Mercurius covers the entire gamut of disease-application
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 2003 Jan / Feb VOL V NO 1.
Dr Navin Pawaskar
Those painful Beginnings
My relation with Mercurius dates back to at least a
decade when I was a novice still struggling to understand homoeopathy and
homoeopathic practice. Those were the days when even a case of simple
pharyngitis or tonsillitis would send a shiver down my spine and a few septic
foci on the tonsils or some abscess draining down the crypts would scare me.
It was difficult to understand and pick up the
characteristics in the case. The high fever that accompanied the tonsillitis
would give me sleepless nights. The severe throat pains would be distressing to
both: the patient and me!! In such states, characteristics like pain on empty
swallowing, profuse salivation and thick white coated moist tongue would bring a
sigh of relief’ because now you knew that your friend Mercurius will do
the job for you. So too a toothache troubling your near & dear ones, who
would wake you up at night with sharp pains radiating to the ears going upto
temples: better at times by warmth, with great desire to drink water and to
clinch it- the classical moist tongue. Then you ask them to open the mouth,
where if you found either a deep caries or a painful abscess, you knew it was
time to call your friend - the Mercurius.
Our Growth
As we grew in practice and our nerves settled, cases with
slightly moderate complexity started visiting us.
The two cases of Infectious Mononucleosis where the entire
cervical chain of glands had got involved with hepato splenomegaly and
high-grade fever and a blood picture with rise in Monocyte count, are worth
noting.
The first child: a fearless child, extremely irritable yet mature
in his behaviour, chilly with throat pains along with glandular swelling worse
on empty swallowing. The clinching chord was given by the father: when the child
gets angry especially when contradicted or teased, he tends to aim to hit at the
nose of the opposite person or tries desperately to catch it. This allowed me to
see the precautious, fearless and aggressive mercury with this key note. Did the
hit at nose mean to hit on their pride?
The other boy was constitutionally Nat-mur, but since the fever, had developed submandibular glands giving him an appearance of bull neck. The glands started appearing on the Rt and moved to the Lt. Merc-i-f settled this case beautifully, followed later by the constitutional.
A deep trophic ulcer appeared before me in the remote interiors along the sea-coast. While I was doing my rural posting. The man was not in a position to give a full history with details of his symptoms because there were none. But by God’s grace I could observe that only that particular foot which had ulcer was sweating. He had no signs of peripheral vascular disease and the ulcer was due to the Hansen’s disease, which he had suffered from. This pointed to a tuberculo-syphillitic miasm with offensive discharges, painlessness & sweating of affected parts. Mercurius once again bailed me out and gave relief to the poor hapless, hopeful villager.
The use of Mercurius in cellulitis especially if the cellulitis is due to post-traumatic necrosis or due to secondary pyoderma with thin, offensive oozing and red proud flesh-like look has many a times been helped by Mercurius.
Learning from Experience: If we look back at all these experiences, we find a strong tuberculo-syphilitic miasm at its base and a predominant infective processes in the suppurating stage of inflammation involving skin, extra-cellular spaces, RES or glands. Not to miss the destructive caries which gives rise to pain or the destructive ulcer, which would grow deeper, but without any pain.
The experiences with these cases helped me to learn a lot and grow both in my confidence and in practice. Recently, I got a chance to work on orthopaedic cases and thus move on to the realm.
Osteomyelitis
A 12-yr old young boy complained of pain and swelling at the
lower end of femur with fever. The child was unable to walk and was limping. It
was so sudden that an X-ray was ordered immediately which revealed Osteomyelitis
of lower end of femur with sequestrum. Child was given Calc-phos. There
came a time case when necrotic material could not find a vent out, thus
increasing the pain, swelling & fever.
Calc-phos was continued till it formed the vent. Inspite
of forming the vent, the swelling would not go down and pain & fever
continued with vellow offensive discharge. The outer end of sinus looked like a
chunk of red meat with proud red flesh. Based on remedy relationship to Calc-phos,
the tuberculo-syphylitic depth of the disease and the necrosis of bone, helped
me to prescribe Merc-sol in multiple doses which helped to improve the
discharges & thus relieve the fever as well as pain & swelling.
The Next Experience followed immediately and consolidated my learning. This young boy of 15 yrs had pain in his hips with severe adductor spasm. The child was unable to move his limb at all. His ESR was on the higher side. An x-ray was ordered which showed osteolytic lesion on Lt Iliac crest. The child was given Merc-sol in infrequent doses. Later the repetition was increased. By the 4th day the child was able to walk with reduction of adductor spasm and at the end of the week, child had complete range of movement. At the end of 1st month the ESR started to show a decrease in the level. Today, the child is completely asymptomatic. Bone lesions have to be still re-evaluated.
One more case which opened up, The Mental Aspect of Merc-sol
for me, was a young man, intelligent, hard working, but with a lot of
fascination for war, armies and violence. He was regularly beaten up in the name
of discipline by his parents and teacher. He could not overcome these
experiences, got sensitized, worked hard, went from a small village to a big
city to become an Engineer. In Engineering College, he went through a lot of
vexation & inferior feeling because he came from a small village.
He started developing bitterness towards his own parents, and
his culture. When he came back to the village, he revolted against the entire
community and the religion with lot of aggression, to the extent that he started
breaking the idols of Gods thus preventing his family from their freedom of
religion. He did this fearlessly during the daytime, but during the night he
dreamt people were running thirsty for his blood.
He was suffering from ulcerative colitis. The ulcers would
give away leading to bleeding per rectum, along with severe abdominal colic with
mucoid stools & never get ‘done’ sensation. Thus a violent,
aggressive, hard working yet intelligent boy at one hand, underwent severe
suppression of his anger in childhood and became revengeful, and rebelious
against system of religion- violent and destructive. But the sub-conscious told
the true story of fear which he harboured within, which depicted the threat to
his life when he saw the mob (society) thirsty for his blood. Thus on one hand
lay the aggression and on the another hand the counter balancing force-fear.
And luckily one could get the characteristic physical particular of never get
done sensation which is the hall mark of Mercurius
Later, I found that in many other cases of intestinal infections and
ulceration, as an acute exacerbation of ulcerative collitis or the bacillary
descentry Merc-sol stands as one of the major remedies presenting mainly as
severe abdominal pain along the sigmoid colon with severe tenesmus in the
rectum, passing scanty, but mucoid to bloody stool and the classic sensation of
never get done feeling or at least the tenesmus not better after stool. The
other general of thirst and the characteristic particular of moist coated tongue
helped to confirm the presence of Merc-sol in these cases.
Last, but not the least, Merc-sol in malignancy
has proved to be a saviour and also a reliever for those who want to live and
for those who want to die.
A man in his late 60’s developed squamous cell carcinoma at
the base of the tongue. Constitutionally, he was a hard hearted, hard working,
emotionless, energetic man who had lost his wife, but still wanted to get
married inspite of knowing that he had cancer. Calc-flour was his
constitutional and Merc-i-f played a great deep active anti-miasmatic
through its antisyphilitic action. Whenever there was any block in the
improvement and later when the end was near, it gave a lot of pain relief. When
he developed secondaries in the glands which also involved the nerve sheath.
This would give rise to severe neuralgias especially at night. Although, he had
reached T3 N2 M1
stage and was prognosticated to have a very short life span, he managed to
survive on homeopathy with all his senses intact and his energies vitalized till
the end of his life. Those 1 ½ - 2 yrs of his journey were with homoeopathy
alone in which mercurius played a very major role.
The Antisyphilltic Role of Merc-i-f in cases where
there is destruction of structure as in case of atrophic rhinitis when the nasal
mucous membrane along with the nasal plate is on the verge of atrophic and
ulcerative destruction giving rise to offensive discharge from the nose which
are quite embarrassing with complete anosmia.
One of our patients who was helpless with this atrophic
rhinitis was tremendously helped by Merc-i-f. Only when we could approach
the case through Boger’s approach, could we see the totality as described
above.
Not only has mercurius allowed the people to pass off
peacefully, but has also allowed young infants to survive critical moments. I
had a rare chance to experience a case of a neonate who was just 28 days old who
landed up with intra-hepatic biliary stasis with serum bilirubin rising high
above 20 mg with the ratio of direct to indirect, reversed.
There was no other symptom that the mother could give except
that the child had cyclical vomiting. This characteristic along with the
understanding of the pathogenesis, the increased viscosity of bile in
intra-hepatic biliary stasis described as plastic exudates, the vomiting of
cyclical nature indicating the time aspect and the epoch as infant, again
indicating time; finally combined with the predominant action on liver, pointed
towards Merc-dulcis. Merc-dulcis resolved the entire case in a week’s
time adding to the vitality of the infant and unleashing new energies into the
life.
What more can I expect from this great friend of mine with its range of
clinical condition and its depth to handle all pathology ranging from
infections, inflammation, ulceration to malignancies, miasmatically covering the
most dreaded tuberculo-syphylitic range, and standing with me when I faced
life-death situation with my patients? You cannot help, but develop a deep
reverence for this great liquid metal-only one of its kind in the universe!
