The California Homeopath
Journal of the California Homeopathic Medical Society

January 2009

An English volunteer Rob and I are now in Kumasi, about 150 miles from Accra, the capital. We are here to do some teaching of homeopaths in the region and have been joined by another English/Israeli homeopath. There are a number of practitioners here, but mostly they do combination remedies. So we are here to bring the good word of Hahnenmann and the single remedy.

We had one case today though. A 68 year old man with intense shaking of both hands and a severe stitching pain in his sacral area, making him walk bent, and more recently pain in the coccyx after having a herbal enema by a local herbalist. He also has diabetes and is taken tablets for it for the last 10 years. The shaking is worse when he is hungry and much better after eating. He has been informally diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. That was the case. We could not get any other information from him. The shaking is the same whether he is holding something or not. In his life he worked as an anesthetist in a hospital. He had no significant medical history or other general factors. So based on the information we had, I could see no other remedy than Plumbum, which has the shaking very strongly, has paralytic type pains (which the back could indicate further neurological damage occurring and also is a remedy for diabetes and is worse fasting). We asked him to get his blood sugar and urine level checked again in case it needs adjusting. We had to go on the major keynote in the case and let’s hope it works.

We had a case come back that we had given Stannum to one month ago. She came with this chronic cough which was worse for exertion, bending forward, walking at all. She would hold her chest when coughing and would get a headache from it. She could cough non stop it seemed for hours. She was extremely short of breath made worse by the least exertion and by coughing. The cough was dry, with little expectoration brought up. I suspected she had bronchiectasis. This was not just a simple cough and therefore the remedy had to cover the depth of the pathology. From this description I suspected Stannum and so asked a leading question, sorry, but I wondered whether she had a hollow sensation in the chest. She said she did and that was enough. One month later, she is doing generally much better. She still coughs some but her breathing is better and she can walk further than before. I told her it would take six months to really make a difference and that she should come back each month for more medicine.

Some cases take a lot of work to get symptoms from. Mostly they are being translated for me so that in itself takes time. But often, people volunteer very little information and unless one strikes lucky early on with a few good keynotes, it is a relentless search until enough information is found. One woman came to the clinic recently. She was 52 and complained of trembling of the head with palpitation. She has 5 children but her husband died a long time ago. The palpitations only started in the last day and she also had nausea and vomiting. She said the palpitations would get better after she vomited. She said one week ago she had a fever, was tested for malaria, which was negative but then the fever continued all week. However, when her temperature was taken last week, it was only 36.9, so we weren’t sure it was actual fever. She said the palpitations only began in the last day when she was considering going to the hospital and how she was going to pay for it. She said that in the last days she has felt dizziness, with the feeling as if she’s drunk. She has nausea with the dizziness.

That was basically it and this took me about 20 minutes to get when including all the translating. (I learnt later that she is being pursued emotionally by a man who is already married, but who has left his wife and children and his wife is bringing legal action against him. But she is letting herself be involved with him.) The only other observation about her is that she seemed exhausted, sitting back in the chair with her head resting or leaning forward against a low wall.

There are times in cases where it seems all the questions that can be asked have been asked and yet it is really not enough. Some cases here simply do not offer the opportunity for more chronic or constitutional style of prescribing and one has to give a remedy based on what one has. Also, it is in these cases where some kind of intuition can kick in, however inconsistent this may be. In this case, I looked up the rubric: head, trembling and shaking and then vertigo, as if intoxicated and also with nausea. The remedy had to ideally have a couple of these symptoms in it and also cover her general exhausted state. Gelsemium came to mind initially but with the symptom: dizziness  as if she was drunk,  then I considered Cocculus, which was confirmed with the trembling of the head. I have often found Gelsemium and Cocculus to be similar and needing differentiation. Both have the weakness, heaviness, neurological conditions and an over emotional condition. Cocculus in particular can be impressionable to emotions, easily worried,  becoming weak and worn out easily, as from nightwatching, a key symptom of the remedy. Maybe this is what is meant in the books by “sensitive, romantic girls and lighthaired, timid, nervous, persons etc.” They suffer easily from too much strain and in this case, her concern of going to the hospital was like the mental symptom “thoughts fixed on one unpleasant subject, sits as if absorbed in deep and sad thoughts and observes nothing about her.” Both remedies have the dizziness but Cocculus in particular has the vertigo as if drunk and in Phatak, it states it has dizziness, with nausea and with palpitation. So Cocculus was given.

By Richard Pitt

Richard Pitt | Homeopath and Educator

Richard has been practicing and teaching homeopathy in San Francisco since 1995.  He orginally trained in England and has been practicing homeopathy since 1984.  He is former Director of the Pacific Academy of Homeopathy in San Francisco and also teaches at many other schools in the United States and Canada.  He is a founding board member and past president of the Council for Homeopathic Certification, which has established professional certification for the homeopathic profession in North America.  He is in private practice in San Francisco.

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