HOMEOPATHY IN PREGNANCY—EXTREME NAUSEA & VOMITING
Pregnancy can be the most blissful nine months of a woman’s life or the most dismal. For some women it is an abyss of nausea and vomiting and feeling so wretched that during the worst moments it seems an unfair torture that will never end. For some women, the vomiting is so frequent the woman becomes dehydrated and must be hospitalized and given intravenous fluids.
It happened to Sara, a woman of 38. It was her fourth pregnancy and by far the worst. By the time she came for homeopathic treatment near the end of the first trimester she had already been in hospital three times for IV fluids. She admitted she did not want to be pregnant and felt “very sad.” She was sleeping excessively—the entire night plus three to four hours in the morning plus a nap after lunch. She was restless, constantly moving and vomiting bile. She had pain in the lower half of her back. Her sweating had become profuse and was offensive. She wanted to eat salads with vinegar but could not keep them down. Earlier she had trembled from cold after vomiting. She was salivating profusely and constantly.
It was the latter symptom that was curious—all that constant salivating. Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy are common and hence of little use to the homeopath who always seeks those peculiar symptoms which are not easily explained by his knowledge of pathology. The extreme amount of sleeping, too, was unusual. Her sadness was understandable as she had not wanted to become pregnant. Add to that her miserable physical condition and her sadness could be excused.
The homeopath looks for the most unusual aspects of the case and then looks to find a homeopathic medicine that covers them all.
For me the profuse salivation, the heavy sweating, the excessive sleeping and the desire for vinegar had to be covered by the medicine I would choose. I found it in Antimonium tarrtaricum and after she received a dose she began to improve.
Over the next five days the vomiting decreased markedly as did the nausea, the salivating and the desire to sleep. Soon the symptoms ceased altogether and Antimonium tartaricum was discontinued. The rest of her pregnancy was uneventful.
Most homeopaths have not used Antimonium tartaricum in pregnancy as it is more famous in lung conditions but such is the fascination of homeopathy that one remedy can be useful in many different conditions—provided the symptoms match.