Minutus

Shannon & Bob Nelson wrote:


Phosphorus loving cold fizzy sodas containing phosphoric acid.
In my own very Nat-mur mother's example, her salt cravings disappeared in her early 30s around the time she was on a year's course of cortisone treatments. In her mid 30s she stopped craving the sauna and then around 40 she lost her ability to sweat altogether. Without ameliorations from sweat, she became far more emotionally suppressed, rigid and brittle, and increasingly difficult to live with. It took another 15 years to be diagnosed with high blood pressure and diabetes and then five more for the allopathic meds to fail to control them.

I've been watching this thread with some interest since I studied with Paul Herscu for three years. Yes, Rosemary, you can deduce a remedy's cycle from a careful study of materia medica -- the problem, however, is that as the remedies get smaller and more obscure, there's usually insufficient info for a full cycle, or it's unclear exactly how one segment feeds into another.
In practice, I've found the method very helpful in studying materia medica, but not adapted to my own approach in repping a case.
For example, the cycle of Nat-m., which Rosemary mentioned, is:

CYCLE: Feels vulnerable --> wants to close up--> too closed, too contained --> swelling --> discharge -->
Those are the bare bones. You have to fill in the details and flesh out the segments, otherwise Nat-m. ends up looking like any other remedy that has swelling and discharge in it.
It's fun and enlightening to study remedies this way, though I suspect my cycles for many smaller remedies are "works in progress" that await clinical confirmation.
Peace,

Dale

Dear Dale,

I take it you did not feel that Herscu was giving you textbook cycles,
rather he was teaching you how to see them. Did you ever just look at
the MM and construct cycles from it the way Rosemary did? Or was it
much closer to clinical evidence and cases?

In the Nat-m cycle that you just presented, you would not be able to
see swollen meningitis around the brain accounting for the headaches
but you might easily assume it with all the other swelling symptoms in
the remedy. Then drying symptoms and nerve sensitivities might be
seen as discharge. How did you decide that swelling was the defining
symptom other that salt balance in the cell regulates swelling of the
cell?

Rosemary's example was taken from what I think of stages of
progressive illness in a remedy. We usually talk to a px at one of
these stages and maybe there are hints of previous stages. These
stages are not necessarily cycles that repeat themselves, although
they could be. Do you have some approximate time frame for cycles?

Best,
Ellen

Hi, Ellen
The cycle for Nat-m. was Paul's, not mine. I've developed my own for smaller remedies that he did not cover in the three years. And I use whatever information is available, whether clinical, provings, or older MM.
Paul's thesis is that each segment is a skewed response, an over-straining of the body/mind in its efforts to restore balance. That means that you would see more severe "stages" in each segment. The cycle would repeat, but the symptoms would be graver.
So far as I know, no one has attempted to parse out a time frame for the cycles. I'm not sure that it's do-able. I could see that, depending on the remedy, some cycles would have longer intervals between segments, whereas others would have shorter. It's also possible that there's a kind of centripetal force at work where as the cycle grows more intense in symptomatology, the interval between segments shortens.
Peace,
Dale

Thanks Dale. That was really interesting.