Title: Aqua, Water Remedies in Homeopathy
Author: Raymond Sevar, MD.
Published by: Saltire books, Scotland.
ISBN: 978-1-908127-44-0
Year of publication: 2022, paperback, 261 pages including index
Reviewer: Vatsala Sperling
Practically, anything and everything can be turned into a homeopathic remedy using the methodology invented by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. In our practice when our remedy choices are based on time-tested homeopathic processes and principle, we encounter their incredible healing potential. Clinical evidence of successful application of remedies do occupy a vast section of our voluminous materia medica.
It comes as no surprise at all that ‘water’ from various sources are homeopathic remedies. To help us learn all about water remedies, Dr. Raymond Sevar has presented us with a book, AQUA, Water Remedies in Homeopathy.
This book is as plain, as awe-inspiring, and as vital as the focus of this book, ‘water’ or ‘aqua’. Water is life, after all. Could remedies made from water be of equal significance? To find an answer to this question, you must read this book.
Once you assimilate its contents, you will want to go back to many of your cases where the indicated remedy either did not work or worked only partially. You will want to call up these cases and give them a suitable aqua remedy instead.
Since water is a sustainer of life, you will find the attributes of the water remedies reflected in many other remedies, and it would be easy for you to see how you might have missed it. But with this book in hand, you will not be missing any water cases.
The book begins with Dr. Sevar’s effort at familiarizing us with water and aqua themes. Water themes can be recognized in the water remedies:
- Clear, clean, pure, and bright
- Intuition and imagination
- Sensitivity and vulnerability – emotional and cognitive
- Loss of resilience, overwhelm
- Remembering the past, unable to move on, ongoing emotional pain
- Inability to reflect dispassionately, gain closure from relationships, let go of the past
- Suppression of emotions
- Sublimation of libido
- Exhaustion: mind and body
- Desire to beget children and be a parent
Since water contains the elements hydrogen and oxygen, the key words of these two elements do appear in the water themes. The list of aqua words is impressive and includes 111 words that we hear often during case taking. The sensation method practitioners will see that water words can be found in levels 1 through 5, and these words also indicate 11 different miasms.
In this book, we have a whole gamut of rubrics. Initially, a list of 58 rubrics shows the inclusion of various aqua remedies. This list is just a teaser. Further along, in various chapters, Dr. Sevar has presented a total of 38 water remedies.
All these remedies are represented in rubrics that help us narrow our search. Some water remedies we might be quite familiar with, for example, Aqua Marina. Some, at least for me, are new, for example, Aqua Hall, and Aqua XWMUTHKWIUM (pronounced MUSQUEAM). A quick look at the other remedies in these rubrics give us a pointer for differential diagnosis of water remedies.
Some families of remedies are closely related to aqua remedies, for example, fishes, imponderables, minerals (gemstones, gases, acids, and lanthanides), milk, sarcodes, birds, ocean invertebrates, plant family Asteraceae, Coniferae, Liliaceae, and Solanaceae.
Next, the author elaborates on this point by presenting rubrics shared between remedies related to aqua, and the remedies from aqua. Personally, I found the list of rubrics shared by aqua remedies and lac remedies very interesting. Milk is the first sustainer of life of all mammals, and milk has about 87% water.
There are individual brief chapters devoted to remedies from specific sources of water: salt waters, hot springs, warm springs, cold springs, spring-fed lakes, new water, and water from Roman Baths Museum pool in Bath, Somerset, England, where the water has not been refreshed from the hot springs for almost 2000 years, distilled water, and water from two rivers.
Is it likely that remedies from water of highly venerated and worshipped rivers, for example, river Ganga in India, wells dug in holy shrines, temples, and samadhi spots of various sages like Vivekananda, Shri Aurobindo, and Ramana Maharishi, have unique and distinct healing messages that could be uncovered in a proving? I do hope too that Dr. Sevar might explore remedies from these sources of water, for the next edition of his book.
The chapters listed above have information regarding composition of water, proving, rubrics, themes, related remedies, and a few chapters have cases too. A case of psoriasis is highly illustrative where the indicated remedies like Lachesis, Staphysagria, and even Psorinum were given leading to minimal improvement and even aggravation, but true resolution of the case occurred on daily dose of Aqua marina 6x.
In another case, a 70-year-old lady with atopic eczema from ten months of age, had a severe flare up of her symptoms while grieving after the death of her husband of 44 years. She was given Sulphur LM1, and she became worse, but recovered fully on aqua Skookum Chuck 6x.
When I received this book, I first read chapter 10, Aqua and clinical indications, because this chapter educates us about when we could consider water remedies. In the kingdom approach, indication for water remedy comes up when a case of mineral kingdom shows themes and keywords of more than one row and column of the periodic table. In some cases, the strange, rare, and peculiar symptoms lead to a water remedy. The case might present a pattern and totality of a specific water remedy.
This chapter 10 also has clinical rubric clusters like anxiety state, headaches and migraines, back pain, rheumatic disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, skin eruptions and ulcers, heartburn, cracks, corns and excoriations, failure to thrive, cognitive and physical exhaustion, emotional overwhelm, chloasma gravidarum, breast sensitivity, pain and tumor, unresolved grief, sleep disruption, ear wax, coryza and viral respiratory tract infections, tonsils, laryngitis, and cough.
These clinical rubric clusters cover a lot of ground. For each cluster, there are rubrics that show a water remedy along with other remedies. We can compare the water remedy with other remedies in the rubric, and if the case has themes, sensations, words, and totality of water remedy, we can choose to prescribe it.
The book concludes with a chapter on rubrics that carry water remedy and nosodes that indicate various miasms.
My personal lesson, and conclusion from this book are that just as water is essential to life, water remedies are essential to our practice. We simply need to learn when, where and how to look for water remedies in our cases where the indicated remedies have not done much and where a reassessment of the cases clearly take us to rubrics that have water remedies in them.
A quick differential diagnosis among various remedies in these rubrics and highlighting the water themes in our case will help us choose an appropriate water remedy based on indications. To this end, Dr Raymond Sevar has written this practical, and highly useful book that totally merits (and successfully commands) our attention and curiosity. Well done, Dr Sevar, Thank You!
As to where to find the water remedies listed in this book, I would suggest, you could write to the author and ask, or inquire with your trusted homeopathic pharmacies.
