4.6.1 Chromium sulphuricum, Case 1
A 28 year old woman suffers from leucorrhoea, which she feels very embarrassed about. It drives her to despair and she wants to forget about it because she is so ashamed. It itches very much, especially in the evening on going to bed and in the morning between 4 and 5 am. She wakes up scratching and her vagina burns as if she has been stung by stinging nettles, feeling very raw. The discharge is white, sometimes yellow and smells quite strongly. She has often had this in the autumn. The first time she had it was when she went to live with her boyfriend. Her mother had difficulties accepting this, because ‘you shouldn’t have sex before marriage’.
And the fact that she did have sex was one thing, but the fact that she was going to live with him so that the whole town would know about it was even worse.
Her mother had always been very keen on keeping up a nice front. Nobody was allowed to look inside her house, but everything looked spic and span from the outside. Her mother never wanted her to take friends home on the spur of the moment. Such things should be announced long beforehand, so her mother could ‘prepare herself’.
She has frequent infections of her earlobes where they have been pierced for her earrings. Her neck is very sensitive to draughts. Sometimes she has aphthae. And she also suffers from anaemia at times.
As a child she used to have frequent sore throats, starting with a cold, then a dry throat with difficulty swallowing and very red and inflamed tonsils and finally a terrible rasping pain in her throat. Also loss of voice, fever, shivering, sweating and sore muscles in her whole body.
The pain was soft liquorice, < salty liquorice, < smoking.
Her upbringing was a bit ambiguous, as on the one hand it was quite normal to walk around naked, but on the other hand nobody ever talked about sex.
She quickly feels guilty, afraid she will get the blame.
She is afraid of becoming too dependent on her boyfriend.
Generals
Weather: cold, -> thunder and storm, -> fresh air and wind.
Perspiration: occasionally at night.
Time: 5 am. Bad mood in the morning.
Desires: sweets, liquorice, chocolate, fruit, lettuce, butter.
Aversion: fried food (2), sour.
Food: < coffee, meat, sauerkraut.
menses: back pains, stomach pains, feeling bad for first few days.
Sleep: lovely, on back or right side.
Analysis
The ‘cause’ of the leucorrhoea is the fact that she goes to live with her boyfriend and everybody can see they are having sex although they are not married yet.
The relationship indicates Sulphuricum, and the nice appearance that needs to be kept up indicates Chromium. So we get Chromium sulphuricum.
The leucorrhoea symptoms and its modalities are very typical too: she must scratch (Sulphur), it is worse at 5 am (Chromium and Sulphur), she feels embarrassed (Chromium), the itching is terrible (Sulphur) and the throat feels raw (Chromium).
After Chromium sulphuricum she had a return of old symptoms which were typical of this remedy: problems with her clothes, feeling ugly, feeling she has to conform, feeling she has to dress nicely.
The other symptoms in this case are not all that typical. Carcinosin would have been another possibility: strict upbringing, -> chocolate and fruit, frequent throat infections.
Reaction
First she was given Carcinosin, which made her feel much better mentally and emotionally, but did little for the leucorrhoea, which went away for a short while and then came back even worse.
After Chromium sulphuricum 1M she felt slightly depressed and weepy for a few weeks. She recognised this feeling from when she was a teenager, when she did not know what to do with herself because she felt so unsure. She felt that she was ugly and always said the wrong things and that everybody was ignoring her. There was a conflict around clothes, because her mother never let her choose her own clothes. She wanted to wear jeans but her mother wouldn’t let her because they weren’t decent enough. She hated the conservative kind of dresses her mother used to make her wear.
After this spell of depression she started to feel much better, becoming sunny and happy. And the leucorrhoea disappeared.