It burns in my mouth nose and tongue, she said. It has a burning all the time. It literally has a fire, constantly on fire. Nothing smells the way it’s supposed to smell; everything smells the same... It’s all the same smell, and it’s to the point of gagging. At one point I couldn’t eat or drink and went down 20 lbs in one week. For a while I was excreting it so badly into my mouth, the mucous was so thick that I couldn’t swallow it, and so I was spitting at that point in time. I spit it out by the cupful.
Crying she told me, I can’t function. It’s causing me upset from morning to night This is not me.
The peculiar suffering of people with multiple chemical sensitivities is difficult to witness. The symptoms would be enough, but then there’s our medical system’s treatment of them, which can produce a suffering all its own. First there’s the attitude of the doctors, who tend to view these patients as psychiatric basket cases. Then there is the mad attempt to avoid the offending substances, which in itself can become a full-time, night-and-day job. And then there’s the treatment centers:
I go to the environmental center, thought I was going to die... I was not able to stay on the premises, I had to stay in this other place. and there were all these wacko people who walked around with masks. They are all sick and looking at me as if I'm from another planet. “You are sick You smell,” ....In a week you can spend $10,000 . The 2nd day I was there I started crying and I couldn’t stop crying.
Thousands and thousands of dollars later, this woman ended up in the same place. As she put it,
I still wasn’t feeling any better. I was in a horror movie.
The case that taught me just how powerful classical homeopathy can be in the treatment of environmental allergies was the woman who came with the burning mouth, nose, tongue. It took some work to track her case, but once I gave her a correct remedy in very high (10M) potency, she was cured of the burning and atrocious smells.
In understanding how this is possible, it is important to not make the mistake that the doctors treating her made, that is, don’t get too distracted by the physical symptoms, which generally are intense and create a cloud of confusion. Instead, start to look what the outcome of the physical symptoms are. For example, the woman with the burning mouth told me this:
I used to be very outgoing It never bothered me to walk up to anyone. say hi to anyone, meet and greet people. Some people wouldn’t do that, but I would.
Then, however, she said this
I was kind of raised in a family, what goes on in house stays in house, could never really do that, be outgoing or whatever, could never really, I was always very shy very quiet, kept to myself. For a long time always real quiet.
There’s a bit of a contradiction here, and when she got sick with the burning, note what happened: she spent her life locked up in her house. She couldn’t go out at all, because she would be assaulted by people wearing colognes and such, which would cause her burning to intensify.
Compare this to another case that was also profoundly irritated by environmental substances. Her symptoms were similar. Nevertheless. the outcome for her was exactly the opposite:
This is crazy I can't be in the house...I couldn’t stay in my house. Every time I would go into kitchen-- I like to cook do that for my family and myself--I would get this horrible feeling. My nose would start running, heart start racing, nightmare tingling; everything feels irritated, I”m going to die, I'm really scared. When i would leave the house I would feel better outside.
So, on the surface, we have similar physical symptoms, but in one case the symptoms cause the person to stay in the house, never going out, and in the other case, the symptoms cause the person to run from the house. How can this be? The answer is that the outcome is, ultimately, not determined by the offending substances themselves, but by the underlying state, which is driving everything. We could say the first person is in an “I have to be in the house” state and the second person is in an “I cannot be in the house” state. They have formed sicknesses that help intensify these underlying states.
In other words, to heal the chemical sensitivities, you have to heal, respectively the person’s need to be in the house, or, case two, the need to flee the house. If you are successful in this, the sensitivity to chemicals will “magically” disappear. The treatment of these states is what classical homeopathy is all about.
Note that each of these respective states could be said to relate to specific insecurities. In the first case we start to sense this when she tells us I was always very shy very quiet, kept to myself. This is a person who is shy because of strong underlying fears--fears that make her want to stay home and not meet people. When she tried to compensate by being outgoing, she developed a disease strong enough to send her back to the ultra-safety of the parental home.
The second case has a different underlying energy altogether. This particularly became clear to me when she said said, in reference to a relationship upset earlier in her life:
I have to get out of this country. I was so upset, I wasn't’ going to school anymore
I was living at home. living two jobs. I wanted to get out of this city, get away from this country,
Further confirmation of this underlying energy came when she described some of her physical symptoms, which were
like a tingling burning all over my body. it moves around. It can be in my neck and back, it just like moves around.
So, this is a disease “that moves around.” It moves out of the house. It moves out around the body; and when things really get rough, it’s time to check out and move out of the country. To treat such a disease successfully you need treat this underlying energy. To be distracted by outer layer of physical symptoms is lose sight of what needs to be healed.
