A Case of Severe Itching and Total Body Discoloration Solved with Sensation and Synergy

This is the case of a girl who came to me in 2012 with the complaint of severe itching eruptions all over her body, more on limbs and trunk, with reddish-blackish discoloration.

This case was taken in local language, so here I present the essential parts of the case verbatim… See that the whole energy of the case comes out in the initial few minutes while the patient is narrating her chief complaint… so during that time we really need to be fully aware in all our five senses.

D = doctor, P = patient, hg= hand gesture

My comments are in italics.

D: Yes, tell me what the complaints are.

P: If water falls on it [shows the eruptions] it feels like it has burnt…like how our skin feels if burnt…

D: If water falls…

P: Means how it feels if our skin burns…that kind of feeling…that much only.

D: On applying water?

P: No, if water poured over it…then feels better with cold application

D: Cold application?

P: Feels better by applying ice…but worse if water poured over it … it feels like burning [hg]

D: What is this? [hg]

P: It means something comes out from inside of our skin… [hg] something burnt…there is some dirt inside and I feel it comes out and burns

Suppose if we pour acid on the floor then how the dirt comes out…that kind…. The dirt comes out on skin…

When it starts ITCHING… THERE IS ONLY ITCHING…ITCHING…ITCHING… [hg] AND IT FEELS BETTER AFTER SCRATCHING and the more I scratch more I feel better…

D: Then?

P: Then these kind of rashes appear and at first they are reddish then turns blackish… [Shows red black rashes on forearm, abdomen and chest]

D: What happens after scratching?

P: After scratching burning… only that much

D: Talk about ‘ something comes out’

P: It feels like some type of dirt comes out from skin and it burns… [hg]

There is something in our skin which compels us to itch [hg of itching] it feels like doing this [hg of itching] However I control not to scratch then too it happens… from scratching there is splitting…

When going for bath and applying soap and no matter how much we have decided not to scratch… but when hand goes over that, there is a lot of itching; when soap is applied….it itches…

D: while bathing?

P: Even while bathing…

At this point I was thinking about the kingdom of FUNGI as itching and dirty feeling and split and cracks and abnormal feeling that there is something dirty and abnormal is a strong indication for this kingdom….and the fungi I was thinking about was SECALE COR, so I asked her about the well-known modality of secale cor.

D: Do you like covering the part, or can you bear it being covered?

P: No, I don’t mind covering it [which ruled out SECALE COR] [she was wearing a gold pendant MANGALSUTRA] [In India it’s a tradition that married women wear a necklace with black beads and gold pendant] [ so she was talking about this MANGALSUTRA ]

But this if it touches then it’s so much troublesome that I feel like not wearing it

[ she meant that the hard metal kind of thing gives her trouble if it touches her skin and here BOVISTA was on my mind because a knife and instruments produce deep impression on skin of BOVISTA, but i needed to crosscheck]

P: Even if I wear anything except cotton clothes then I feel.. when will I remove…like synthetic clothes.

[This much of case was taken. I had an idea about the kingdom and that too only in 4 minutes, thanks to the sensation method. I had an idea where I was heading]

D: Tell me more.

P: [She looks at the eruptions and says.. ] And once it starts itching… it feels like when my hand can reach there and I could scratch; so much of trouble and after scratching it feels nice… and after some days from heat there is white colored thing superficially coming out on skin…

D: What is the effect of this symptom on you?

P: I feel like…. when I see somebody else’s skin and it is nice; I feel that it is so clear and why my skin has become black? What wrong did I do? Some people say because your bowels are not clear so it happens but many people have constipation; why with me? What is lacking in me? [This could be a mineral or malarial miasm or a nosode feeling, so I ask her: ]

D: What is lacking in you?

P: I think too much… even which is not to be thought…nothing bad about someone [spontaneous denial shows that she is thinking badly about someone; as I had not told her that she thinks badly about someone!!! See the beauty; when we are asking her about what is lacking in her….she is answering something irrelevant and when it all connects we will reach the simillimum.]

P: We should be thinking nice about our sister in law…let her do whatever she wants but then I feel tensed….if she does something wrong and people blame me…..WHEN I GO IN FRONT OF PEOPLE; I FEEL WHAT THEY WILL TALK ABOUT ME [because of my disease] AND ABOUT MY HUSBAND AND SON…

[Here I ask her about that and she tells me that she covers up herself, wears full sleeve dresses so that she could avoid the comments of people.]

After taking her history I was pretty sure that the case belonged to the KINGDOM FUNGI, but which fungi was not clear to me, so I kept trying to find some specific feature of the well-known fungi remedies like BOVISTA , AGARICUS, SECALE COR, USTILAGO. I was trying to look for the keynotes to match with the patient. The patient was very conscious of the pigmentation on her skin and wanted to hide it so obviously there was this cover up feeling of sycosis miasm.

I asked her about her dreams and she said that she remembered a dream which had come a few days back. She had a dream of a snake; this snake was pursuing her and she holds her elder brother and he laughs at her and hits the snake with a stick; still the snake follows her and she is very much scared that the snake will bite her.

Then she says the snake was actually not looking like a snake and it was small and had white colored lines on it… [hg] It was round and it was pointed in front…and it had a tongue and it was not very long but she was scared of it!! She said that the snake was brown colored and it had white lines on it and there was a round design on it.

She had rheumatoid fever when she was about 16 years old, treated successfully by penicillin injections.

I gave her BOVISTA 200 as BOVISTA belongs to SYCOTIC miasm as per sensation method and she also had symptoms like anger and anxiety on emotional plane, so I gave her 200 C potency. But there was no significant relief to the patient…neither in itching nor in anxiety. She came back after 6 months and I decided to retake the case.

The interesting thing was that this patient had a dream the previous night which unfolded the whole case and her source………]

P: There were these wires used for saline…. it came and enticed me….

D: Where?

P: Not everywhere… in some part….in one part….then I had great fear…that something will happen on my body/skin [hg]…..like if we are bound tightly then there will be this stain….it will become red due to blood congestion.

I had one more dream previously. There was no lights and one man of white color came and slept next to me….my husband was hitting him but he was not getting up… I was telling my husband to kill him or else he will kill us… My husband was hitting him but he was not dying…He was totally white and bald…

D: What was he doing?

P: Nothing but sleeping next to me and I had a great fear that he would kill us…

[When I searched in repertory in the mind chapter under the word wires, I got the following rubric which exactly matched the patient’s dream….we believe that dreams are also a kind of delusion.

“Mind: delusions, imaginations; wires, is caught in (5)”

There were five remedies under this rubric and the only fungi was ustilago. Now it was very much clear to me that the simillimum was USTILAGO. So, here now I wanted to know how her previous dream of the4 snake following her made sense.]

D: What was the fear in the dream of the snake?

P: Fear that it will bite me and its poison will spread [hg] in whole of my body…

It will prick [hg] and then its poison will spread [hg] in whole of my body…

D: Tell me more.

P: Now it has bitten us…then it will spread in whole of my body and I will die… [Giggles]

D: Now only focus on “it will spread in whole of my body” How does the spreading in your body feel?

P: It’s like [hg] pricking…and feels like its poison will go in my whole blood and the blood and muscle will get spoilt!

D: How it will spread?

P: From where it pricked… and it will go [spread] even if we tie up that hand; it will not stop spreading… only this much about fear of snake…

[Now I was pretty sure about the simillimum…it was ustilago.

Ustilago belongs to the tubercular miasm…so I further asked her if she had fear of closed places and had hurried feeling like there is limited time and she said yes!

I checked in detail about the life cycle of ustilago].

Let’s see some of the source level descriptions….

The patient describes her complaints as some dirt coming out of her skin and she gives an example of acid, like how the dirt comes out when the acid is poured on the floor. The patient had a dream of plastic wires binding some of her parts.

The patient had a dream of a brown snake with white lines on it…the snake not looking like an actual snake. The patient is afraid of a snake biting her and its poison spreading inside the blood [hg of spreading]…its nature of fungi to spread and here patient is afraid that it will spread in her blood stream…and ustilago has streamline spread.

The patient said she had increased sexual desire only when her husband would sleep next to her… [Hyphae grow conjugation tubes towards each other]

She was totally cured of her itching and discoloration after initially USTILAGO 30 and then USTILAGO 200 TID for a week within a month. And now she is enjoying a good health.