A woman we shall call Sarah first came to see me as a patient with something of an unusual complaint. Several years earlier she started developing an array of unusual symptoms: amongst other things, her heart rate had increased to around 120 beats per minute, her body temperature had increased, she began to lose weight and her hair started flattening out. What was curious was the fact that she could pinpoint the day when her symptoms began to appear and this led her to explore what could have changed around that time. It led her to discover that this was the day that the store underneath her apartment had installed a Wifi network. Her sensitivities to these manmade electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) although not ‘typical’, are certainly not unique either. In my own practice, I have come across a number of people with similar complaints and there are entire communities in remote parts of the country established as EMF free zones for just such people.
One finds little discussion in the mainstream media or medical community in this country about the growing body of evidence that EMFs emanating from cell towers, smart phones, Wifi networks and other such ‘hot spots’ do have a negative impact on the health of living organisms.
Although the majority of us may not be so acutely aware of the presence of these fields of energy – even though we may suffer the longterm consequences of exposure, the ‘EMF sensitives’ like Sarah develop any number of symptoms and feel acutely ill. What complicates their situation further is that these people often feel desperate because they perceive a lack of options to deal with their illness - aside from packing off to some faraway hinterland.
Making matters even worse is the fact that healthcare providers when unfamiliar with the issue can find it all too easy to dismiss such complaints as psychosomatic, regarding the person as hysterical or delusional or worse. It is an easy conclusion to draw when someone shows up at your office wearing a knit cap lined with tin foil, like Sarah did…
A writer and academic, she was in her early 50’s with a shock of blond frizzy hair and a ramrod straight posture. I had first come to know her a year earlier when she facilitated and accompanied a friend to take homeopathic treatment with me. Now, with some hesitancy, she felt it was her turn.
Sarah arrived with some twenty pages of hand written notes including detailed descriptions of a dizzying array of problems she was experiencing. If nothing else, it was readily apparent that finding a medicine that covered the extent of her symptoms would be nearly impossible. Instead, I needed to understand the person behind all these symptoms.
This of course was not unique to this particular situation. Whether working with a common complaint like asthma or headaches, or working with something more unusual, constitutional homeopathic treatment relies on a perception of the nature or constitution of the individual who becomes susceptible to the disease and develops the symptoms
But in Sarah’s case, this too proved to be quite a challenge. After the initial appointment when we sat together for two and a half hours, I felt I was no closer to understanding what remedy she needed than before we had begun. Her language and the connection between her ideas left me confused. It was difficult for me to find a coherent pattern or thread in the information she presented, let alone relate it to a homeopathic remedy.
So, I asked her to return again for another hour and a half. This time, I had decided to approach her case from a different perspective. This was an approach learned from a number of homeopaths who had mentored me over the years. Instead of focusing on the particulars of her symptoms or her personal history or her emotions or even her ideas, I wanted to concentrate on the way she expressed herself – in particular, the language she used.
With this in mind, I began to notice during our second session that Sarah repeatedly used words like ‘hard’, ‘stone’ and ‘smooth’ in various contexts when describing situations or symptoms. Going back to the notes of the first consult, I saw similar expressions. For instance, one of the first things she told me was that her ‘chest felt ‘hard like a rock’. She also spoke of heat and pressure a number of times.
It was an indication that subconsciously she was expressing an inner state that reflected in her words. The way the words were strung together or the meaning they were supposed to convey were of secondary consequence. Homeopathically, this inner state relates to a ‘source’ or substance that matches the constitution. That is, the constitutional remedy.
As our second session drew to a close, Sarah said something that struck me as somewhat odd and therefore significant. It was an otherwise innocuous comparison of the seeds of a particular fruit to marbles. The use of the word ‘marble’ seemed out of context and coupled with her repeated use of ‘stone’, ‘rock’, ‘hard’ and ‘smooth’, amongst other words, suggested that we had come across an indication for the source of her constitution.
After the session ended, I began to investigate the homeopathic remedy made from marble. I found that the substance itself is created by ‘metamorphism’, which in geology is defined as ‘a process by which rocks are altered in composition, texture and internal structure by extreme heat, pressure and the introduction of new chemical substances’.1
Encouraged by the familiarity of the words heat and pressure to Sarah’s case, I looked further into the research of an Irish homeopath by the name of Nuala Eising who was largely responsible for the creation and understanding of this medicine about 20 years ago. It is commonly referred to as ‘Lap-Mar-C’, or more formally ‘Lapis Marmorean Connemara’ meaning ‘marble stone from Connemara county (Ireland).
It turned out that the first patients Eising treated with this remedy where children from a town in Belarus located just 40 kilometers from Chernobyl. They had been brought to Ireland for homeopathic treatment for the radiation exposure they had experienced.
She states that, “I have used marble a number of times, when I see intense whiteness or paleness of a child for instance, or when a person has been overexposed to cellphones, electrical currents in the home, cellphone towers or from radiation cancer treatment. It is worth studying the many ways in which body systems may be broken down by over-exposure to radiation... Recognizing this remedy before the functional changes have occurred in a person may be life-saving, and it may be very helpful for cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.”2
Needless to say, Sarah was sent a dose of Lap-Mar-C.
Eight weeks later, she reported experiencing dramatic changes in her wellbeing soon after taking the remedy. Her heart quieted down, her breathing became easier and her temperature felt more regulated. In addition, over the next few weeks her hair felt springy like it used to and her teeth, which had become discolored, where whiter. Emotionally, Sarah felt more resilient and she was able to finish a book she had been working on.
Over the eighteen months since that initial consultation, Sarah has benefited from a number of doses of Lap-Mar-C. Though still aware of their presence, she is now much less sensitive to EMFs. In the interim, she had gone through very acute skin rashes, but these too have disappeared. Her heart feels more regular, her appetite is improved and overall she feels much sturdier with greater energy and hopefulness. As she put it, ”I feel a new lease on life.”
1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition 2000 2. The Family of Calcium carbonicum - Limestone and Marble, Angela Hair, www.interhomeopathy.org, April 2010