Homeopathy for nettle burns
Skating librarian wrote:
What does the homeopath suggest for nettles beyond swearing and dock leaves?
Chances are homeopathic urtica urtens, which is to say the remedy made from stinging nettle itself, is the answer to nettle stings*—homeopathy’s founding principle is ‘like cures like’.** But some people react to nettle stings with a frantic burning itch, in which case you might try rhus tox***; or if urtica doesn’t work and the burning feels like it’s eating holes in you, then try ars alb—arsenicum album, yes, white (oxide of) arsenic.† And if the burn is severe enough to make you feel feverish, apis.
The main drawback to homeopathy, aside from the fact that most of standard medicine keeps insisting that it’s rubbish, which rather discourages people from trying it, is that it’s user-specific rather than complaint-specific . . . or rather complaint-general. Have a headache? Try aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol. That seems like plenty to be going on with. But if you take a headache to a homeopath—or even to your first-aid homeopathy book—‘headache’ won’t give you a short list of choices, but a longer list of questions. What kind of headache? Pressing, pounding, stabbing, burning? Where is it located? Forehead, temples, back of head, right or left side, alternating? What makes it better or worse? Heat, cold, light, dark, pressure, motion, stillness, indoors, outdoors? Is there a time of day when it’s better or worse? Does it happen under known circumstances, like right before your period or after you’ve had too much coffee?†† There is no such thing, in homeopathy, as ‘It’s just a frelling headache, give me the Disprin.’ You need details.
The individualisation of homeopathy also makes it seem a trifle less than welcoming when someone is trying to have a first go at it, perhaps because a friend or family member or blogger keeps talking about how great it is—and it’s the worst nightmare of someone who doesn’t want to think about their health.††† And it stays both beautifully simple—you want the best match possible between your friend or your dog or your client and the remedy you choose—and exponentially more complicated—there are thousands of remedies, each with a highly specific symptom picture, and everything has the potential to be a remedy—for as much time as you spend with it. For as much time and energy, and sweat, and note-taking, and muttering, and pulling down just one more book or looking up just one more symptom, and staring into space, and list-making, and reading as much as you can get your hands on because the real bottom line is that it’s fascinating—as you choose to spend with it.
But there are very few one-size-fits-all remedies. Arnica for general injury is the best known: it’s brilliant for bruising, but it’s also brilliant for a lot more than that—take one before you go to the dentist and one when you come out again, for example, and you’ll feel a lot less beat up than if you didn’t.‡
After that the lines get blurry. There are a lot of first things to try: nux vom for hangovers, chamomilla for fretful babies that demand to be constantly carried, ars alb for Montezuma’s revenge, at home or abroad, apis for insect bites. But you may turn out to need ars alb for your hangover, and nux for your streaming gut, ledum for your insect bites, and pulsatilla for your wailing infant. Even at a first-aid level homeopathy is about the whole person: the usual differentiation between chamomilla babies and pulsatilla babies, for example, is that chamomilla is angrier: pulsatillas are poor little clingy things you feel sorry for. ‡‡
The ideal situation is that someone comes to you for insomnia and depression, you find a terrific remedy match, and it cures their eczema and hay fever as well—again, because you’re treating the whole person, so while you’re focussing on the insomnia and depression, you’ve also taken down the details of their eczema and their hay fever, because the perfect remedy match is going to have their kind of eczema and their kind of hay fever in its ‘picture’ too.
But homeopathy is also good for first aid, once you’re a little bit used to having to think in the middle of the crisis. ‡‡‡ I’d got so used to dock leaves and gritting my teeth for nettle burns that when I started using homeopathy I never thought of experimenting with it for that; and by the time I was reaching for my homeopathic first aid kit without having to think to do it first, homeopathy had whole-personned me enough that I didn’t react to nettle stings the way I used to. If I get stung now, out with hellhounds or out in the garden, it’s probably worn off by the time I come indoors again, and it’s not worth coming indoors early for.
Do please experiment with homeopathy. The first thing to do is go to your library and check out a few books on it, and learn enough about it—it’ll only take a few hours—to have a comfortable idea of how to go about using it for simple first-aid things. And then buy yourself your own first-aid book, and your own first-aid remedy kit and . . . go forth and prosper.
* * *
* http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Urt-u is a ‘materia medica’ listing of the symptom picture of urtica, which will give you an idea, although this is a short list, as materia medicas go. Note that you do not need to be suffering from repressed breast milk to use urtica—clients and remedies never match 100%, more’s the pity–for example there are men who do well on sepia, even though it’s best known as a menstrual and menopausal remedy. This is why homeopathy is an art as well as a science: apparently perfect textbook matches may not work, and remedies that ‘feel’ right may work beautifully even though they didn’t come at the top of the symptom list.
** But not too much. There’s a slightly weird bias against what’s called ‘isopathy’, which is to say prescribing a remedy made of the hair of the dog that bit you, although the principle behind the bias is merely that you do need to engage your brain, which is always good advice. You also need to know where to look next if hair of the dog doesn’t work.
*** http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Rhus-t : Poison oak.
† http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Ars Hmm. I can’t immediately find a shorter, less overwhelming symptom picture somewhere else. Ars alb is one of the ‘polychrests’ as they’re called, which means they work for a lot of things for a lot of people, and the symptom list is a monster.
Even in first aid, if you have a whole-person indication toward one remedy or another, use it: I might try ars alb first if I ever fell in a patch of nettles again. First because I already know it works for internal outrages, so it does connect with me, and second because I’m rather an ars alb type—twitchy, anxious, overreactive, cranky. Which is probably part of why it works on my gut. I wish it were my single central cure-all ‘constitutional’ remedy, which is the grail every homeopath seeks for every client, but it isn’t. Ah well.
†† The repertory—which is the big fat book of symptoms that you look stuff up in—that I reach for first has a whole 100-page chapter just on headaches.
††† These people are a bit of a nightmare to the homeopath too, although if you get one in your office^ you have at least two good clues immediately: that they are here even though they don’t want to be, and that they don’t want to think about their health. Mental and emotional ‘symptoms’ are enormously important. It’s all grist to the mill in homeopathic prescribing. A bit like writing stories: it’s all grist to the mill.
^ Or your kitchen, as the case may be
‡ I’d probably be dead if I hadn’t discovered arnica. It couldn’t touch those two root canals I had the first autumn I was keeping this blog, and it doesn’t stop the ME saying ‘we don’t like dental anaesthesia’ but general pain and swelling is waaaaay less than it used to be. And I can’t remember the last time I had a post-op infection, which used to be standard, and all part of my joy in dentistry.
‡‡ The tutor at my first college said: If you want to throw the kid out a window, it’s a chamomilla. But don’t put it that way to the parents.
‡‡‡ Note that no good homeopath would ever say no, no, don’t call that ambulance, I’ll cure it, whatever it is, with homeopathy. A good homeopath will say, call the ambulance while I sit here feeding them little white pills.^ Don’t do anything that goes against basic first aid advice, and don’t neglect any standard first aid commandments—just use some homeopathy too.
It’s a different kind of hard when you’re the one having the crisis. I’m very glad that I now know that ars alb is the thing to reach for when I wake up in the middle of the night with only barely enough time to make it to the bathroom^^ because the last thing you need with Violent Intestinal Rebellion is to get your books down and start making lists of differentiating symptoms and most probable remedies.
^ Most often arnica and aconite. Aconite: Number one shock-and-fear remedy. The standard advice about aconite is that if anybody needs it, everybody needs it, because shock and fear are contagious. This includes you doing the dispensing.
^^ which is six feet away
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