This is a really complex case that our group has been working with for several months, with little success. There have been two case taking problems that I hope this summary below has overcome. First, the patients are 32 year old male twins, possibly identical. In any case, they have lived intertwined lives since their birth two and a half months prematurely. So it's been very difficult to prise apart what is individual to each twin. Secondly, for the past 12 years, they have been treated allopathically with extremely dangerous, high dose medications for schizophrenia. As the following presentation on twin A shows, and as you will also see in the presentation on twin M which I'll send in a subsequent e-mail so that the message doesn't get too long for Yahoo, probably they were both misdiagnosed, and the medications are inappropriate. They are being treated at a public clinic, which does not offer a whole lot of choice of doctors. I'm quite sure that the clinic also has not dealt well with the middle eastern culture and language differences. For example, when we have seen the twins, the whole family has come along - siblings, their spouses and small children, grandparents - 20 or so people, of whom two can speak understandable English, but all of whom are contributing simultaneously in their language. The whole family immigrated to the US as political refugees in the mid 1980s, when the twins were in secondary school. The family is intelligent and well educated, and the other siblings have finished high school and also earned advanced university degrees in the US. The twins are essentially zombies under the medications, and it is extremely difficult to get any response from them. So we have had to rely on the family's accounts. It is a loving family, very supportive of the twins, and everyone treats them lovingly - quite impressive, really. First, we treated what we saw, with little result. We've realized now that, contrary to usual homeopathic procedures, we need to tease out what is characteristic of each twin before the medications, and pretty much ignore the medication effects. (we first gave Anhalonium, and it was about 50% effective in reversing the medication effects, for a couple of months, but the remedy didn't hold. Subsequent remedies, based on the medicated state, Calc, Bar, Aur, Kali-br, have had no effect.
So the following case takes the first twin up to the moment when the psychiatrists took over with the medications. I'd really appreciate your suggestions, since I really want to start seeing some good effects for them. Their state has been variable enough that it's clear much of it is treatable. The twins are A and M, and their sister, who has provided most of the information either from her own memory or translating from other family members, is F.
A: Core issue: trying to please his father, demanding too much of himself, impossibly perfectionistic in terms of both achievement and appearance. Also, unable to make the leap from trying to be the perfect son in a middle eastern context to creating a new self-image in an American context.
For instance, he once took an art class in his home country that he found excruciatingly difficult, and afterwards said it had only been to please his father. He was terrified to do anything less than perfectly (and apparently, the terror was more in him than inculcated by the father -- they appear to have had quite a loving, affectionate, relatively close relationship, although the father was also perfectionistic in what he wanted of his sons, setting extremely high ideals. But he supported A in doing whatever he wanted to do, like learn art, perform his comedy routines, etc...)
A was a very sensitive, extremely intelligent and deep thinking person, always observing, analyzing, and theorizing about why people behaved the way they did. F said, for instance, that when she was 25 or so and A 20, A talked with her about her feeling (which she had been unaware of but he had observed) that marriage would fix everything, and gave her extremely wise advice about how to get out of that way of thinking -- advice beyond his years, as if he were a very mature and experienced person.
A got straight As (highest honors) in both high school and college, although English is not his native language. He actually reads and writes fluently in three languages. He would hold forth interminably during family meals about social and psychological issues. He was especially fascinated with what made people develop as they did as they went through different life stages, talking about the evolution of his own awareness, and asking questions of his older relatives about theirs. They wanted to ask him to shut up and let them eat, he talked so much and so enthusiastically. He especially admired the artist Picasso, and wanted to be as brilliant as Picasso had been.
He really started getting into trouble when they came to this country. He felt out of place, different, wasn't sure how to deal with the cultural differences around dating (in his culture, marriages are arranged, whereas his classmates were all dating and socializing.)
He was really fun-loving as well as deeply thoughtful -- but not terribly interested in hard work. He loved movies, entertainment, music. He had an enormous talent for imitating other people's voices perfectly, and would keep the whole family in gales of laughter repeatedly with his performance. He and M would create whole audio tapes of TV programs, in which they were aping perfectly the voices of the interviewer and interviewee, then they'd play back the video silently, accompanied by their audio of the dialogue they had created (a humorous, silly one), rather than what the individuals had really said -- this was also great family entertainment. Very creative and imaginative too.
In short,he was a lively, deeply intelligent, funny person who was also much too concerned about pleasing his parents, and who consistently went way beyond what he could really endure in that effort to please. He worked two jobs in high school and college, while also making straight As, not because he was so serious, but because pleasing his parents and the teachers was so consumingly important to him.
During high school, he had severe acne -- forehead, cheeks, chin -- with some large boils that came to a head and burst, and then left pits or scars. He was anxious about his appearance, and also had some anxiety about his health. For instance, once when he had a rash on the back of his neck, he asked F to tell him what was causing it, and it was hard for her to convince him that it was nothing serious. Interesting that he didn't ask his parents or someone like a school nurse -- some secrecy there. He also was extremely picky about whatever food he ate being clean, uncontaminated -- a bit of obsessiveness? At least fastidious.
He liked intellectual pursuits much better than physical ones -- wasn't into sports or handwork, as his father would have preferred, so he felt some stress there about not being as his father wished. I would bet anything that he started out as a Lycopodium.
The breaking point came after a straight-A semester in university, his first university experience. He held his head and told F that he couldn't stop the thoughts "I can't stop thinking about things -- too many things!!" He came home the next day and said "I can't do this any more." Shortly afterward, he had what appears to have been an epileptic seizure, although it was never picked up on by the doctors. His face got dark, his jaws locked, his hands got cold, his eyes were looking up at the ceiling, he was totally unaware of his environment. When they brought him to the hospital, his chest and shoulders started to jerk uncontrollably.
He had other seizure-like incidents in the subsequent months. Several times, they discovered him lying on the floor on his back with his arms stretched out from his sides, looking at the ceiling, totally unresponsive. He also had catatonic episodes, where he appeared incapable of moving, at moments when he also just became absent (petit mal?) For instance, one time, F was offering him a bowl of dried fruit, and he put his hand in, then went absent, and couldn't move anything, and his hand got heavier and heavier, pushing F's arms down with the bowl. At another point during these few months, he had a delusional moment, where he started weeping uncontrollably, saying that his father had been killed in an auto accident (the father was fine.).
The remedy may be syphilitic -- he had undescended testicles, and also a large space between his two front teeth, which embarrassed him.
In any case, we need to pick a remedy that is either cancer-related or syphilitic, in which the cause of illness is overwork -- mental overwork -- and demanding too much of oneself, leading to collapse with epileptic seizures and catalepsy. Severe acne is a major physical. He seems now (since the meds) to dwell on happy experiences in his homeland, and prefer those thoughts to what's going on around him, although he is still able to mimic people, and to analyze the behavior of people around him with exceptionally fine insight. But he doesn't want, now, to talk for more than a few sentences, and wants to get back to his inner thoughts. He paces constantly (again, under medications - I'm not at all sure this should be included in the case analysis.)
The next e-mail will give M's case - the other twin.
Rosemary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Request for remedy suggestions -- fascinating and difficult case Part 1 -- Twin A
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Rosemary Hyde
- Posts: 403
- Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2005 11:00 pm
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Rosemary Hyde
- Posts: 403
- Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2005 11:00 pm
Re: Request for remedy suggestions -- fascinating and difficult case Part 1 -- Twin A
This is a really complex case that our group has been working with for several months, with little success. There have been two case taking problems that I hope this summary below has overcome. First, the patients are 32 year old male twins, possibly identical. In any case, they have lived intertwined lives since their birth two and a half months prematurely. So it's been very difficult to prise apart what is individual to each twin. Secondly, for the past 12 years, they have been treated allopathically with extremely dangerous, high dose medications for schizophrenia. As the following presentation on twin A shows, and as you will also see in the presentation on twin M which I'll send in a subsequent e-mail so that the message doesn't get too long for Yahoo, probably they were both misdiagnosed, and the medications are inappropriate. They are being treated at a public clinic, which does not offer a whole lot of choice of doctors. I'm quite sure that the clinic also has not dealt well with the middle eastern culture and language differences. For example, when we have seen the twins, the whole family has come along - siblings, their spouses and small children, grandparents - 20 or so people, of whom two can speak understandable English, but all of whom are contributing simultaneously in their language. The whole family immigrated to the US as political refugees in the mid 1980s, when the twins were in secondary school. The family is intelligent and well educated, and the other siblings have finished high school and also earned advanced university degrees in the US. The twins are essentially zombies under the medications, and it is extremely difficult to get any response from them. So we have had to rely on the family's accounts. It is a loving family, very supportive of the twins, and everyone treats them lovingly - quite impressive, really. First, we treated what we saw, with little result. We've realized now that, contrary to usual homeopathic procedures, we need to tease out what is characteristic of each twin before the medications, and pretty much ignore the medication effects. (we first gave Anhalonium, and it was about 50% effective in reversing the medication effects, for a couple of months, but the remedy didn't hold. Subsequent remedies, based on the medicated state, Calc, Bar, Aur, Kali-br, have had no effect.
So the following case takes the first twin up to the moment when the psychiatrists took over with the medications. I'd really appreciate your suggestions, since I really want to start seeing some good effects for them. Their state has been variable enough that it's clear much of it is treatable. The twins are A and M, and their sister, who has provided most of the information either from her own memory or translating from other family members, is F.
A: Core issue: trying to please his father, demanding too much of himself, impossibly perfectionistic in terms of both achievement and appearance. Also, unable to make the leap from trying to be the perfect son in a middle eastern context to creating a new self-image in an American context.
For instance, he once took an art class in his home country that he found excruciatingly difficult, and afterwards said it had only been to please his father. He was terrified to do anything less than perfectly (and apparently, the terror was more in him than inculcated by the father -- they appear to have had quite a loving, affectionate, relatively close relationship, although the father was also perfectionistic in what he wanted of his sons, setting extremely high ideals. But he supported A in doing whatever he wanted to do, like learn art, perform his comedy routines, etc...)
A was a very sensitive, extremely intelligent and deep thinking person, always observing, analyzing, and theorizing about why people behaved the way they did. F said, for instance, that when she was 25 or so and A 20, A talked with her about her feeling (which she had been unaware of but he had observed) that marriage would fix everything, and gave her extremely wise advice about how to get out of that way of thinking -- advice beyond his years, as if he were a very mature and experienced person.
A got straight As (highest honors) in both high school and college, although English is not his native language. He actually reads and writes fluently in three languages. He would hold forth interminably during family meals about social and psychological issues. He was especially fascinated with what made people develop as they did as they went through different life stages, talking about the evolution of his own awareness, and asking questions of his older relatives about theirs. They wanted to ask him to shut up and let them eat, he talked so much and so enthusiastically. He especially admired the artist Picasso, and wanted to be as brilliant as Picasso had been.
He really started getting into trouble when they came to this country. He felt out of place, different, wasn't sure how to deal with the cultural differences around dating (in his culture, marriages are arranged, whereas his classmates were all dating and socializing.)
He was really fun-loving as well as deeply thoughtful -- but not terribly interested in hard work. He loved movies, entertainment, music. He had an enormous talent for imitating other people's voices perfectly, and would keep the whole family in gales of laughter repeatedly with his performance. He and M would create whole audio tapes of TV programs, in which they were aping perfectly the voices of the interviewer and interviewee, then they'd play back the video silently, accompanied by their audio of the dialogue they had created (a humorous, silly one), rather than what the individuals had really said -- this was also great family entertainment. Very creative and imaginative too.
In short,he was a lively, deeply intelligent, funny person who was also much too concerned about pleasing his parents, and who consistently went way beyond what he could really endure in that effort to please. He worked two jobs in high school and college, while also making straight As, not because he was so serious, but because pleasing his parents and the teachers was so consumingly important to him.
During high school, he had severe acne -- forehead, cheeks, chin -- with some large boils that came to a head and burst, and then left pits or scars. He was anxious about his appearance, and also had some anxiety about his health. For instance, once when he had a rash on the back of his neck, he asked F to tell him what was causing it, and it was hard for her to convince him that it was nothing serious. Interesting that he didn't ask his parents or someone like a school nurse -- some secrecy there. He also was extremely picky about whatever food he ate being clean, uncontaminated -- a bit of obsessiveness? At least fastidious.
He liked intellectual pursuits much better than physical ones -- wasn't into sports or handwork, as his father would have preferred, so he felt some stress there about not being as his father wished. I would bet anything that he started out as a Lycopodium.
The breaking point came after a straight-A semester in university, his first university experience. He held his head and told F that he couldn't stop the thoughts "I can't stop thinking about things -- too many things!!" He came home the next day and said "I can't do this any more." Shortly afterward, he had what appears to have been an epileptic seizure, although it was never picked up on by the doctors. His face got dark, his jaws locked, his hands got cold, his eyes were looking up at the ceiling, he was totally unaware of his environment. When they brought him to the hospital, his chest and shoulders started to jerk uncontrollably.
He had other seizure-like incidents in the subsequent months. Several times, they discovered him lying on the floor on his back with his arms stretched out from his sides, looking at the ceiling, totally unresponsive. He also had catatonic episodes, where he appeared incapable of moving, at moments when he also just became absent (petit mal?) For instance, one time, F was offering him a bowl of dried fruit, and he put his hand in, then went absent, and couldn't move anything, and his hand got heavier and heavier, pushing F's arms down with the bowl. At another point during these few months, he had a delusional moment, where he started weeping uncontrollably, saying that his father had been killed in an auto accident (the father was fine.).
The remedy may be syphilitic -- he had undescended testicles, and also a large space between his two front teeth, which embarrassed him.
In any case, we need to pick a remedy that is either cancer-related or syphilitic, in which the cause of illness is overwork -- mental overwork -- and demanding too much of oneself, leading to collapse with epileptic seizures and catalepsy. Severe acne is a major physical. He seems now (since the meds) to dwell on happy experiences in his homeland, and prefer those thoughts to what's going on around him, although he is still able to mimic people, and to analyze the behavior of people around him with exceptionally fine insight. But he doesn't want, now, to talk for more than a few sentences, and wants to get back to his inner thoughts. He paces constantly (again, under medications - I'm not at all sure this should be included in the case analysis.)
The next e-mail will give M's case - the other twin.
Rosemary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
So the following case takes the first twin up to the moment when the psychiatrists took over with the medications. I'd really appreciate your suggestions, since I really want to start seeing some good effects for them. Their state has been variable enough that it's clear much of it is treatable. The twins are A and M, and their sister, who has provided most of the information either from her own memory or translating from other family members, is F.
A: Core issue: trying to please his father, demanding too much of himself, impossibly perfectionistic in terms of both achievement and appearance. Also, unable to make the leap from trying to be the perfect son in a middle eastern context to creating a new self-image in an American context.
For instance, he once took an art class in his home country that he found excruciatingly difficult, and afterwards said it had only been to please his father. He was terrified to do anything less than perfectly (and apparently, the terror was more in him than inculcated by the father -- they appear to have had quite a loving, affectionate, relatively close relationship, although the father was also perfectionistic in what he wanted of his sons, setting extremely high ideals. But he supported A in doing whatever he wanted to do, like learn art, perform his comedy routines, etc...)
A was a very sensitive, extremely intelligent and deep thinking person, always observing, analyzing, and theorizing about why people behaved the way they did. F said, for instance, that when she was 25 or so and A 20, A talked with her about her feeling (which she had been unaware of but he had observed) that marriage would fix everything, and gave her extremely wise advice about how to get out of that way of thinking -- advice beyond his years, as if he were a very mature and experienced person.
A got straight As (highest honors) in both high school and college, although English is not his native language. He actually reads and writes fluently in three languages. He would hold forth interminably during family meals about social and psychological issues. He was especially fascinated with what made people develop as they did as they went through different life stages, talking about the evolution of his own awareness, and asking questions of his older relatives about theirs. They wanted to ask him to shut up and let them eat, he talked so much and so enthusiastically. He especially admired the artist Picasso, and wanted to be as brilliant as Picasso had been.
He really started getting into trouble when they came to this country. He felt out of place, different, wasn't sure how to deal with the cultural differences around dating (in his culture, marriages are arranged, whereas his classmates were all dating and socializing.)
He was really fun-loving as well as deeply thoughtful -- but not terribly interested in hard work. He loved movies, entertainment, music. He had an enormous talent for imitating other people's voices perfectly, and would keep the whole family in gales of laughter repeatedly with his performance. He and M would create whole audio tapes of TV programs, in which they were aping perfectly the voices of the interviewer and interviewee, then they'd play back the video silently, accompanied by their audio of the dialogue they had created (a humorous, silly one), rather than what the individuals had really said -- this was also great family entertainment. Very creative and imaginative too.
In short,he was a lively, deeply intelligent, funny person who was also much too concerned about pleasing his parents, and who consistently went way beyond what he could really endure in that effort to please. He worked two jobs in high school and college, while also making straight As, not because he was so serious, but because pleasing his parents and the teachers was so consumingly important to him.
During high school, he had severe acne -- forehead, cheeks, chin -- with some large boils that came to a head and burst, and then left pits or scars. He was anxious about his appearance, and also had some anxiety about his health. For instance, once when he had a rash on the back of his neck, he asked F to tell him what was causing it, and it was hard for her to convince him that it was nothing serious. Interesting that he didn't ask his parents or someone like a school nurse -- some secrecy there. He also was extremely picky about whatever food he ate being clean, uncontaminated -- a bit of obsessiveness? At least fastidious.
He liked intellectual pursuits much better than physical ones -- wasn't into sports or handwork, as his father would have preferred, so he felt some stress there about not being as his father wished. I would bet anything that he started out as a Lycopodium.
The breaking point came after a straight-A semester in university, his first university experience. He held his head and told F that he couldn't stop the thoughts "I can't stop thinking about things -- too many things!!" He came home the next day and said "I can't do this any more." Shortly afterward, he had what appears to have been an epileptic seizure, although it was never picked up on by the doctors. His face got dark, his jaws locked, his hands got cold, his eyes were looking up at the ceiling, he was totally unaware of his environment. When they brought him to the hospital, his chest and shoulders started to jerk uncontrollably.
He had other seizure-like incidents in the subsequent months. Several times, they discovered him lying on the floor on his back with his arms stretched out from his sides, looking at the ceiling, totally unresponsive. He also had catatonic episodes, where he appeared incapable of moving, at moments when he also just became absent (petit mal?) For instance, one time, F was offering him a bowl of dried fruit, and he put his hand in, then went absent, and couldn't move anything, and his hand got heavier and heavier, pushing F's arms down with the bowl. At another point during these few months, he had a delusional moment, where he started weeping uncontrollably, saying that his father had been killed in an auto accident (the father was fine.).
The remedy may be syphilitic -- he had undescended testicles, and also a large space between his two front teeth, which embarrassed him.
In any case, we need to pick a remedy that is either cancer-related or syphilitic, in which the cause of illness is overwork -- mental overwork -- and demanding too much of oneself, leading to collapse with epileptic seizures and catalepsy. Severe acne is a major physical. He seems now (since the meds) to dwell on happy experiences in his homeland, and prefer those thoughts to what's going on around him, although he is still able to mimic people, and to analyze the behavior of people around him with exceptionally fine insight. But he doesn't want, now, to talk for more than a few sentences, and wants to get back to his inner thoughts. He paces constantly (again, under medications - I'm not at all sure this should be included in the case analysis.)
The next e-mail will give M's case - the other twin.
Rosemary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]