I am sure all of us have experiences in our clinics where patients narrate their stories as if they were the provers. I find these cases to be the best opportunities to take a journey into the consciousness of these remedies especially for newer remedies. Once I understand the depth of these states, it becomes easier to prescribe these remedies even without the most prominent proving symptoms. I would like to take you on the journey I took into the consciousness of Plutonium Nitricum. I hope it turns out to be as exciting an experience as it was for me.
“I have been feeling too much pain, pain of everyone around me, I can’t take it, it is unbearable. I feel as if I am going to explode. This pain is not only of the people around me but it is of the generations of all the relatives that have died, they have died even before I was born. I have had dreams of my Czech relatives that I have never seen. They all look alike, they have similar faces. I don’t want to carry their pain. I have carried everyone’s pain all my life and this is enough. I have had it. I know that I am healthy now and it is not my pain. My own pain is completely resolved. This is not mine. It is so sore, It feels like malignancy all around, pervading the system.
“My cry is not a simple cry, I am wailing loudly. When I cry, what comes out of my mouth and nose is so toxic. It just feels like there is death and destruction all around me. Feels like a war zone. It is so painful, people are passing on their pain, I can feel it so intensely. I say I don’t want to carry anyone’s pain. I know, they are not doing it maliciously they are just doing it in a matter of fact ways. It’s like catching a ball when it is thrown in your direction. I feel I can’t survive this much pain, please do something. I feel I am going to explode. The most difficult part is the knowledge and information that it is all spread, pervaded in the system.
“I recently quit my job which was related to the Federal Program for the Foster kids. My position was one of where information would run through. I would get all kinds of information even personal. And I would feel the pain. I know something big is going to happen there, I can feel it. It is so big that it can affect the topmost people, even the governor. I had a paranoia a month ago that I will be arrested when all this blows out. There is a mess going on. There is toxicity in the system, they are selling kids, these kids are in pain and no one sees it. There is so much pain, I can feel it all. I don’t know where to go and what to do, I can be killed with the kind of information I have. I just had to quit because of things that are going to happen. It is hardest to know that it is the whole system is involved like Nazi, IRA, government, U.S. government. I have had Nazi kind of dreams where I am being chased and I have to not only protect myself but every one. It is going to blow out of proportion in a big way. I have had two dreams of one of my co-workers who is feeling the pain when things are happening at his work. I can feel his pain and I don’t want to.”
This was my first encounter with the remedy Plutonium Nitricum. In 1996, this was verbatim description from Ms. J who was under my homeopathic care for two years. She had come for Bipolar II Disorder of seven years duration. She was taking Lithium 1200 mg, Vivactil 20 mg, Zoloft 100 mg, Meloril 20 mg at the time. She made an amazing progress in the two years of treatment, primarily with Natrum muriaticum, after which all of her medications were discontinued, including Lithium.
I had seen signs of changes in her state for the month prior to this encounter and suspected that she would need another remedy soon. This happened when I was on a teaching trip. I received emergency phone calls from her almost every two hours for 3-4 days. During my discussions about her with a colleague, we came to a consensus that this seems like a desperate syphilitic state that requires something like a radioactive element. Interestingly, a short time later, even before thinking specifically about Plutonium, I received a phone call from the patient that:
“It seems as if the surgery is over, something passed through me. It was a very dangerous surgery and now I feel tremendous weakness after the surgery. I just need to recover, I am still very vulnerable and need to be cautious but it feels like the malignancy is removed. It was terrible. I am still afraid that I might have more of this. I didn’t know I had this in me. What if it happens again, I won’t survive another one like this. I hated you, I didn’t know it would be so painful.”
When I cry, what comes out of my mouth and nose is so toxic. It just feels like there is death and destruction all around me. Feels like a war zone.
There are many different ways of learning materia medica. Although each of them provides valuable information, I believe that the most reliable insight comes from the story told by the patient who does well with the remedy. The remedies are nothing but the inner consciousness of the substances expressed through the patients who require it or the provers. I collect my materia medica understandings from my patients. I knew this was a unique experience for me to learn more about a remedy I hadn’t known before. When I saw Ms. J in person after I returned from my trip, I found more history from her that I hadn’t heard before.
“My father has told me stories about his father. His father was in the people’s party which was going to take over when communism fell. He got arrested and was put in a cell and was used for radiation experiments. I believe he was exposed to Plutonium. He suffered terribly, they didn’t know what happened, only after the bomb in Hiroshima, they could correlate that his problem was similar and came from radiation experiments. He used to say-‘close all the vents, the gas is coming, the gas is coming.’ He died before I was born. But I can feel his pain, it is so horrible. On my mother’s side of the family too, one of her uncles was exposed to Uranium and I think he is the one whose face showed up in my dreams. He was asking me- ‘why did you stop carrying my pain?’ I was shocked. All my Czech relatives have died in the war time.”
It was also interesting that I lost this account of her case twice in the computer when I was trying to write it up.
She had dream of kittens of different ages and colors. All dipped in blood. She used to have an image of a hole in her heart area from which an organic fluid mixed with pus, blood and all the horrible discharge was oozing constantly. This image would vary in color and intensity during the two years of treatment prior to this follow-up. This time, the image of that organic fluid was very vivid. Also there was a dream of plastic worms wrapped in blue colors.
On the physical level, she had developed an intense craving for animal fat, especially pork. She was salivating a lot with a toxic taste. She had also become very chilly, with extreme intolerance to the slightest cold or cold breeze, remarkably better by extremely hot showers. She had also developed explosive headaches in the afternoon at 3 pm.
I was sure of a radioactive element but which one? I had heard at that time about Jeremy Sherr doing the proving of Plutonium nitricum. I remembered that this proving had a profound effect on provers and everyone related to it. I had heard that some of the main aspects were images of a prehistoric era as if sins of the family were passed on from one generation to the other, the theme of persistent feelings of existential threats, underworld of gods and spirits. I decided to give her Plutonium nitricum 30C (that’s all I had at the time).For a few days after Plutonium, she had several episodes of a lot of anger, yelling and cursing at God for her helplessness and hopelessness. She was also very angry with herself for feeling the pain of others and other generations. She was angry even at me. She had a dream of her cousin taking her to visit the site of a bomb in Prague where she was extremely uncomfortable. In other dreams, she saw people being tortured, dying, dead animals, rotting meat of animals, dead vultures hanging upside down.
A few days after this episode, and the first indication that this state was lifting, was when she saw the image of the organic fluid changing from black patches all over to bright blue sunny sky.
She also woke up from a dream with a feeling that someone took a hold of her vital force, held it tightly, and gave it a jerk, as if someone was pulling out a tooth. The thought that came to her was that the root of her illness had been pulled out.
On the physical level, the headaches diminished and went away. Her extreme sensitivity to cold breezes went away. Her intense craving for bacon and pork went away.
This Plutonium state cleared and she went back into her original Natrum muriaticum state, a remedy on which she continues to do well. However, each winter since then she has needed a dose or two of Plutonium.