The Return of Old Symptoms: A Case of Ulcerative Colitis

I recently treated a man with ulcerative colitis, a case that illustrates some important concepts of healing.

Ulcerative colitis and its twin sister disease, Crohn’s, cause the lining of the colon to become inflamed and bleed. My patient described his symptoms like this:

My guts go into powerful spasms. After you have to go to the bathroom five or six times, it feels like you’ve exhausted a lot of your energy. It sort of tears the guts out of you. It takes me out of commission. Even for a short period of time, the spasms make it difficult to participate in things I have to do during the day.

In the world of conventional medicine, doctors treat these powerful symptoms with equally powerful suppressive medications, either steroids or strong anti-inflammatory medications injected into the bowel. But these do not resolve the underlying energy driving the disease. As I have mentioned before, this underlying energy is directly in line with the emotional energy of the person’s body-mind.

This man told me he was extremely sensitive to his environment.

Everyone said I had high standards for myself when I was younger, probably impossible standards. I would lose my temper because I wouldn’t be able to do what I thought I could. I still feel like I lash out at people for no reason.

Then he gave an important clue to the underlying energy of his body-mind disease:

I just feel like I’ve got a lot of pressure in my body somewhere that I don’t know about; and for some reason it will blow off, and I’ll say something inappropriate. Something will snap.

Of course, the same thing happened at the level of his colon. It’s as if the pressure would keep building up and building up inside him and then finally explode in bloody diarrhea.

It is interesting to follow what happened when I gave him a deep-acting remedy prepared from the element Antimony.  He healed both at the emotional and physical level. The first and key sign was when his ulcerative colitis disappeared.

I’m not having problems anymore with my bowels.

And as this happened, old symptoms that he hadn’t had for years came back. The first was a rash on his foot.

It was almost like an eczema outbreak. I first got that right around the time I started having the ulcerative colitis, or even just before that. All of a sudden I had this eczema over the arch on my foot. They were teeny little blisters and they were itchy. I had them occasionally on my hands.  They would just come up for a week or two, be itchy, kind of break open and then heal over and be gone.

Now, years later, the rash made its reappearance and then disappeared again, this time likely for good.

It didn’t stop there.  

A few weeks later, I had the leg cramps. I had those when I was a kid, probably six to eight years old. The memory still sticks in my mind. They felt the same.

The leg cramps lasted a few nights and then also disappeared.

For me, there are few things better than the patient saying, “Oh, I’m much better, but this symptom I haven’t had in years came back.” When a symptom resolves in the context of old symptoms returning, it generally means your prescription was a dart thrown into the bull’s eye. The return of old symptoms is deeply healing.

That might not makes sense until you consider the disease from an energetic perspective. Symptoms are the body’s attempt at energetic balance. Shift the energy of the system back towards health, and it will re-wind right back along the energetic path it took as it slid into disease.

Here’s what this patient told me after the remedy:

One of my biggest goals in life has been to not get riled about things; when complications and challenges come up, to not get bent out of shape. I have been able to do that recently. I feel like there is a calmness that’s been building up a little bit in my spirit. I have been able to get back in contact with friends I lost touch with.

You cannot heal the bowel without healing the emotions that go with it.  It is one thing to compensate for disturbing symptoms with harsh medications, and it is quite another to give a homeopathic remedy that mirrors the disease and shifts the entire system.