TALK : 26 PLANT KINGDOM - 4

Papaveraceae & Compositae

Hello and welcome back!

Hello and welcome back! Today we compare two families which both have the
common sensation of Shock. In both these families, the patients are sensitive to
and affected by injury, accident and fright. They experience the trauma physically
and mentally. There is great pain, and the opposite of this – numbness and
anaesthesia.

The two families we are talking about are:

Papaveraceae
Compositae

Let’s start with the family Papaveraceae

Family Papaveraceae
This family has remedies like Opium, Sanguinaria canadensis, Sanguinarinum
nitricum, Codeinum, Morphinum and Chelidonium majus.
On studying these remedies we found several common symptoms, let us study
some of them:

In Opium we have:
Mind: Ailments from excessive fright [Hering]
Gen: Pain and shock from traumatism [Clarke]
Sleep: Sleepiness, pain, with [Boeninghausen]
Gen: Complete anaesthesia and muscular relaxation [Allen]
Gen: Painlessness of complaints usually painful [Kent]
Mind: Complete insensibility [Allen]
Mind: Blissful feeling [Boenninghausen]
Fever: All complaints: with great stupor, painless, complains of nothing, wants
nothing [Allen]

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In Morphinum we see symptoms:
Gen: Dreams, frightful [Allen]
Gen: Ailments from fright or fear [Mirilli]
Gen: Extremely drowsy and sensitive to pain [Pulford]
Causation: Electric shock, lightning, thunderstorms [Clarke]

Let’s look at Chelidonium majus:

Gen: Sensations: Numb, somnolence, with [Knerr]
- Somnolence is like sleepiness
Sleep: Drowsiness, numbness, with [Knerr]
Sleep: Sleeplessness: Limbs: Numbness [Knerr]
Gen: Analgesia [Kent]

In Sanguinaria Canadensis you have:

Mind: Sleeplessness at night, awakes with fright [Minton]
Mind: Mental torpor, stupor, heaviness, sleepiness [Clarke]

So when you look at these symptoms from the provings, from the remedies you
see on the one hand there is intense pain, fright and shock, and trauma. On the
other side, you have painlessness, numbness, anaesthesia and drowsiness.

Also in these remedies you have stupor, coma and convulsions.

For example:
- Mind, stupor, apoplexy, from (Morphinum purum, Opium)
- Mind, stupefaction, as if intoxicated, waking, on (Chelidonium majus, Opium)
- Mind, unconsciousness, coma, general, apoplexy, in (Chelidonium majus, Opium)

So we understand that there is sensitivity to pain in the Papaveraceae family. The

pain is violent, uncontrollable, paroxysmal, and it causes anguish, suffering, agony
and a hell like state.

Here I want to narrate an experience that I had about a month ago. My mother
she landed up in the hospital with acute breathlessness and in the hospital she
went into a kind of Psychosis. You couldn't understand whether it is due to carbon
dioxide retention or it was due to her being in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for
3 or 4 days. They have this ICU Psychosis. But I was sleeping with her one night

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and in the ward and she started talking and talking and talking continuously
talking and she was constantly talking about death and I am dying I am dying ... I
am dead I am gone I am dying I am dead ... pull away this Oxygen, I am dying I am
gone I am dead pull this oxygen I am dead I am gone ... the whole night she was
sleepless and talking constantly in a kind of delirious, in a kind of Psychotic state
and at that point, I had the books, the program with me.

So I started putting all her symptoms in the Repertory this talking continuously,
talking of death, imagines she is dead and I don't exactly remember those
symptoms; but when I put all these symptoms in the Repertory, this intense
fright, this intense talk of death and intense sleeplessness and excitement of the
mind - the remedy that came was Opium. But I didn't give it to her at that point
because she was on another remedy at that time so I didn't want to interfere so I
just was noting. I thought should I give her the Opium or should I not give.

At that point, she had a Cardiac Respiratory Arrest and she was revived due to
Cardiac Resuscitation. She was revived and she went into coma and she was
completely unconscious for the next day. So when she went from this state of
great fright, great excitement, great sleeplessness and intense shock of death,
fear and fright and excitement and sleeplessness. Her intensity took completely
extremely of total insensibility and coma. So at that point, I knew this has to be
Opium.

So though they said she is 80 years old and the brain is hypoxic and you know she
had lost her heart beat. She had arrest and so there was brain hypoxia. So she is
not going to recover with her age and the prognosis is not good at all. But I just
kept on giving her Opium. In fact I gave her Opium CM almost every hour for the
next 3 or 4 days. She remained in total unconsciousness and I just kept giving her
Opium because there was just nothing else to do. And after 4 days she started
coming slowly back into consciousness. That was a really very, very nice thing to
see and it has been a very stressful time. But now she has come out completely.

She is completely conscious. Then after that she was quadriplegic, she couldn't
move her limbs and we needed another remedy and now she is on another
remedy and she is improving. Though she is on ventilator but she is doing very
very well. There was a period of lots of stress in the last month. But Thank
Heavens she is doing very much better, very unexpectedly. So that experience

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which was a LIVE experience with Opium and I thought I would just share that
with you.

So there is a kind of an intensity of the pain and fright which is not found in
any other family and this it is so intense that they need to go very quickly is so
intense opposite which is the numbness, the anaesthesia, the sleepiness, the
coma, a kind of hibernation, a kind of shutting off, a kind of total numbness.

Many times in the Papaveraceae family, when we ask the patient type of
pain because for us for example: we know that the sensation is very very
important. So when we ask the person what is the type of pain in papaveraceae.
Very often they are not able to give you specific type of pain but what they insist
is the intensity of the pain. So the patient can tell you ‘I have pinching pain,
cutting pain, throbbing pain, burning pain and it keeps shifting’. The nature of the
pain will keep shifting but always it will be preceded by an adjective – very, very
severe pain, very severe shock, very, very severe fright. It's an agony; it is a
suffering, untold suffering.

So we will go to case example:

Case Example - 1
A woman aged sixty-five years
The outpatient department

Chief complaints:

1. Difficulty in speaking, with slurring of words.

2. Heaviness, tingling and numbness on the right side of the body.
3. Insomnia

In 1996 she has had a ‘heart attack’ and she was admitted. Then she started
having blood pressure and breathlessness on walking and talking. Another
myocardial infarction occurred after two years. After which there was a lot of
numbness and heaviness of the right side of the body.

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D: So tell us about your problems.
P: I can’t speak. I have difficulty in talking. I have one son and his family is living
with me. And one elder son, he died of heart attack. And I feel fearful what will
happen to his children.

I cry very easily and especially when there are scenes with son-mother
relationship in the movies.

My children have no uncle or aunt. And I feel that if I die there will be nobody for
them

D D: Say a little bit more about your fear.

P:P: I am very strong. Even when my son had a heart attack, I wasn’t scared. I am
only afraid what will happen to my children if I die. And all this started after my
husband’s death, eighteen years ago. He died in an accident.

P: I can’t see accidents. Even when I hear a vehicle strongly applying brakes, I feel
very frightened. I close my eyes and I sit quietly, “Has an accident happened
now?”
L: So what you see here that this woman is very sensitive to a certain situation.
What is that situation? Her heart attack, situation in heart attack of her son –
scared, fright, accident, and after that particular incident with her husband’s
death of an accident she seems to have got be sensitized to the idea of accidents.
And what she does is she just shuts it out, she just closes her eyes I don’t want to
face too much. And yet she says ‘I have to be very strong. Even when my son had
a heart attack I wasn’t scared’. So this whole theme – this sensitivity to fright, the
sensitivity to shock, the sensitivity to accidents is the theme of Papaveraceae and
the need to shut it out.

One of the rubrics which is good for Opium is :

Ailments from fright of an accident

In which you have Aconite and Opium as the main remedy.
A and the main theme of Opium we will see later is that as if that one single
episode of fright gets fixed somewhere deep inside the mind and then it never
goes, it never leaves. That one thing never goes.

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So the another rubric of Opium is:
A Anxiety after fright, when the fear of the fright remains.
It’s as if one incidence of fright gets frozen as if a black box inside the person’s
mind and that person is very very sensitive to that specific fright. This is the basic
difference between Papaveraceae and Solanaceae. Solanaceae also has fright like
Belladonna, Stramonium, Hyoscyamus etc but the difference is for example
between Stramonium fright and opium fright is that-

Stramonium is frightened of anything. He is afraid of the dark, he is afraid of the

dogs, he is afraid of the ghosts, he is afraid of being alone, he is afraid of animals,
he is afraid of anything. And from everything he is frightened and he runs away
from everything and he wants to be held and he wants light, he wants company
etc. So the theme of Stramonium and the theme of Solanaceae is anything
induces fright is escape, flight and fright reaction .. get out, move from here.
Whereas in Papaveraceae and Opium it’s not a fear of anything but it’s as if a
specific incident of fright or suffering has been frozen and making all around
completely numb and insensitive; so that that sensitive spot should never ever be
touched again. That’s the whole difference. So I ask her:

D D: Tell us about your nature.

P: P: I am not rich, but I still like to help people, I help everybody. I get angry
when somebody tells lies. I don’t like to remain alone. If my children don’t want
to stay with me I will go and stay in an Ashram, in an old age home or something.

D D: What fears do you have?

P: P: I am very afraid of lizards, also of dogs.
L: And the dream that she gets is of a revered Hindu religious leader.

P: And he came and said to her in the dream, you have to give food to nine
people.
L: Another time she dreamt of a snake but she did not have any fear of it.

Investigations
The MRI of the brain showed “mild diffuse cerebral atrophy with significant
narrowing of the origin of the right external carotid artery with tortuous bilateral
cervical internal carotid arteries.”

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Analysis of the Case
So this is a case with a lot of pathology – she has hypertension, she has
myxoedema and she has ischemic heart disease. The speech is slurred. She says,
“I can’t sleep the whole night. I worry that if I die my children won’t have
support.” This is strange because her children are grown up. She says, “I can’t look
at accidents...I am not rich but yet I help people.”

So her greatest sensitivity is to accidents, to heart attacks, to shocks. And her

feeling is, “I have to be very strong at this time.” Also there is a theme of helping
others at the cost of herself.

So we see here the theme of Papaveraceae – the sensitivity to shock, to pain, to

suffering and the feeling “I have to be strong in this situation which is the cancer
miasm and so she got the remedy opium which is the cancer miasm of
papaveraceae family.

Rx: Opium 30

She followed up treatment, she got Opium 30. She is a strong pathological case
mainly local symptoms, so she got 30. And she was better with 30. she followed
up for 6 yrs and the remedy in six years has been repeated eight times and she
has responded very well to the remedy overall feeling much better, her anxiety
much less. Her symptoms significantly better with the treatment.

Another case:

Case Example-2

The clinic
10th August 2006
A woman aged fifty-two years, married, having four children

In her questionnaire form, these are the complaints she has written:

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Chief complaints:
1. Muscle and joint pains for the past fifteen years, especially during winter and
rainy weather.
And then she describes:
2. Backpain “Excruciating pain, as if poked by needles”
3. She has got Obsessive Compulsive Disorder especially about cleanliness, and
she is on medication for this condition.
4. Hypertension
5. Hypercholesterolemia (much cholesterol in her blood)
6. Patches of hyperpigmentation on her face

She talks of being very affected by disorder and uncleanliness, and wants
everything to be very tidy.

Dreams: Snakes, robbers, ghosts, death of relatives, accidents, etc

These are the things she has written in the case form.

She says:
Looking from high places: she is ‘scared’
Sudden noise: she is ‘shocked’ etc

Now we begin with the interview:

She says:
P: I like being lonely. I don’t feel like mixing up. I want everything clean, beyond
limit. I like too much. Everything in the house, every day I have to dust them
(weeps). Earlier I was quite normal. Suddenly about twenty years ago I changed. I
started washing my clothes, and my hands and feet again and again. Then I went
for psychiatric treatment and then to a homoeopath as well.

Why does this happen to me? (Suddenly she weeps) My family life is disturbed
because of me. I don’t do it on purpose. My children are suffering because of me.
Everything has to be clean.
L: Now this is very typical symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive disorder; this
cleanliness mania, this washing mania etc. and they are not to be given too much
importance.

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What we have to understand is where does this come from? What is her deepest
sensitivity? So I say:

D: Tell me about your childhood.

P: I was not quarrelsome. I always had to win any competition; I never teased or
did anything to anybody, or cheated.

D: What are your interests and hobbies?

P: I like greenery. I like flowers. I am not fond of the cinema

D: Any dreams?
P: Yes. A man is coming and I feel fear. I shriek and I am unable to say anything.

D: Was there any incident in your life that affected you.

L: So why are we asking these questions? To find what is the sensitive area for
her. So it’s a way of case taking where we do not go into one thing. Suppose for
example I ask her about her obsessive neurosis I don’t if it could have reached
anywhere. So the idea is to go around and see where can you find an entry point,
where is the sensitive spot. So she says any incident that affected you:

P: Yes. Before all this illness started, there was an incident. My father died of
heart attack. I opened up the telegram and read it. At that moment I collapsed
and fainted. I was very attached to my father. It was a big shock. I had never seen
death before. I would always remain alone, stayed at home and I would only cook
and clean.
L: So this is a very interesting thing that she is saying. She is saying, it was a big
shock. I had never seen death before. For the first time, I saw death that was a
shock and I wouldn’t stand the intensity of the shock, I just fainted, I just
collapsed. I lost sensibility.

So that is where we have to pitch in, this is the whole secret. We have to find the
person’s most sensitive spot and that is her spot. That’s the incident that kind of
moved her.

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Now that brings me to the idea of ‘I have never seen death before’. So one of the
things that I think can help you to remember Papaveraceae is the story of the
Buddha.

The Buddha was Prince Siddhartha who was never exposed to any suffering, pain
or death. His father put him in a kind of a golden cage where he was with the
servants were especially told Prince Siddhartha should never see suffering, he
should never see death, he should never see pain and as the story goes...

Once Prince Siddhartha by accident he took his friend outside of the palace. He
escaped and he saw for the first time death, suffering and pain. And this was such
a huge shock for him. The idea that there can be so much intensity of suffering
and pain and death that this completely converted him into a philosophical or a
spiritual attitude and he wanted to find in his suffering what is the cause of
suffering, what is the cause of suffering, what is the end to suffering. And I think a
lot of his philosophy and his later life was devoted to this question. So that's very
interesting. This is the story that comes to me when I think of Opium or
Papaveraceae.

The patient says:

P: Three years after that my sister died. She had a problem with the valves of the
heart. The effect of her death remained with me for many years.
L: This is another story with Opium. The effect of the incident just seems to
remain and remain especially when it is shock and fright.

D: What dreams do you get?

P: Different types of dreams – an accident of a friend, or a car hits someone and
they fall in a valley, a child falls in a well. There are many snakes around me. I
can’t put my foot down. I may be bitten by them. It’s a lot of fear.
L: Now the question is so all the dreams show fear, fear, accidents, fear, snakes.
Now the question is what is the experience of the fear? I ask her:

D: How do you experience the fear?

P: There is a vibration inside my body. I see black snakes, cobras. There was a
fisherman’s son who would come over. He was a good friend. He had some clash
with his father and committed suicide by poisoning himself. They took his body

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for a post-mortem. I got a dream after his death, about him (as if I saw him). I was
very scared. He seemed like a stranger or a ghost or some dead body. What
would he do to me? Murder or rape? I am not usually scared of anything. I will hit
back if someone teases me. I am not scared of death. It is going to happen to
anyone.

So the second idea of Papaveraceae is death and life, life and death; is this man
alive or is he dead. From death they can come to life and from life they can go to
a death like state - like coma, like what happens to a person in coma, is this
person alive or dead is always this question in Papaveraceae.

Analysis of the Case

So the patient talks about obsessive compulsive disorder, but there is nothing
peculiar about it but this are common symptoms of the illness. But when can we
find peculiarities are the most significant events in her life.

The incident of the death of her father had a tremendous impact on her. It
gave her such a shock so severe that she fainted and she collapsed on reading the
news. It was an extreme fright and shock! She had never seen or been exposed to
death before.

Again in a dream she experiences a man coming towards her. Again a sense of
fright with the snakes, again fright and trembling.

So in life we see the opposite that there is no fear of anyone and that she being
very courageous. She also expresses a strong sense of responsibility and guilt
about her sister who she was not able to help.

In all the situations, she sees herself alone; that she has to handle things
independently, and often they are too much to handle. This is the cancer miasm.
The idea of Cancer miasm is as if you need a kind of a super human effort or
strength in order to manage that situation. It’s too much for you.

She has also the symptoms of:

- Perspiration on the face
- Desires for sweets
- Loquacity

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The sensation of fright/shock causing faintness and collapse indicates the
Papaveraceae family. The Cancer miasm in this family is Opium. And all these
above features are found in Opium.

And also you know there are very Significant symptoms of Opium. One of them
is:
Benevolence: General [Allen]
- wanting to do good. Bene – is good , volence is action, good action , wanting to
help people.
Syncope: when fainting is the result of the fright [Blackwood]
Mind: Courage, fearlessness, [Allen]
Gen: Cheerfulness, liveliness, contentment, increased strength [Hahnemann]
Loquacity [Gross]

So the remedy for her is also Opium. Now I want to read to you some
characteristic symptoms of Opium which I use very often as confirmatory.

- Ailments from: Anger, vexation: fright, shock, with.

- Ailments from: Accident, sight of, an
- Ailments from: Fright or fear: Fear of the fright still remaining
- Heat aggravation

One of the symptoms of Opium is that they find the bed too hot and they are
looking for the cool place. Like Arnica is finding the bed too sore and is looking for
a soft place.

Sleeps very, very deeply, hears nothing, woken with difficulty

So the sleep of opium is very very deep. The Papavaeraceae .. Somniferous … you
know the somniferous sleep. Also you have the opposite:
Sleepless from slight noise
Snoring + +
Opium people are known to snore very very heavily.
I remember I had a good friend and he and I were traveling together and once we
booked ourselves in the same room just to save some money in our hotel and
then I realized that he was a very heavy snorer. And in the morning when he got
up, he asked me 'Did you have a sound sleep? I said ' Between the two of us, we

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had a sound sleep. You had the sleep and I had the sound.' I think he got the
message and we then slept in different rooms after that. In any case Opium is a
very heavy snorer and they

Sleeps with eyes half open and/or mouth open

They can have:
Somnambulism
- Like walking or talking in sleep.

Dreams: Terror, also of snakes

- Some times beautiful dreams of flying/floating
The feeling is:

Alive yet dead, dead yet alive, it’s like almost being buried alive
There is a theme of skeleton. Opium has:

Dreams of Skeletons, dead bodies, death

Also the other side of Opium is blissful, peaceful, content. It's like when Carl Mark
said ‘Religion is the Opium of the masses’. It like puts you in a state of bliss or
peace - Morphine for example: well known Opiates and things like that and the
difference between Opium - blissfulness and a Cannabis - blissfulness is in
Cannabis. Everything is exaggerated looks more beautiful, more colourful, more
sweet, more fantastic, more etc. more bigger bigger. But in Opium, it's more
peaceful, bliss, quite etc not so exaggerated and loud as Cannabis indica is. And
this the patient say very clearly. When you ask them what's your dream they say
they are in a mountain or we are in a forest or we are looking at a sea .. this is our
dream. It's beautiful, how do you feel, just peace, bliss. Almost like anaesthesia in
a way.

So this woman was given:

Rx: Opium 1M

Follow-ups
And later Opium LM-8 for several months with a marked improvement in the
obsessive compulsive neurosis and in the overall state of health.

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More about the Papaveraceae sensation

So in the Papaveraceae remedies also there is a ‘drug like effect’, so that there
could be cheerfulness, pleasantness, peace, quietness, sleepiness, anesthesia and
sometimes a lack feeling both to pleasure and pain. Because of the painlessness
on one side and on the other side, a lack of a very specific type of pain sometimes
Papavareaceae family remedies become difficult to identify because either there
is nothing or nothing specific.

I remember a case of a woman who approached me for treatment of an ovarian

cyst. And when I asked her to describe the pain, the dysmenorrhoea that she had.
She could never tell me a specific pain except that any type of pain was so intense
that she would become faint or blank with the pain. She variously described the
pain as pinching, hitting, hammering, jerking, wandering etc. and she could not
pin it down to a very specific pain. The only thing that came across was the
tremendous intensity of the pain, which was followed often by numbness and
fainting. She did very beautifully on the remedy Chelidonium majus.

I think I told you of a case of a man who was a victim of a terrorist attack and the
main thing he told me was – there was absolutely no symptoms, as if nothing
happened. During the attack he was in perfect control and he was one of the
three LIVE victims among twenty four hostages. The rest were all shot dead in his
presence. And yet in that situation he remained in absolute control, still, as if
dead, and then he survived. The perfect control in a situation of absolute terror
and almost total insensibility indicated Opium, which belongs to the cancer
miasm of the Papavaraceae family. This remedy helped him significantly.

We will take

Case Example 3:
The clinic on 10th December 2007
A man aged thirty two years old

Chief complaint:
He says “I have a problem of acidity. It started after I joined the call centre,
around four or five years ago. In the call centre there would be night duties and

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the shift would change quite often. Due to all this my diet was very irregular. I
went long hours with an empty stomach, and my head would start paining. Also
when I had mental tension my head would pain. There was a lot of work pressure.
When the acidity increases, I start feeling a burning in the esophagus (he points to
the centre of the chest). The burning increases after eating. I have nausea when I
look at food.”

And then he had various kinds of pains:

Leg pain, Joints pain etc etc

I asked him about his complaints but he could not elaborate any further. Then he
describes his dreams. In one dream, he is riding a motorbike or a car, sometimes
at a good speed.

Another dream,
- Somebody is pointing a gun at me.
Another dream:
- Dead bodies.
Another:
- People going out for marriage.
Another dream:
- Suddenly things becoming big. I get scared and I get up.
Or
- Failing in exams.
Or
- Of rainfall, where I am relaxed and I am enjoying.

D: Describe this dream a little bit more.

P: It’s dark, it is the evening, it is raining heavily, drops are falling. I feel relaxed,
there is no tension, and my mind is free. Everything is settled, I feel I have
everything – I have a good car, my own business.

D: What does it mean by Relaxed?

P: Relaxed means Peace, very happy. There is no pressure, no load. I am quiet, I
watch the sea, I feel free – I don’t have to move anything.

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D: And what is the opposite of this?
P: The opposite is struggle. Life is harsh.

D: What other dreams you get?

P: I get dreams of fighting for the country – of war, of being a soldier and killing
everybody. I am a soldier and I kill the enemies. Suddenly a gun is pointed,
someone is shot and there is blood everywhere. I get scared.

D: Scared of what?
P: Of dying, I am scared of graveyards, of evil spirits, of dead bodies. I see bodies
in the mud and insects are eating them up. They are all buried. I get scared to
touch the dead body, fear sets into me. My blood starts circulating faster. What if
the body gets up? What if he talks to me?

L: This theme of dead bodies, dead bodies getting alive, very very important
theme in Papaveraceae. I really have seen this in many cases.

D: Tell me about your nature?

P: I am a relaxed kind of person. If everything is going smooth, I am relaxed. I feel
a lot of pity for the poor people on the road, begging etc.

Analysis of the case

L: So what do we see in this case, it seems as if there is not too much to go on but
there's enough information to make a good prescription. So this man has
complaint of retro-sternal burning, everything is aggravated by stress. And when
he describes his complaint he always uses the word ‘it’s intolerable’, intolerable
pain. This gives a kind of quality to the pain.

In his dreams, we find the maximum energy. He has dreams of dead bodies, of
guns, of shooting, of war, of killing, of blood, of fear, of scared, of evil spirits, of
graveyards, of dying, of dead bodies and what if the dead body comes alive.

So what is it in his dreams that is most peculiar? We have the issues of violence,
killing, shooting, murder, of the dead bodies, etc and a lot of suffering.
And the opposite you get in another dream is relaxed, peace, calm, content…. the
opposite sensation. He also

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Desires – very hot drinks.

All this gives us the remedy Chelidonium majus from the Papaveraceae family. In
this remedy, the characteristic are rage and violence, dreams of being murdered,
the fear of funerals, the fear of death, dreams of dead bodies, the dreams of
being buried alive.
So let’s check out some of the rubrics of Chelidonium:
Rubrics of Chelidonium majus:
- Dreams soldier, being a
- Dreams murdered, of being
- Dreams death, of dying, of
- Dreams dead bodies which spring from dissecting table and seized throat
- Dreams buried alive, being

Rx: Chelidonium majus LM 8 daily.

Follow–ups
5th April 2008
He is already much better. His acidity is 60% gone, his mood is better, his energy
is better etc. and over the past two years he has required infrequent repetition. I
just shifted him back to 1M Potency by infrequent dosage. Acidity is much better.

And his dreams, he still had some frightful dreams of gun and killing, funeral etc.

But the frequency of the scary dreams reduced considerably. He reports much
better in all ways.

Now I want to point out to something specific which is the themes of dead bodies
and of war in the Papavaraceae.

The kind of suffering experienced by Papaveraceae remedies is often connected

to the experience of death and dying, the death agony, the suffering of death
and the half-alive-half-dead state, like being buried alive. Papaveraceae people
have often a fascination with, or dreams of, corpses, of dead bodies. The theme
of dissection recurs in this family. So you see in Sanguiniaria, you have the dream

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 17

of dissecting a dead body, and in Chelidonium, the same dream is modified to
"dream that the dissected body is being brought alive and seizes his throat".

There are many intense fears found in Papaveraceae remedies and the delusions
of the remedies give an idea of war. War represents fear and pain, violence,
shock, suffering, killing and turmoil. It is a hell-like situation; the opposite of war is
peace, tranquility and calmness. So war and peace is the theme of Papaveraceae.

We could infer that the Papaveraceae family, the survival of the plant is through
its ability to adapt to extreme conditions, and in the human this translates as an
ability to withstand any kind of pain.

Sometimes in a seminar when I have to explain Papaveraceae family, I show often

the clip of a first scene from the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ as an example of the
intense shock and suffering of this family. It is a movie which begins with a landing
of Allied Forces in Normandy towards the end of the war. There is a lot of shelling
and violence, intense agony and suffering. Soldiers dying, limbs being lost, people
suffering from tremendous anguish. Many seminars where I show this people
simply want to shut their eyes and go away from there. So intense is the suffering.

To summarize the experience of Papaveraceae:

Vital Sensation
Pain of any sort of any character, but the main thing is of great intensity
Torture, intense suffering, agony, a hell-like state
Punishment
War, violence, murder
Fright and shock
- These are the sensations of the Papaveraceae family.

Passive Reaction
Analgesia, coma, anaesthesia, painlessness, numbness
Fainting, hibernation
Meditation

Active Reaction
Violence,

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 18

Spasms,
Numbness alternating with pain

Compensation
Calmness in situations where there is great pain
Peaceful, serene, tranquil
Untouched by pleasure or pain

Key words
Intense pain, intense suffering, agony, hell, misery, fright, punishment, war,
murder, execute, cruelty, nightmare, terror, torment, torture, hostility, battle,
brutality, carnage, slaughter, havoc, war etc.

And the other side:

Analgesia, numbness, bluntness, no feeling, no sensation, sedation, put to sleep,
deading, fainting, lifelessness, etc.

The other side:

Super strong, bold, brave, courageous, daring, defy, heroic etc.

And the other side:

Meditation, calm down, composed, cool, harmony, quiet, serene, soothe, etc.

What’s the difference between the family Papaveraceae and Solanaceae:

In the family Solanaceae, the main sensation is sudden violence, rage, outburst,
explosive, jerking, shooting. Sudden danger, fear, the 'fright or flight response',
escape, panic. There are delusions with wild animals, of darkness, of pursued, of
being killed, of robbers.

Whereas the main theme of the Papaveraceae is of intense suffering, pain,

agony, a hell-like state. And the opposite is numbness, hibernation, anesthesia,
meditation etc. And war represents this exact state.
I remember a very beautiful case that was told to us by a colleague of mine called
Linda Johnston from Los Angeles. She had a patient who was in a war. I think it
was at Vietnam and he was a high ranking official in the army. And he wrote a

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 19

diary of that war in which he described such intense agony of people, bloodshed,
bodies of woman being tortured, children being flung down and the entire
scenery that he described graphically was so intense and anyway the remedy that
he received was I believe Morphine Sulph which did him a lot of good. By just
reading his description is enough to cause a numbness to anybody, just so
intense.

Now we turn to the next family which is Compositae.

Family Compositae

Many remedies of this family are well-known and well proven in our Materia
Medica. The remedies are: Arnica montana, Calendula officinalis, Chamomilla,
Senecio aureus, Bellis perennis, Eupartorium perfoliatum, Echinacea angustifolia,
Millefolium, Taraxacum, Cina, Abrotanum and Gnaphalium.

A detailed study of the symptoms of the different drugs from this family show the
following symptoms:

Generalities: injuries, blows, falls and bruises; operation, disorders from (Arn,
Bell-p, Calen, Echin, Mill)

So many remedies from this family in the theme of injury.

Injuries: shock. (Knerr) (Cham)

Female: Injuries to the pelvic organs (Abrot, Arn, Bell-p, Calen, Tarax)

Mind: sensitive, oversensitive; touch, to (Abrot, Arn, Cina)

Mind: abusive, insulting (cham)

Somebody asked me the question in the Discussion session today how does
Compositae family manifest in the mind? How does injury represent itself in the
mind and one of the answers is: abuse and insult which is often experienced as a
blow or a slap; and that's how it experiences this trauma at a mind level. So the
main sensation of the Compositae family is injury.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 20

At the physical level it means various kinds of injuries, which includes not only
blunt injuries, contussion or lacerations, but also burns and scalds.

At the mental level, the sense of injury corresponds to or translates into the
feelings of shock, of being hurt and insulted. And the active reaction is to be
insulting, abusive and harsh - like Chamomilla.

When one is injured, the injured part is very sore and sensitive to touch. Hence
there is a fear of being approached, which is a well-known symptom of Arnica
montana. There is also sensitivity to things which are hard and soft. Hard things
are perceived as causing injury, soft things give a soothing feeling.

So we see in Arnica montana the following confirmatory symptoms:

Gen: Fear: Being struck or approached [Lippe]

Gen: He cannot bear anyone to approach him, as he feels he will be hurt if

touched [Puddephatt’s Signposts]

Gen: Complaints of bed feeling hard [Schwartz]

We go to a case example 1 from family Compositae.

Case Example-1
10th July 2001
A woman aged thirty-three years old, she comes to the clinic.

Chief complaints:
Migraine headaches and recurrent sore throat which gets aggravated by dust and
pollution.

D: Describe the headaches.

P: I have had migraine headaches since I was eight years old. The headaches are
aggravated when I lose sleep, from too much tension, or if I am in the sunlight.
With the headache the upper area of my left eye becomes blood-red. The pain is
throbbing and I feel like banging my head or hitting my head with a hammer.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 21

L: So what I gathered from this is a very strange symptom that with the migraine
the eye would become red. This is a strange thing not common, blood red she
said ‘almost as if injured’; and she would hit herself or want to cause to injury to
her by banging her head against the wall. So this is what we got as far as the
headache and that time she said if anybody talks it feels as if somebody is hitting
my head. It's like with every word as if something is coming and hitting it. So this
thing 'Hitting', being hit and the redness of the eyes like injury was very strange.

P: When I get irritated with headache, I feel like slapping my son.

L: So this again is hitting, injury, all the time injury. So from the chief complaint
that's what we got. Then I asked her:

D: What are you tensed or worried about?

L: Because we must see the same sensitivity also at the mind level. Not only at the
local level but also the mind level and she says:
P: The main thing for me mentally is my parents. I cannot bring them to where I
am staying there are in a different city but I am thinking all the time about them.

D: What do you think about them?

P: The main thing I am thinking about them is that they might have an emergency.

D: What you mean by this emergency?

P: For example my mother’s Blood sugar once went up to 450, she was walking on
the street and she just blacked out and fell down. And my main fear …

D: What is your main fear in this situation?

P: My main fear is she may be run over by a car.
L: And that is her fear that suddenly something will come and cause injury. And
the other thing that she is very very afraid of especially when her husband is out
of town is that somebody would come and then I ask her:

D: What if somebody comes? What are you afraid of?

P: I am afraid they would come and hit me.
L: So again I ask her:

D: What is hit?
P: They can bang me on the head with something.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 22

L: So this constant theme of banging on the head comes so many times and also
in her fear. The fear is of her mother having an injury, being run over by the car.
Even with regard to her children her main fear is her children could get injured,
could get hurt somewhere. Because they could jump around, they could get hurt,
they would get hurt.

Analysis of the Case

So right from the chief complaint everywhere we see the sensitivity is to injury.
And this recurs in her state, in her fears, in her sensitivity, and in all the factors
that affect her.

If somebody is talking, it’s like something is hitting her head. If her head aches she
wants to hit her head. And the another thing about this is everything is sudden
and scary and the action is instinctive.

Like what can you do? You are walking on the streets to get run over by car.

I asked her;
D: Tell me about your Interests and hobbies?
P: My interest is Music.

D: Tell about music.

P: I don't like hard music, I like soft music. If I hear rock music, it is as if something
is banging my head.
L: It's quite amazing often in cases to see a repetition of the same sensation in so
many ways, in so many areas.

So her predominant sensation words in this case:

Hitting
Banging
Slapping
Beating
Cut
Hurt
Kill
Run over
Sudden emergency

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 23

So the Plant is from the Compositae family and when we see in the fears, you
always see there is something sudden, sudden emergency, sudden attack. So you
have the miasm of the case is Acute. And the remedy for her was Arnica Montana.
And Arnica when I looked in the Repertory has so many symptoms of the case
like:
— Head, pain, general, blows, from
— Head, pain, pulsating, beating, throbbing
— Head, pain, general, light aggravates
— Nausea, headache, during
— Sensitive, oversensitive, general, noise, to etc

So I gave her

Remedy: Arnica montana 1M, one dose.

Follow-ups:
And very soon her headaches are so much better. We continued the treatment
for a year or so, after which she had no episodes of migraine. Her moods are
much better. Her anxiety about her parents have become much more realistic and
no panic. And she did very very well with this remedy.

Now we will talk about

Case Example 2:
On 3rd April 2000
A thirty-four-year-old woman

Chief complaints:
Irregular menstrual period since the very beginning. She has been diagnosed as
having polycystic ovaries and has taken birth control pills for seven months. She
has had no menstrual period since she stopped the pill, and she has to take a drug
to start her period again.

L: She has been on hormones. If she does not take hormones she does not get
periods.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 24

Her blood test showed elevated prolactin levels.
In 1993 she developed a subdural haematoma which is basically a clot inside your
skull and she cannot recall how it occurred. It required surgery. During that period
she experienced amenorrhoea for six months. Then she had an episode of an
allergy to dust. She has frequent headaches with vomiting and she describes it as
pounding pain on the right side of her head.

D: Describe your nature.

P: I am anxious, short-tempered and intolerant. I never used to be this way. I
worry about minor things, like exams etc. I always wanted to do well in exams. I
have never fail.

I have always been very conscientious. I must always study the whole matter
before the exams. I never wanted anything the easy way out. I was always on the
top five, very conscientious.
L: So what is interesting is when we ask the person about her nature and what she
describes we have to see what does it indicate. Here I see a soft data towards the
miasm where she cannot take anything casually. Everything is serious, everything
a lot of effort that has to go in. everything has to be just right, just perfect. So
that's giving a kind of a clue towards the maism.

D: What dreams do you get?

P: I have dreams of dead people, of struggling to do something and something is
holding me back, of not being able to find a toilet, of trying to board a train or a
plane and there is always a delay.

The feeling in these dreams is one of insecurity. I am irritated by delay. I always

want things to happen according to plan. Inefficiency and inaptitude bother me. I
want everything on time.

I feel acidic and nauseous. I am maniac regarding cleanliness, very particular

about order. I want everything in order etc.
L: So again we are seeing indications towards miasm but not really what is she
really sensitive to. If you attempt to prescribe at that level just with that data like
saying fastidious or whatever ... huge mistakes. So I know if you get the message.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 25

But the idea is we have to go deeper in order to know what's really going on
inside.
P: I am a very emotional person. I was completely … I want to sit in a room and
weep. But I put on a brave front.
L: So again this theme of controlling one's emotions is also an indicating the same
miasm namely the Cancer miasm.
P: I was completely broken down when my brother met with a massive accident. I
was shocked. When I was called to the hospital and saw him, I nearly fainted and
vomited.
L: So you get a lot of like clues even towards Papaveraceae - the sight of the
accident, the faintness etc.
P: The whole time I would be shaking, but I stood with him. I had to stand by my
parents through all of this. When I am a little calm I feel anything could happen
anything horrible can happen like an accident, somebody could die.

D: Did you yourself have any injuries?

L: Now this is a very long case and it has been heavily summarized here. And she
says:
P: Yes, when I was about nine or ten years old, I had a cycle accident.
L: And then she describes the accident graphically.
P: The flesh in my groin, between the thigh and the vagina, was trapped in the
spring of the bicycle seat. The muscle got trapped. The flesh came in my hands. I
did not cry until I got to the house; and everybody saw it and started screaming.
After they all scream, I started crying. It was a massive scar. I do not remember
the pain or the blood. It did not have affect any of the muscles. I was stitched up.
L: So here you see that the sensitivity really is to injury. The Brother's accident,
her own accident, the complete injury, the whole thing getting torned, flesh in her
hands and yet in both the situations, she maintains or felt the need to maintain
control, to take charge and this taking charge or control goes hand in hand with
the high standards that she set for herself. The fastidiousness which is the Cancer
miasm- the need to put up a brave front. She was shocked but she had to stand
by him through 6 weeks.

She had a big injury and a large piece of flesh tore away and yet there was no
crying. It was a brave front when facing a major injury. The need to put a brave
front or to keep everything under control is a feature of Cancer miasm. And we
see that in her case- the main area is injury and shock.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 26

Understanding the case
She developed a subdural haematoma clot for no reason at all. Normally it
develops after an injury without any obvious injury, she developed a haematoma
which was serious enough to require surgery. This is an additional theme of
sensitivity to injury.

So in her theme we see running through her state is the idea of “being in control
when injured or hurt whether it is self or somebody else.”

This indicates the Compositae family and the Cancer miasm. So that’s what she
got. She got Bellis pereneiss 200 C which is the remedy in the Compositae family
which falls in the Cancer miasm. So I gave it to her and she came on 7th December
2000.
P: I started my period after two-and-half months without hormones.

25th September 2001

P: I am now getting my periods without taking any hormones every two months.
L: Then she had a dream. Her husband was having an affair. But in her experience
she felt I had to react to that situation with calmness.

D: When you say that this situation happened, what did you experience?
P: It was like numbness, a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt shaken.

D: What do you mean by shaken?

P: Shaken is like when you lose a loved one –like a major accident like what
happened to my brother.

D: How are you since you first came to me?

P: Now I am having my periods without taking tablets – this makes me very
happy.

L: She continued to improve; she remains well with her periods, with her state of
mind and everything. We have followed her up now for quite a few years.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 27

Something more about the Compositae sensation:

So we understand that in Compositae, the main sensation relates to being injured

– being wounded, being scalded, being sore or bruised. We will see this in the
physical sensations, in the chief complaint itself. But mainly you will also see the
sensitivity to injury and hurt in the most significant areas of the person’s life.
Everywhere you will get the same theme – sensitivity to injury.

You will recall that in Talk 24, two Wednesdays ago, Anne Schadde, my colleague
from Munich and Willi Neuhold from Austria they gave us some very very nice
cases of Compositae.

If you recall Anne Schadde described a case of infertility and this woman at some
point manifested a sudden acute problem of cystitis. The pain in the bladder she
described, it felt like soreness, like a wound. And when she asked to describe this
sensation, she connected it to a very significant traumatic incident in her life. In
that she had become pregnant as a teenager. The pregnancy was medically
terminated. And her experience of it was described was that the gynaecologist
“tore” the foetus out of her womb. This is another injury experience, one of
sudden injury. Anne gave her the remedy Calendula, because this also falls under
the acute miasm of Compositae family. Calendula not only cured her cystitis but
also her infertility and she went on to have two children.

Willi Neuhold also described an acute case, where the miasm was not acute. The
situation was acute but the miasm was not acute. It was a case of a patient with
acute tonsillitis - severe inflammation, fever, swollen lymph nodes and
membranes covering the tonsils. The tonsils were so painful that patient could
hardly swallow. When Willi asked her to describe the pain. She said it felt very
raw, sore, wounded. The pain was distinctly aggravated by touch, even from the
outside. She also said that if nothing touched her and she kept quiet, she felt that
everything was numb.

So in this case, both sides of the sensation could be elicited – very intense sore
pain on the one side, and on the numbness on the other. Based on his
understanding of the Syphilitic miasm – because the pains were very severe, the
patient was hopeless, the pain was going into the bones and there was

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 28

destructive pathology – he understood it was Compositae from the Syphilitic
miasm and he prescribed Echinacea. And with this there was a rapid remarkable
relief to the patient, between morning and evening the patient’s state had
completely changed.

So it was a very interesting case where at even in such an acute situation he could
use the sensation method straight from the experience in the chief complaint and
he could solve the case.

Now to summarize the experience of Compositae:

Vital Sensation:
Injury
Injured
Hurt or insulted
Shocked
Burnt or scalded
Fear to be touched, hurt and approached

Passive Reaction: Active reaction:

Numbness Hurting others
Anesthesia Being cruel/ violent/ abusive
Stupor Striking, hitting
Catalepsy

Compensation:
A tough person; who takes all the injury, who takes all the beatings.
-And also it can be a protective person.
Protective to see that others do not get hurt.
- So there also they are sensitive to injury to other people also.

Key words
Banging, beating, burn, injury, hit, hammer, hurt, scald, shocked, accident, blows,
concussion, crash, knock, pound, punch, smack, smash, thrash, etc

Another set of words:

Anaesthesia, analgesia, blunt, numb, and tough.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 29

Now to just differentiate between families:

Compositae and Solanaceae

The main sensation of Family Solanaceae is sudden violence, rage. The people
that require remedies from this family relate to symptoms like strokes, being
pursued and/or attacked, murder, snakes, wild animals. All this speaks of sudden
violence, of sudden danger and the reaction is 'fright or flight response', escape,
panic, spasms.

In the Compositae family we do not see danger, terror, fright and violence and
the escape as in Solanaceae. We see more injury and we see more numbness over
here.

The other family that we have to differentiate is the Umbelliferae

In the Umbelliferae family, there is also an injury, a blow, a big injury. But the
main difference is in Umbellifereae this injury is unexpected. It’s an unexpected,
sudden, huge blow, a big injury. You can say it’s like a stab in the back. You can
say it’s like an axe fell down.

So for example: Conium is the remedy from Umbellifereae family. It’s a well
known remedy for injury to the breasts, so the theme of injury also occurs in
Umbellifereae. But the difference is in Umbellifereae this injury is sudden, huge,
violent and especially totally unexpected, a bolt from the blue. Things come and
attack, a violent attack. So many of the dreams and delusions that are there in the
family are like Mutilations, riots, cruelty, without notice and the response to this
sensation is convulsion, rage and violence.

So when one thinks of Compositae – Arnica like you are thinking of things like
boxing, wrestling, falling, injury, hurt etc. but when one thinks of :
Umbellifereae – a sudden attack, stab in the back, rape, abuse, a violent blow etc.

This is the difference between one and the other.

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 30

And finally let us differentiate:

Compositae and Papavaraceae:

We already did Papavaraceae just an hour ago so this should be easy.

The main theme of the Papavaraceae is the intense suffering, pain, agony and a
hell-like state. This kind of suffering is often connected to the experience of death
and dying, the death agony and the half-alive-half-dead state, like being buried
alive. Intense suffering and the opposite is a kind of numbness, hibernation,
anesthesia.

What differentiates Family Compositae from Papavaraceae is that in

Papavaraceae family; there is not one specific sensation. But there is a sensitivity
to extreme pain and intense suffering.

Whereas in Family Compositae you have a definite physical sensation which is

injury, hurt, soreness, touch aggravation, hard and soft. And this specific
sensations are found in all cases of Compositae and that’s what differentiates it
from Papavraceae.

So I hope that today we could discuss some families Papavareceae and

Compositae, Umbellifereae, Solanaceae which comes somewhat similiar because
in all these families there is fright, there is injury, there is shock, there is
numbness, there is anaesthesia. So many common things are here. But their
inner experiences are very very different and I hope I could point out these
differences clearly for you. And also to point out at what stage in the Case taking
all these come at a superficial level, at a level of name, fact, feeling. These things
do not come, you have to go within and look for those sensitive areas in the
patient's life which indicate his true Sensation. Only then we can be assured of
success and once you get to the true sensation, you see that the theme is
occurring everywhere in his mind, in his dreams, in his chief complaint, in his
fears, in his interest, in his hobbies, in his stress.

You'll find it everywhere and then you identify whether this is a kingdom - Plant,
Mineral or Animal. And if it is a plant which specific sensation is this and be able

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 31

to differentiate clearly between one family and the other. Because few words are
common but the entire group of words and the experience conveyed there in will
be different from one family to another very very clearly. And once you are able
to identify the family, the next step is of course to know the Miasm and through
this and through the characteristic symptoms from the Repertory you can come
to the remedy and this is what I try to illustrate in these talks really I tell you
practice.

Like this Homoeopathy is simple, it's easy. Only you have to to just get the hang of
getting to the depth of the case, to the sensation and then to know clearly where
is the sensation in the map of all these kingdoms and then from the intensity, the
depth and pace of that sensation experience you get to the miasm and that helps
to indentify the remedy and that's what we do.

We are coming to the end of this talk and I invite you to send in your feedback,
your comments. Let us know how it went for you. If you have any questions, any
queries. Please send it in write to us on the email and we will be happy to answer
it on the forum.

So with this, I say to you Good bye for now,

Chao, Auf weidershein, Gracias, Aurevoir and
All the best and do stay in touch.
Let's know what's happening,
Good bye!

Talk 26 Plant Kingdom - 4 32