Here I am reporting a chronic case of backache in a 45 year old woman. A characteristic modality of her backache was that she got relief by bending backwards. She also revealed a very peculiar mental symptom: when she was on her bed for sleep, suddenly a fear creeps into her mind that if she sleeps, she will never wake up from that sleep. She spent many whole nights without closing her eyes due to this fear of falling into sleep. This delusion has made her life miserable, even though she did not reveal this fear even to her husband. All of them considers it as ‘sleeplessness’.
I felt this is a very peculiar uncommon symptom that may lead me to her prescription. I started to scroll through repertories for this rubric, and finally located the following one matching to her symptom:
[Kent]Mind : FEAR : Sleep : To close the eyes lest he should never wake:- Aeth.
To my great surprise, I noticed that her peculiar modality ‘backache amel by bending backwards’ is also covered by AETHUSA. See this rubric:
[Kent]Back : PAIN : Bending : Backward : Amel.:- Acon., Aeth., Am-m., Bell., Cycl., Eupi., Fl-ac., Hura., Lach., Petr., Puls., Rhus-t., Sabad., Sabin., Sil.
Satisfied with this wonderful combination of two rubrics, I decided to ignore all other symptoms, and selected AETHUSA as her similimum. Her backache and mental agony was totally cured with AETHUSA. I used a few doses of PULS also later, considering her constitutional symptoms.
Making a perfect prescription using only two symptoms, one mental symptom and a particular modality may seem to be unbelievable- but here is the beauty of homeopathy.
HOMEOPATHY WORK-DESK 