4.12.4 Zincum iodatum, Case 1
A 30 year old woman feels very tense and restless. She doesn’t sleep well and often wakes in a panic at 4 am, breathing rapidly, perspiration on her chest, fear and tingling fingers. She feels tired and exhausted and her resistance is low. She has eczema which gets worse when she is tired. She also suffers from constipation.
Her work environment is quite hectic. She worked for a computer data firm and was involved in a project that involved moving whole companies with all their computers to a different location of the weekends. She did not feel safe and at ease in this job, had difficulty keeping up. She felt that the whole world would come down on her if something went wrong. There were many different parties involved and she felt she had to keep them all happy. She found it hard to steer her own course and to evaluate whether she was doing things right or not. She is not very good at owning her power and radiating a sense of authority.
Her boyfriend had gone abroad for his work and which made her feel estranged from her surroundings.
She recognises that she had similar feelings in the past. Her parents were very demanding and she felt she had to achieve a great deal before she would be accepted as a proper member of the family. She was conscious of people checking on her all the time. Her mother put a lot of pressure on her in many ways: ‘You must do your very best at all times, sell your talents, prove to the world what you can do’. She was also urged to look good at all times. She hated this sort of pressure, felt that she would break the rules if she relaxed for a single moment. She couldn’t rest until she had done everything she could. She tried to adapt by minding her manners, being sociable etc., anything to avoid the withering criticism of her parents, which would have felled her completely. There were thousands of rules she had to comply with and her parents wouldn’t have accepted her if she hadn’t followed them to the letter.
It was a tremendous effort to control herself.
Her elder sister was more rebellious. She did not have much contact with this sister because of her tendency to disturb whatever was going on. Although her sister did get a lot of attention, it was mainly negative and she wanted a different sort of attention.
She felt guilty if her marks at school were mediocre, her sister got much better marks, she even skipped a class.
She often got teased at school because of her nervous tics and blinking eyes. She felt very lonely and excluded when she was little, life did not hold any promises for her. She lived far away from school and wasn’t a part of the group. Her mother was always ready to find fault with her friends, nobody was ever good enough.
When she was seven she lost a lot of hair, she also suffered from paratyphus and eczema. She wet her bed at night and used to sleepwalk onto the balcony, talking all the time. She used to break glasses by biting too hard, was clumsy, tense and ‘impulsive’. She ate very little when during her secondary school years.
She had a dream: I am walking through a busy town in silence, I am the only person walking against the galeforce wind, all other people are going the other way; when I get frightened somebody of my own age who is at the other side of the street starts to laugh at me and taunt me. After such a dream she had wet the bed. During this time she often dreamt that her parents gave set her all sorts of difficult tasks which she couldn’t do, everything went wrong, she would drop things etc. She often dreams that her parents are chasing her saying: ‘You have done this wrong’.
She also dreamt that she was clinging on to the back of a lorry. Her family and friends were sitting in the open back of the lorry, but she wasn’t allowed. The lorry was driving fast through busy traffic and she felt very frightened, having to watch out for oncoming traffic.
As soon as she wakes up in the morning she feels she has lots of work to catch up on.
Generals
Weather: cold, cold feet.
Time: < 4 am.
desires: eating (3), savoury, bread, cheese, sweet spicy biscuits, chocolate.
Aversion: meat, fat, fatty meat.
Menses: absent << the pill.
Sleep: sleepless, on right side, hunched up.
Analysis
She is very tense and restless. Remedies such as Arsenicum, Iodum, Zincum and Agaricus would immediately spring to mind. But which one of them? The urge to achieve belongs to the Iron series, so does the feeling that people are checking on her, pushing her and forcing her to comply with the rules.
The fact that she doesn’t allow herself a moment’s rest is typical of Zincum. So is her job in computer data systems. But which Zincum? She has to achieve in order to belong to the family, otherwise she will be dumped. In her dream she has to cling on to the lorry otherwise she will fall overboard, stage 17. In this case I would choose Iodum because she feels estranged since her lover has gone abroad.
She was told to sell (Iron series) her talents (Silver series), you must show what you have got in you (Stage 17). She got stressed at work (Zincum) moving computers (Zincum) from one place to the next (Iodum). She got teased (Iodum) because of her tics (Zincum). She dreams of having to walk against the wind (Iron series) and being laughed at (Iodum).
Other Zincum symptoms: dreams that her parents are setting her tasks and chasing her, restlessness, sleeplessness, nervous tics, cold.
Iodum symptoms: excluded, outside the group, restless, < 5 am, eating much, eating little, hanging on.
DD: Kali’s, Calcium’s, Silica, Aurum, Carcinosin, Agaricus.
Reaction
Carcinosin had no effect at all. After Zincum metallicum she had the dream about the lorry where she had to hang on for dear life to avoid being dumped. This gave me the clue to Zincum iodatum. After Zincum iodatum she quickly starts to feel better. She decides to lead her own life instead of others deciding for her. She decides to go to her boyfriend and quit her job, in spite of the fact that she was very good and was offered a much higher salary because they did not want her to leave. She has had enough of all this strife, she doesn’t need it anymore.
She had another dream where she was sitting in a room in which people were quarrelling, something to do with a little child. When the people had left the child crawled onto her lap. It gave her a great feeling of peace; the child was her at the age of 3 or 4.