Vet Case: Daisy the Hen

Daisy is a young, happy, laying hen who lives as part of a group of three in the perfect chicken run which is kept very clean. She is loved and fed all the best organic food in the world. One day I received a call stating that Daisy had been unwell since the day before and the local vet had prescribed Baytril and gave a poor prognosis, for what is most likely a case of egg-bound with rupture of the oviduct and peritonitis. Obviously she is ruffled up and she does not do much, tries to eat a little and has a swollen abdomen. The clinical signs I get are those you would normally associate with a chicken with peritonitis and which is likely to die soon.

I ask: what strikes you about Rosie? ‘She is fiercely red around her anus and passes no stool just a little bit of white mucus (=urine)’.

The only remedy at Redness of the anus is: Medorrhinum. She receives the remedy in 200 six times in 36 hours and she starts eating again and behaving more normally by the time of the last dose.

I see her the day after the last dose. She is still a little bit red below her cloaca and the abdominal wall feels thick and soft. The abdomen is only a little swollen; she is not quite right yet.

I am told that she always was the last to lay her eggs and often struggled (pain?!) to pass them. While the two other chickens will happily fly on the owner’s back when she cleans out the pen, Rosie always stayed more in the background.

I felt that the Medhorrhinum had done fantastically well but there was something missing, and I did feel another remedy may need to be found. I made a basic repertorisation which gave the following.

Female genitalia, delivery during slow

Mind reserved

Bell, ign, nat m, sec, tritic-v: are covered by the two symptoms.

Natrum mur appeals very much to me and she receives a 30C twice per week to try and nurse her back to full health.

Five days later, things don’t go well. I advise to go back to Medorrhinum and Rosie picks up straight away. She will receive another three doses over the following month every time when she appears to be dropping off a bit. In the mean time she sheds most of her feathers and grows a perfectly new set.

When I see her again nearly two months after the initial episode, she looks like a perfectly normal hen again, but had been unwell that morning. By the time she arrived in the surgery and we took her out of the box, we found two old shrivelled egg yolks on the floor of the box and daisy was her usual self again. She was given another dose of Medorrhinum 200 and went back to normally laying eggs again. She is still Daisy and still reserved though.

Lesson learned: Don’t give up on a remedy that helps the patient until it has stopped helping.