what he wanted to see from the treatment.
P: “I need to concentrate, every job needs concentration. You have to be innovative; you are taking care of all of India’s marketing. For the past six months, I am feeling low, not healthy, feel weak, sleepy and tired throughout the day. I am going to work, but I don’t feel like going. I feel like going away, taking a break to take proper rest and sleep. I am just working because I am supposed to. Due to the tiredness, I have made a couple of wrong decisions. I have almost resigned three times in the past eight months. There is no pressure from my job, everyone is happy with my work, but out of frustration and irritation, I get restless and irritable.
“I am shrinking; even my clothes do not fit. If my clothes fit me, it gives me confidence. If they are very loose, I feel I am shrinking. I feel as if I am losing something, like losing vitamins in my body or having flat feet. Then, I feel that that which was there in my body is not there anymore. Losing is like a particular element or a thing that was within me which I don’t have now.”
Understanding the case
To solve this case, we must look at the general nature of the problem. This general nature is also known as the Genius or the essence of the remedy or of the patient. Finding the Genius makes for an easier and quicker understanding of the case. In this case, the nature of the pathology is very important and we need to match this with the overall themes of the case.
I first looked at the nature of his pathology. He says: “I have a lot of body aches. I can never stand, I am always tired and I’m losing confidence, losing control. I am going to fall down, as if I can’t hold something. I’m so tired that it feels like my bones are shrinking and I will fall down.”
From this, we can conclude that the nature of the pathology is fatigue; it is as if his muscles, his bones, his brain and everything else has become tired and weak and has lost its capability. The Genius or general idea here is tiredness and fatigability. Consequently, what I want to look for in the Materia Medica is a remedy that has at its very center, core, and in its very essence, this fatigue and tiredness, weakness, falling, and exhaustion.
Life becomes easy when you know that there are very few remedies with this kind of weakness. Once we get these few remedies, then what we have to do is see the themes of one of those remedies and match it to the patient!
In this case, we have, on the one side, this fatigue and tiredness, weakness and exhaustion, and on the other side, we have: “I cannot concentrate, I cannot work, I cannot innovate, I cannot communicate, my confidence is very low, I have no ability, and it is affecting my career.”
Here, we know that the patient is talking about the Mineral kingdom issues, because he is losing his capacity and capability to innovate, to communicate, to use his voice, and he is losing control of his voice.
Minerals have to do with structure. The central theme common to remedies in the Mineral kingdom includes the feeling that something is lacking: lacking in structure or in performance. It can be a lack of identity, lack of support, lack of position, lack of relation. In human beings, the Mineral experience corresponds with the stages of human development, which finds its reflection in the seven rows and columns of the Periodic Table of Elements. Each Row has its own respective themes and symptoms that correspond with that stage of human development.
In this case, there are a lot of issues that have to do with his voice; he gets tired when he speaks, he trembles on speaking, and his voice does not come out when he is speaking.
When you put these together you get Stannum metallicum (commonly known as tin).
In this remedy, the first modality listed by Phatak is: Worse: using voice. Secondly, Stannum is an element in Row 5 of the periodic table of elements. In this row, the main themes are creativity, communication, performance and speech. The main feeling is that he has lost it, that he is a failure, he wants to resign, to give up. He has lost the capability to do things, to be creative. Further, when we see his mind symptoms we have a prominent symptom: Very sensitive as to what others say about her. We saw this symptom clearly when the patient was worried about what others would say about him when he was going into the meeting.
In the Materia Medica, Stannum metallicum reads as follows:
▪ Anxious, nervous, sad …Miserable and discouraged
▪ Cannot get rid of an idea once fixed in her mind
▪ Taciturn and dislike of society
▪ Sudden fits of passion
▪ Forgetful and absent minded
▪ Uneasy, knows not what to do with himself
▪ Hopeless, despondent; feels like crying all the time
In generalities we find:
▪ The chief action of tin is centered upon the nervous system, causing extreme weakness, which is especially felt in chest, throat, stomach, upper arms and thighs. The patient is unable even to talk; he drops into a chair instead of sitting down, and trembles on moving.
▪ Weakness is felt much more on going down stairs than going up.
▪ Paralytic heaviness or a weakness.
This patient said that when he climbs the stairs, he feels as if he has run a marathon. This is the kind of weakness and exhaustion sensation that he feels in his legs. In Stannum metallicum we see the following symptoms:
▪ He trembles on moving, he drops himself on a chair instead of sitting
▪ It is a paralytic weakness and weakness of nerves
What can be understood is that this weakness is also a nervous weakness, therefore any anxiety makes it worse.
▪ There is also a key symptom of Stannum: PAINS, INCREASE GRADUALLY AND GRADUALLY SUBSIDE, which matches our patient. In his past complaints, he had abdominal pain for five years. The following physical symptoms are representative of our patient:
▪ Pain, pressure amel.
▪ Pain, bent bending double amel.
▪ Pain, eating agg. after
▪ PAINS, INCREASE GRADUALLY AND GRADUALLY SUBSIDE
▪ Pain, Night restlessness with
▪ Stool, Hard
▪ Abdomen, distension, sides right
▪ Flatulence, after eating
▪ Flatulence, obstructed
▪ Flatulence, pressing on abdomen amel.
The symptoms from the mind that matched our patient included:
▪ Concentration difficult attempting to, vacant feeling has a
▪ Despair exhaustion from
▪ Dreams misfortune of
▪ Mind - EXHAUSTION, mental, prostration - talking, from
▪ Mind - EXHAUSTION, mental, prostration - trembling, with
▪ GENERALS - REST - amel.
▪ GENERALS - REST - must rest
▪ Standing agg.
Mentally, our patient was empty, weak, and drained. It was as if everything had come to an end and he had lost control. This in turn made him weak and empty, as if life has drained away.
Prescription: Stannum metallicum 1M
Follow-up: his fibromyalgia pains and his voice’s complaints improved dramatically, and he was overall in a much happier mental state.
This contemporary approach in homeopathy, termed Synergy, has evolved over the last thirty years and has come to be advantageous when utilized in homeopathic practice. While utilizing in depth knowledge in fundamental and traditional tools of homeopathy like the Materia Medica, Repertory, and the Organon, the Synergy method also values the newer approaches like Sensation, Kingdom and Miasm understanding. This is a system that is unique – its design can be taught, practiced, and replicated successfully by students and practitioners. The method has brought together both the old and the new approaches in homeopathy.
Keywords: synergy, Guernsey, Allen, Kent, Phatak, Boenninghausen, Boger, modern homeopathy.
Remedies: Belladonna, Crotalus cascavella, Kalium bromatum, Stannum metallicum.