It's not heavy, it's light: a case of Spectrumby John Ourant
The patient is a 56 year old woman whose chief complaint is arthritis in the thumbs. She has trouble grasping and sometimes drops things. Writing can be hard and using tweezers is almost impossible. The thumb joints feel loose and they ache, worse in cold weather. She does not have arthritis in her other fingers, just the thumbs, although her hands get numb and tingly easily in the cold.
She also complains of low energy. This was remarkable to me because she presented with the opposite: perky and cheerful, speaking rapidly, sometimes changing subjects abruptly and sitting restlessly. It was intense to be with her. Regarding the low energy, however, she said that she goes and goes and goes and then gets home at 7 o’clock and drops.
She says: “I don’t think about my body. I don’t take rest breaks. I don’t even take the time to breathe sometimes.” She says that she is always thinking about the next thing to do and that she has flashes of intuition: “Wow! Click! Write it down. But then I don’t have sustained energy to work it out.”
“Thoughts come in and out fast. Just like with this foot” (indicating her vibrating foot). She gets impatient with “people who are slow minded.” She says its hard work to be normal with people because her head goes so fast.
“I tend to change jobs because I get bored. I hate mundane work, things that are boring or repetitive, where you can’t use your mind. I have had to do it, but I don’t like it.”
She feels like there is something big that she has to do in life. “It’s haunted me, plagued me, figuring out what I should be doing.”
Asking her more about what this “big thing” feels like to her, she says: “It’s like a ball of energy that’s back there. It’s some kind of a blockage, obscuration. It’s like when a mother is ready to give birth (she has no children). It’s like a brilliant, bright sun. Big stuff that will help the planet. It’s a big, glowing, bright light, really illuminating for people.”
She complains of being indecisive and having difficulty being clear about what she would like to do. She blames her lack of ability to do more in life to a lack of self-esteem. “I haven’t touched the tip of my capabilities. I’ve always gone beneath. I don’t believe enough in myself.”
She does not like to live by time, dates or clocks. She likes to “flow and tune into where I want to be and when. I get more done that way.
Time is so artificial.” I asked how she is with directions and she says she loves maps and gets turned around easily without one.
She said that her mother tried to kill her a couple of times. “She tried to drown me once and has chased me around the house with a butcher knife.” Despite the fact that she had been terrified of her mother, she said: “Other times, she was fun. I probably terrorized her in another lifetime.” She did not feel this was an issue for her at this point in her life. She felt that the main result was that she had never wanted to have children and had a fear of being pregnant.
She also has a fear of hurting others. If she hurt someone it would be “crushing, devastating, like going into blackness, nothingness.”
She is terrified of amusement park rides, even Ferris Wheels.
She hates big crowds because she can feel people’s energies.
She likes things to be in order and describes herself as a perfectionist. She brought a stack of notes to the consultation, but did not refer to them.
Her arthritis is worse in the cold, but not affected by the damp. She likes to be around water: likes rain, likes to swim and loves hot baths.
She loves sugary foods, fruit juice, oysters, and avocados. She cannot stand eggs. She is allergic to dairy and wheat and has not eaten either for thirty years.
She always gets at least two colds a year and has had viral pneumonia twice. She had both types of measles and the mumps as a child, and whooping cough as an adult.
She had been given Rhus tox years ago by another homeopath, which she said had helped her.
Prescription:
Actinium nitricum 30C
Follow-up: she felt more calm and focused, and her mind was not jumping around so much for a few days after taking the remedy the first time. There was a slight improvement with her thumbs.
“All my life it’s been hard to be in my body. It doesn’t feel like my native habitat.”
I asked her what it would be like in her native habitat.
“It wouldn’t be this densely physical. Even as a kid, it felt dense. It would be a lot lighter. It takes time commuting my body around. What a burden. You’d be mostly energy. People would love and care for one another. It wouldn’t have a lot of heavy energy, and I wouldn’t be lugging my body around.
“When you are with other people whose thoughts are fast, it’s like nectar. For some people it’s about the physical body, for me it’s about how fast your mind can go. I tried my best not to live in that realm because it’s too fast for people.
“[People would] all be in sync together, all focused on their own things, but like a wonderful thing that all meshes together and flows. It’s dynamic and it flows. And it’s light, it’s light.
“Except that here on earth, to be in your body and to do the work you need to do on this level of vibration … you need to be more grounded.”
Prescription:
Positronium 200C
Positronium is in the rubrics (from the Complete Repertory):
Extremities; INFLAMMATION; Fingers; first, thumb (5) *
Extremities; LOOSENESS; Sensation of; joints (22) *
Mind; TALK, talking, talks; Hasty (69) *
Mind; HURRY, haste; Everybody moves too slowly (4) *
Follow-up: her thumbs were slightly improved, less painful, but still feeling loose; the arthritis was less sensitive to the cold. She reported feeling noticeably calmer and more focused. However, she still complained of low energy and heaviness at times, especially at the end of the day. There was not any further improvement on repetition. She decided to get married to her long-time partner about a month after taking
Positronium.
Prescription: Eberthium
Eberthium had no effect, and shortly after, there was a pause in treatment because she had the flu and was treated acutely. After she recovered from the flu, I studied her case and prescribed
Spectrum 200C.
Spectrum is a remedy made from sunlight shining through a prism, separating the light into its component colors. The remedy is also called Rainbow.
Spectrum is in the rubric (from the Complete Repertory): Extremities; STIFFNESS; Fingers; first, thumb (13) *
Also, she had a hair style that was reminiscent of the “big hair” of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I have since learned from Lou Klein that this can be characteristic of imponderable remedies.
Another interesting detail: her mother was sick after giving birth (from the anesthesia?) and complained that she had to be in the hospital in the dark for two weeks.
Follow-up: after two weeks, her thumbs only bothered her when she used a lot of pressure, and after six weeks she said they were not a problem anymore. Her energy levels improved and she was much calmer and able to focus.
She had very little trouble with her thumbs during that winter, repeating the remedy once, and was continuing to do well ten months after taking the remedy.
Keywords: arthritis thumbs, brilliant, illuminating, energy, lightRemedies:
Actinium nitricum, Eberthium,
Positronium,
Spectrum.