MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS
An autoimmune, inflammatory, demyelinating condition affecting CNS, which runs a variety of course from progressive to intermittent to fulminating, it is a debilitating condition which greatly affects the work and quality of life of a person in the long run.
This disease shows predilection for sex, affecting more females than males under 50 yrs of age
Clinical features
- Extreme fatigue and other constitutional symptoms that interfere with patients’ life making it difficult for them to do any physical or mental work
- Sensory disturbances such as paraesthesia, impaired proprioception etc. leading to gait disturbances
- Neuralgic pains such as trigeminal neuralgia
- Neuropathic pain of demyelination characterized by burning or shooting
- Motor symptoms such as paresis and weakness of limbs
- Vertigo, diplopia etc. when brain stem lesions are present
- Ataxia when cerebellum affected
- Emotional changes such as delusions, euphoria etc.
- Uhthoff’s phenomenon- worsening of weakness or vision with heat (this can happen after exertion, exposure to sun, hot bath or even fevers)
- Recurrent facial palsy
- Lhermitte sign- tingling in spine on neck flexion
KALMIA LATIFOLIA
The following symptoms are suggestive of multiple sclerosis in kalmia
- Affection of – nerves of spine, Eyes and Face (R).
- Weariness in all muscles; shuns all exertion, can hardly go upstairs. Weary and giddy, with diarrhoea. Weakness the only general symptom with neuralgia.
- Weakness and paralytic condition of limbs.
- Aching, bruised, stiff feeling. Tingling, numbness, trembling or paralytic weakness. Changing pains; shoot outward along nerves; or dull tearing, crushing, moving downward, then suddenly, to heart or alternating with cardiac symptoms, or between upper and lower limbs. Neuralgia
- Pains shift rapidly
- Neuralgia; pains shoot downwards, with numbness.
- Fulgurating pains of locomotor ataxia
- Paralytic sensations; pains and aching in limbs accompany nearly every group of symptoms.
- Pains affect a large part of a limb, or several joints, and pass through quickly. Weakness, numbness, pricking, and sense of coldness in limbs.
- Pain down back, as if it would break; in localized regions of spine; through shoulders. Lumbar pains, of nervous origin.
- Vertigo; worse stooping.
- Confusion of brain
- Vision impaired. Stiff, drawing sensation when moving eyes
- Prosopalgia (rt); pains, rending; agonising; stupefying or threatening delirium; with alkaline taste in mouth. Neuralgia involving upper teeth, but not from caries. Rt sided neuralgia after exposure to cold, going down r. arm; attended or succeeded by numbness in the parts; pains shooting downward, irregular; < by worry or mental exertion, > by food.
- Pain in eyes, which makes it painful to turn them.
Sensation of stiffness in muscles around eyes, and of eyelids.
Asthenopia; stiff, drawing sensation in muscles upon moving eyes - Aggravation
- Heat
- With the sun.
It is amply evident from the above symptomatology that KALMIA covers the symptomatology of multiple sclerosis. think of this condition in kalmia when MS develops on a background of rheumatic complaints. As kalmia is not mentioned anywhere in multiple sclerosis, this exercise was to bring point the home that many remedies are still underused and less understood and their powers are not completely unearthed.
There are many more remedies in homeopathic literature that cover symptomatology of Multiple sclerosis.
We will add and discuss those medicines with time and try to differentiate between them to make a homeopathic prescription.
(It might be noted that some of the symptoms also point towards other conditions like myasthenia gravis. This is actually the strength of homoeopathy. Many conditions can be recognized and treated even before a formal diagnosis is reached. It will depend on the analytical prowess of the physician backed by right remedy.)
Reference
Davidson’s Principles and Practice of Medicine
Harrison’s Internal Medicine
Boericke Materia Medica
Clarke Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica
The Guiding Symptoms of Our Materia Medica by Hering
Boger Synoptic Key
NB: This similarity is found only while studying the medicine from a pathological point of view. The confirmation can only be done by applying this knowledge in such a clinical condition in a patient.
This kind of approach is especially helpful when:
- The patient is not able to give refined symptoms and sensations
- One is not able to find any characteristic symptom or
- The attendants are not able to give one,
- There is time constraint or
- The physician has not seen the patient but has received a diagnosis from attendants.
- Pathology is advanced enough to wipe out the PQRS of the case.
The results in such prescriptions would nonetheless depend on the accuracy of diagnosis and its pathological similarity to chosen medicine.
(This post is for the practitioners of Homoeopathy and not for patients for diagnosis and treatment of the said entity.)
Aude Sapere
Shivangi Jain
BHMS, MD, PGDMLE, PGDHHM
drshivangijain79@gmail.com
https://drshivangihomoeopathy.com/