Karl Robinson MD

A 55 year old woman was diagnosed with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF), an infectious disease caused by the bacterium, Rickettsia rickettsii, which is carried by an infected tick. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the symptoms include fever, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, headache and lack of appetite. Often there is a rash, abdominal pains, joint pains and diarrhea. Treatment is usually with the antibiotic, doxycycline.

Hers was not a textbook case. A week after the tick bite she experienced sudden light-headedness with profuse sweating. She felt weak and faint. “I thought I was having a heat stroke,” she said.

She knew what she was talking about as two years before, she had had heat stroke and became weak and faint.

With the RMSF, the following symptoms came on suddenly—head spinning, light-headedness, profuse perspiration and difficulty breathing. She had to lie down and, even then, she felt poorly.

“What would bring on these symptoms?” I asked.

“If I walked 150 feet from the barn to the house, they would come on,” she said. After an episode, she had to rest for a day and a half but as soon as she got up the symptoms came back.

She continued to worsen. She lost her appetite, began to vomit and developed sharp, travelling pains from head to foot. She had a mild fever and was confined to bed and scarcely able to move. She was so sick she could not even get up and go to the doctor. Finally, the fever broke and the pains let up enough so that she could see a doctor. She was prescribed the antibiotic, doxycycline but could not tolerate it. Then she took the steroid, prednisone, for five days and the pains went away. When she stopped it, they came back.

She had another problem. When she was 21 years old, in 1975, she began having musculoskeletal pains and the strange thing was they occurred only with the change of seasons. The medical doctors could find no sign of any of the known arthritides. When winter went to spring, spring to summer, or summer to fall, she would have terrible pains.

When I asked where, exactly, she felt the pains, she said, “It’s like there was something evil between the muscles and the bones—something that did not belong. I would get stiff, creaking joints with bone and muscle pains from head to toe. They’d last anywhere from four days to two or three weeks. If someone touched me, it felt like my whole body would shatter. I’d have a slight temperature and when the fever broke, the pains would leave.”

These musculoskeletal pains, that came on only with the change of seasons, had nothing to do with the RMSF. Or did they? Four years ago, she moved to Missouri and the musculoskeletal pains disappeared. But with the RMSF they had returned! So, there was a connection, albeit a mysterious one.

It is typical of homeopaths to investigate all the problems the patient complains of, not simply the one the patient comes in with. We try to be inclusive. We look for a single homeopathic medicine that will cover all of the patient’s comlaints.

As we continued talking, she mentioned another problem. Seven years ago, she was diagnosed with optic neuritis of the right eye causing pain and blindness in that eye. After a course of the steroid, Solumedrol, the vision returned. The pain in the back of that eye, however, did not go away. I wondered if there could be any connection between that pain and her other problems.

She also had a sleeping problem, falling asleep at 10 p.m., waking at midnight, awake till 4 a.m. and then sleeping until 6 a.m. It had gone on for years.

Now that I knew about her physical complaints, I needed to know about her. I learned that she had always been sociable and once tended bar for fifteen years. She loved to garden and was handy—could fix most anything. She had some artistic talent and did some drawing and sewing, more in the past. She was a hard worker and a good money manager.

She liked to read “How To” books as well as books on herbal medicine, supplements, etc. “I’m a jack-of-all-trades-master of none,” she joked.

Her profile fit Sulphur and she was given a dose.

When we spoke three weeks later, she was improving though she was not entirely well. Four weeks after that (seven weeks since the dose of Sulphur), she reported, “I feel great. I haven’t felt this good in decades. Nothing hurts. I am also sleeping through the night. It’s been years since I’ve able to do that. And, I no longer have any hot flashes at all.”

I checked my notes. I had no record of hot flashes. Interesting, the correct medicine can cure even those complaints the patient neglected to mention.

“Before your medicine,” she said, “if it was hot outside I couldn’t last in the heat more than two minutes. I’d overheat, sweat and get dizzy.” Now she was tolerating the heat.

“One of the best things,” she added, “is that the pain in the back of the right eye has completely gone! I’ve had it since the optic neuritis was diagnosed seven years ago.”

So there was a connection between the optic neuritis, the generalized, sharp, wandering pains, the hot flashes and the RMSF. The connection was Sulphur! This one medicine cured her not only of the RMSF but the other problems as well.

Caution: Sulphur will NOT cure every case of RMSF or hot flashes or optic neuritis. Sulphur was HOMEOPATHIC to her symptoms, that is, it matched her symptoms and it matched her personality traits. That is the ONLY reason it acted curatively.