Skin Rash & Nightmares Resolve with Homeopathy

Vanessa is a 7-year old who was raised on clean foods, love and occasional medicinal herbs. When she came to me, Vanessa had developed a red rash around her mouth. Her mother had tried many natural methods to treat it over the past four months, but this eczema refused to budge. Mom concluded that it was time to seek out a homeopath.

 As a homeopath I need to create a complete picture of my client in order to pinpoint the proper remedy. In each case the remedy is individualised for the client and treats the whole person including seemingly unrelated conditions and symptoms. Once I completed that picture, I chose the homeopathic remedy Phosphorus. It worked wonders for Vanessa for both her mouth rash and for the nightmares she had been having.

Other remedies that may be helpful for those suffering from eczema include Sulphur, Graphites, Calcarea carbonicum, Chelidonium, Rhus toxicodendron, and Mezereum.

We need to find out more about Vanessa in order to help her to heal her eczema. I started chatting with her about what she loves to do. 

It turns out that Vanessa is an artist who loves colors, rainbows and rain. She showed me a picture she drew with the names of her brother and her mom that shows “some of the people I love.”

 She likes to travel and to go on adventures with her family. She gets a special kick out of staying in a hotel. “There’s a phone by the bed and you can pick it up to order room service.”

“What’s your absolute favorite thing to order from room service? ” I asked.

“A fruit bowl,” she explained. “I like apples, pomegranates, raspberries, blueberries and a lot more.” She also likes to order “cold drinks and ice water and smoothies. I prefer cold water to hot tea.” This is telling. She must really like ice water and fruits to single them out from a whole menu of options! I keep in mind Phosphorus as a possible remedy.

 Vanessa showed me a book she wrote entitled “How to Draw a Rainbow.” It’s quite the instruction manual, analyzing each step with precise details of placement, color and scale. Her approach to art is structured and systematic. From that detail, I concluded that she very likely needed a mineral remedy.

 Vanessa and her mom tie-dye T-shirts for Vanessa’s store. She has “lots of customers” - friends who wanted a tie-dye shirt just like hers. We finally came around to her rash. It took some time to discover what was essential.

 “Last summer, at camp, I wiped my mouth with a napkin, and it felt like it hurt. It was red. I know sometimes wiping your mouth can do that, but it should have gone away.”

 I asked her what had happened at summer camp.

 “Something really sad happened. Our old teacher Mrs. Cheyna had to leave. I’ve known Mrs. Cheyna for a long time and during the last summer camp, I recognized her. She often stops by to give us something. She also teaches in my after-school program. It was very tough. Very sad. We had lots in common. She likes doing art. It was tough when she left.”

 I asked Vanessa how it felt inside when Mrs. Cheyna left. “It was like my heart was crying but I wasn’t crying.”

 I asked her how the skin around her mouth feels.

 “It itches sometimes, but it’s healing. First, it was really red and really wet. Then we put clay on it. The last few days, it was separating, getting drier, and now new skin is coming out. The old skin starts peeling off, like a snake shedding old skin.”

 She tells me how she senses other people’s feelings. “When my mom cries, I feel that I’m going to cry. Being sensitive is a hard thing to control.”

It was time to nudge her to reveal her unconscious state, as expressed in dreams and fears. It may seem far-fetched to explore the unconscious in order to heal a skin rash. Yet, the unconscious is often the key to understanding the whole person and helps a homeopath to differentiate between very promising remedies that have similar physical and emotional profiles.  In Vanessa’s case, it was a gold mine!

 In a recurring dream, she visited a store with her family and asked a salesperson to wrap a purchase. When the salesperson returned with the purchase, “everything turned green, and monsters appeared out of nowhere. The whole store turned green. The monsters blocked me from getting out of the store.”

 In another dream, a shopping mall turned into a house of horrors. A pumpkin on a coupon came to life and blocked the exit. Monsters tried to hurt her. Owls waited near the stairs.

 Vanessa said she sometimes senses something bad is going to happen to someone she knows and then it does.

 This seemingly random conversation, that weaves together her love of fruits and cold drinks, her love for friends and family and her tie-dye enterprise, her empathy, clairvoyance, and intense fear and imagination that spring to life in the dark, all point towards one remedy: Phosphorus. A Phosphorus child will happily talk to a homeopath for over an hour and want to introduce her to other members of the family. Phosphorus is the spark of life and diffuses across boundaries easily, just as tie-dye, her hobby-turned-enterprise, is an art of diffusion!

And for a person who resonates with Phosphorus, touch is magical - it enables that person to communicate deeply with another. So, I checked. Does Vanessa like massage? “I just love it,” she said. “I learnt it so that I can massage my mom’s feet.”

 Vanessa developed eczema when she took her teacher’s departure to heart and kept it there. I saw that she needed Phosphorus, and we started with what the family already had at home: Phosphorus 30C, once daily for three days. This helped to resolve the redness, dryness and itching. Although Vanessa had scary dreams for two more nights, after this initial aggravation - always a sign that you’ve found the right remedy - Vanessa slept peacefully without nightmares. However, the redness returned after five days.

I decided to increase the potency of the Phosphorus to 200C. Her skin was much improved after two doses in two days. That week she left for a trip to see her father. While there she sent her mother a beautiful photo of herself, beaming with completely clear skin. Eight months later, Vanessa is without eczema symptoms and sleeps well.

Phosphorus allowed Vanessa’s unspoken grief to surface and enabled her to resolve her eczema and her night terrors.