Good and interesting questions!
The normal casetaking would have been just fine if I'd had the presence of mind to predict that I was going to get deathly ill. The first little symptoms didn't seem like anything to get too worried about, so I didn't (Mistake #1- if you start experiencing weird stuff, even minor, after a flea or tick bite, time to pay attention!)
The organism that causes any of the spotted fevers (there are about 10 of them all around the world, all caused by bites from insects that have previously bitten an infected rodent) is closely related to the typhus organism. They're all slightly different rickettsiae (just as the various salmonellae cause typhoid and a bunch of related diseases, most of which are food poisonings or act like food poisonings -- Typhoid used to be called "shipboard fever," which makes sense when you think about it.). I did find a whole bunch of rubrics for "spotted cerebrospinal fever" once I knew what I was looking for.
The disease course and symptoms, as I mentioned in the other Minutus post, followed virtually exactly that described in old sources for Typhus. I suspect "typhus" rubrics can be used interchangeably with "spotted fever" ones. I started out using "typhus" rubrics, having learned the causative organism from non-homeopathic sources (probably www.cdc.gov )and they led to helpful remedies.
Many of the old homeopathic sources lump typhus, typhoid, yellow, fever, cholera, etc... together, calling them all "typhoid" -- acute life-threatening psoric febrile illnesses that are basically treated with the same remedies.
I did have a hard time treating myself. By the time I knew I was really ill, I couldn't think very clearly. I wrote to a friend for help.
Everyone thinks of Ledum as THE remedy for ailments from insect bites. While it's obviously helpful in many cases, its designation as the all-purpose remedy for anything having to do with a bite reeks a bit of homeopathic "folklore."
It didn't work in this case for me, and never works for me for bites of 8-legged arthropods (i.e., insects in the spider family, which includes ticks.). As I've discussed the situation with other homeopathic colleagues, I've realized that we're all equally unprepared for actually treating the "aggressive acute conditions" as you phrase it so well. These diseases, in which you have 1-2 days to treat successfully, or you lose the patient, just aren't part of our homeopathic experience or education in many countries.
Case taking is only more formidable if you're compromised by one of these illnesses and you have to try to treat yourself! There's also the added time pressure, which can seriously affect many people's ability to think calmly and accurately. You have to work correctly and quickly. Otherwise, you take the main presenting symptoms, prioritize, and find a remedy, as you would with any case.
It's really helpful to know ahead of time what the most likely illnesses are in your locality, and it really also helps to know how modern diseases are related to historic ones (for which we have in-depth homeopathic literature), and have an idea what the main acute remedies and rubrics are for the relevant diseases. I think you can actually do that in the abstract, especially relating modern diseases to historic ones and knowing the primary remedies.
For instance, apparently Hahnemann in 1813 was confronted with a massive typhus epidemic that was killing the majority of German soldiers returning from war. He narrowed the curative remedies down to Bryonia or Rhus-tox, depending on whether the patients needed to move constantly or were averse to moving, and cured almost all the soldiers he thus treated.
The antibiotics, as I think I said before, clearly killed the multiplying rickettsiae (thank God!) but did not affect the actual symptoms one bit. So I needed to treat myself after the serious acute phase with a series of remedies to eliminate the disease symptoms, then the psoric aftereffects, and now the process continues with the chronic symptoms that were exacerbated by the illness.
The susceptibility had an emotional and physical component, I'm sure (for instance, exhaustion from being a 24 hour caretaker for an ill partner), and a miasmatic component as well (psoric, which virtually everyone shares, and tubercular.). Of course, active miasms can be quieted down again, but not totally eliminated, especially in an older person.
Then there's the factor of luck. Fewer than 1 in 100 ticks in the US are infected with anything, apparently. Every bite renews these 1 in 100 odds. So I was very unlucky at that moment to have encountered this particular tick, probably in my own front yard.
( Oh, well. It was dangerous and painful, and also has provided a lot of important life-changing insights and learning opportunities, homeopathically and in many other dimensions.
I hope you'll have a chance to read the article in the 2007 "American Homeopath."
Warm regards, Rosemary
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