The lower esophagus where it enters the stomach was riddled with ulcers. Unusual, to say the least, in a 17 year old boy. He had come down with the flu five or six days earlier—total body aches, fever, the usual flu symptoms. He took ibuprofen, 800 milligrams, the first day and three times that much the next. The third day he developed intense burning pain in the lower chest and stomach. I saw him the evening of the sixth day. He was in pretty bad shape.
“I can’t eat or drink,” he said. “If I drink even a few drops of water my stomach burns horribly. It’s the same with food.”
What to do? He needed fluid replacement and could not drink. He needed food and could not eat. He was down sixteen pounds in six days and still losing. He had been to the Emergency Room the day before and received intravenous (IV) saline. They drew blood. All blood chemistries were within normal limits. He needed pain medication but could not take it by mouth so they gave him an intramuscular (IM) pain injection. The burning kept on and on and was so extreme he was referred to a gastroenterologist who, with an endoscope, looked directly into the lower esophagus and stomach where he observed many ulcers. That occurred earlier in the day I saw him.
What to do? Daily trips to the Emergency Room for IV saline and pain injections were impractical and costly. The gastroenterologist said the ulcers could be caused by bacteria, a virus or the ibuprofen. In conventional medicine, the cause is all-important. A virus might be treated with an anti-viral, a bacteria with an antibiotic. If the ibuprofen was the culprit, which I suspected, there was nothing to do but watch and wait. But the ball was in my court. I had to find something that could cure him irrespective of the cause.
With homeopathy, the cause is interesting but it is not crucial. We can still prescribe. For us, it is always the symptoms that lead to the correct prescription. Especially important are the symptoms of the man himself.
I learned that if he moved, even slightly, the burning worsened. More importantly, he told me he was irritable with the pain and irritable when he was around noise. Those latter symptoms, plus the fact that he was sensitive to conventional pharmaceuticals, lead me to prescribe Nux vomica, a medicine known for irritability and intolerance to noise. He received three or four drops in water, enough to medicate, not enough to cause more burning.
The next morning we spoke. “I am much better,” he said, gratefully. “Last night around eleven twenty, I took two large gulps of water. There was no pain!” Food still bothered him. I suggested drinking some heavy cream. When I called that evening he reported he was even better and had managed the cream nicely. He went on to a full recovery.
This example shows how the correct homeopathic medicine, by matching the patient’s symptoms to the known therapeutic effects of the homeopathic medicine, can have unbelievably rapid results. All this in a medicine so dilute that it contains no molecules! Homeopathy. It’s almost like magic!