When school is scary - The boy who became dizzy with fear
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When school is scary
- The boy who became dizzy with fear
by Mary Aspinwall, ISHom, PCHom
Published in Homeopathy Today September 2003
Billy, a boy of almost seven, came to see me with a history
of ear infections, asthma, constipation, and “school
phobia.”
Billy had taken over 100 courses
of antibiotics in his young life! The antibiotics had caused
chronic constipation. He had had ear tubes inserted and his
adenoids removed. Since five years of age he had been on Pulmicort
(a steroid inhaler) for asthma, and at the time of this visit
he had been on Ventolin (an Albuterol inhaler) for a week.
Billy’s mother told me
that he had been “frantic” for the past six weeks.
Three weeks ago, he had started vomiting before going to school
and did not want to attend. His sleep was very disturbed,
and he would wake up between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. feeling anxious
and restless.
Desperately seeking sanctuary
When Billy came to see me he was clearly very disturbed, pacing
rapidly up and down my consulting room for a full hour without
stopping. His mother reported that he did this at home too,
and the pacing could make him dizzy. He was very tense; his
jaws were visibly clenched. He had told his mother he really
didn’t want to be seven (his birthday was fast approaching).
He asked her if he would have to move away from home if he
became a daddy. He didn’t want to go to school because
he was lonesome for his mother and scared of being bullied.
Billy said to her: “I love you desperate … I’m
desperate happy … but I don’t want to go to school.”
Watch out for that truck
I remember a homeopathic lecturer once describing how to choose
between the remedies Aconite and Arsenicum in cases of intense
fear and restlessness like this one. A person who needs Aconite
feels like, “Oh my God I’m about to be hit by
a giant Mack truck and I have one second left to live,”
whereas a person who needs Arsenicum feels more like, “Oh
no, someone has slipped me poison and I’m about to die
a long, lingering death ...” After repertorizing the
case, the urgency I felt from this boy made me choose Aconite
(although Stramonium also came to mind). I prescribed Aconite
30C and told Billy’s mother to call me if there was
no change within two days. In longstanding or chronic cases
I normally ask people to wait three or four weeks until the
follow-up appointment before assessing whether the remedy
has worked. But Billy’s symptoms were intense, and in
my experience, the more intense the symptoms are, the quicker
a homeopathic medicine will work. If I had chosen the wrong
remedy, I didn’t want Billy to suffer unnecessarily
for weeks.
No news is good news
The days passed and I heard nothing. Four weeks later we had
a follow-up appointment. Billy’s mother told me there
had been a fantastic improvement. He now felt OK about going
to school and about turning seven. He had stopped pacing and
had no dizzy spells. His sleep was very good, and he had not
been up at night since taking the remedy. He had had ear pain
the day after taking the remedy. I believed this to be a positive
sign as it is common to experience a return of old symptoms
when a homeopathic medicine is working well.
Homeopathic home run
At the second follow-up visit, eight weeks after taking Aconite,
Billy and his mother reported further improvement. He no longer
took his inhalers. His nose was running, where it had been
very dry before. He had had profuse discharge from his left
ear. Despite the discharge, he had had no further ear pain
and no other symptoms. He also had a lot more energy. He had
“filled out” and had a better color.
For better or worse?
This case is a good illustration of what Constantine Hering,
a great homeopath of old, observed if a patient’s symptoms
were moving in what he termed the “Direction of Cure.”
Hering noted that as a person heals: symptoms (especially
the more superficial symptoms like skin eruptions) tend to
move from above to below (e.g., from the head or chest down
towards the arms, legs, or feet); symptoms tend to move from
within to without (e.g., from internal problems like angina
to more external problems like skin eruptions); and old symptoms
tend to reappear in reverse order to their original order
of appearance. In the process of healing, old symptoms will
often return, and this is always to be welcomed as a sign
of recovering health.
When ear goo is good
I had already told Billy’s mother to expect an improvement
in her son’s anxiety levels first and later to watch
for the return of his earlier ear symptoms, possibly with
accompanying discharge from the ear—and to view this
as a very good sign. This meant that she was not unduly upset
when it happened. I asked her not to use antibiotics without
first contacting me. Fortunately, her son did so well on Aconite
that no more conventional treatment was needed, and he made
a full recovery.
Better out than in
Let’s look at this case with Hering’s observations
on the Direction of Cure in mind. Before homeopathic treatment,
Billy’s disturbance was in the ear, later moved to the
lungs (moving within, so he was getting sicker), and then
moved even deeper to the emotional level. After taking Aconite,
Billy’s emotional disturbance resolved first, then his
lungs improved, and finally he succeeded in forcing out the
(formerly suppressed) discharge from his ear.
Don’t ignore those red warning lights
The earlier, repeated ear infections should have been seen
as red warning lights telling us that all was not well with
this child. The repeated use of antibiotics dealt only with
the bacterial infection and not the underlying disturbance
that had brought about his susceptibility to those infections.
Once the more superficial symptoms were covered up, the disturbance
then began to manifest on deeper levels. The moral of this
tale is not to ignore your body’s warning signals.
“The treatment was a success … but the
patient died”
This is a case worth considering, not just because the homeopathic
medicine brought instant benefits, gratifying though that
always is! It’s an instructive case because it points
out the dangers of seeing the symptom as the problem and being
determined to remove it at any price. In this case, sure,
Billy’s ear stopped hurting after many, many courses
of antibiotics, but his bowels, lungs, sleep patterns, and
emotional well-being all deteriorated. We need to ask ourselves
what is more important, the symptom or the person?
Learn to love your symptoms
What is needed is a paradigm shift, a new way of seeing symptoms.
Symptoms are friends not foes … they are like warning
lights on the car’s dashboard telling us that all is
not well and asking us to investigate the underlying reasons.
If we choose to ignore these symptoms, we risk getting bigger,
brighter, harder-to-ignore warning signals next time around.
Children are, of course, prone to the odd acute infection
every now and then. The occasional episode is no great cause
for alarm, but if your child is suffering from repeated infections
of any kind, it is well worth getting professional homeopathic
advice. And don’t forget to love those old symptoms
returning—hopefully they’ll be the green light
that will allow your body to move on towards cure.
About the author:
Mary Aspinwall studied at the London College of Homeopathy
and is a Dynamis School graduate. She is a Registered member
of the Irish Society of Homeopaths. In 1992 she designed the
best-selling Helios Double Helix homeopathic medicine kits
for home use, foreign travel, and childbirth and wrote A Basic
Guide to Homeopathy. She now has a large, busy holistic health
center in the South West of Ireland, teaches for the Irish
School of Homeopathy, and together with her saintly husband
runs www.homeopathyworld.com. You can read more of her cases
and articles there.
© Mary Aspinwall
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