Pain probably sends more people to doctors than anything else. Naturally, every doctor tries to find out what is causing the pain and then remove it if possible. Dentists are excellent at pinpointing pain and then fixing it. Doctors have a tougher time as the cause is not always knowable. Migraine headaches, for example, usually do not have a knowable cause. As a result they are treated with pain killers so that the patient can at least get through the headache. Back pain has a cause but it is neither always easy to know it or fix it.
There are a thousand pains and a thousand ways to approach each pain. One common way is with a pain medication. Pain medicines are widely used by physicians. Your doctor will usually start you with one of the NSAIDs (Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs). The most common ones are aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen. If one or more of these fails, a steroid may be employed. After that, the big guns come out—the narcotics.
In 2002 a 50 year old woman, a longtime patient, called for help with her crippling back pain. It had become so unbearable that she was taking the narcotic, hydrocodone, daily and going to her chiropractor two to three times a week. But the pain was persisting.
She immediately caught my attention when she said, “It feels like a burning rod going up my spine. It starts in my lower spine and goes straight up.”
Now, this is no ordinary description of pain. Most people say something like, “Doc. I’ve got this bad back pain. It really hurts. It goes up my back.” That’s it. They simply cannot tell you more. Question them as long as you like, that’s it. So when someone likens her pain to a rod going up the spine and not just any rod but a “burning rod” that’s important. But why, you ask, is it important? For one thing, her description of pain is graphic. One can easily imagine a burning rod thrusting up one’s spine. But there’s another point. A prover (A prover is a healthy subject who takes a dose of the homeopathic medicine in order to find out what symptoms that medicine can produce in him or her.) sometime between 1828 and 1836 described the following sensation:
“Pain in the back, as if a red hot iron was thrust through the lowest vertebrae.” The substance that was being proved was oxide of aluminum which we call Alumina. So when my patient described her pain as she did I experienced a “Bingo!” moment. She almost certainly needed a dose of Alumina. But I needed confirmation. On further questioning she mentioned she had numbness of the hands as well as pains from the elbows to the wrists “like an electric shock.” Both symptoms I was able to find in the proving of Alumina.
She receieved Alumina and slowly over the next two weeks the pain and numbness diminished and went away.
I find it quite extraordinary that a medicine known to cause back pain “as if a red hot iron was thrust through the lowest vertebrae” over 170 years ago could cure a very similar pain in 2002. Indeed, that is one of the beauties of homeopathy. Our medicines never go out of style. They are truly perennials. Contrast homeopathic medicines to pharma-ceuticals. The latter are rarely prescribed for more than thirty or forty years.
At this time, I’d like to tell you more about how a homeopath analyzes a symptom. We use four qualities of the pain as follows:
Location—where the pain is in the body and does it extend or radiate in any direction.
Sensation—the description of the pain, e.g., sore, burning, pressing, like an electric shock, sharp, stitching, etc.
Modalities—anything that makes the pain better or worse, e.g., some pains are better from movement, others are worse; some pains improve with heat, others with cold, etc.
Concomitant—another symptom that appears along with the priniciple complaint. An example: a headache always accompanied by diarrhea.
In my patient the location was the spine with the pain moving from below up the spine; the sensation was like a burning rod; there were no modalities; the concomitants were the numbness of the hands and the pains in the arms like electric shocks.
Homeopaths are always looking for a “complete symptom,” that is, one that includes location, sensation, modalities and concomitants.