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Continuing with our meditations on the (potential) personalities of Schuessler Salts, I decided to skip ahead so we can complete the Calcarea family. As a reminder for those following this series, Calcium based remedies tend to be shy, slow and hesitant. Of the two we have discussed so far, Calcarea Fluorica manifest this traits as a insecurity, - specially concerning money afairs, - while Calcarea Phosphorica embodies those same traits as immaturity.

That leaves only one more Calcium salt in Schuessler's: Calcarea Sulphurica. That's simply Gypsum, the mineral where plaster comes from. That's a nice, unpretentious compound, and it will have to make for a very short blog post because there's not that much to say about it. The first thing I noticed was that this is not listed in one of the main sources that I am using for this project: Deniz's Psico-Homeopathy book.[1]

The issue became clearer when I checked the remedy in Vijnovsky's Materia Medica.[2] There are but a handful of mental symptoms, and none of those have a high score. It is not clear what exactly these scores represent, - in theory this is the relative frequency when each symptom shows up in the probings, but it is clear that many symptoms come from heuristic insights and clinic experience, - but it is clear that the higher the number the greater the relative importance of this symptom in the overall similia or the remedy. There are two mental symptoms with score 1: jealously, and anxiety/fear (to death or illness, to darkness); and two more with score 0: the first is actually a bunch of correlated traits (moody, disgruntled, irritable), the second is sudden loss of memory or conscience.

The meaning of these scores is nuanced. If we were talking about homeopathic probings, - the process by which the use of the remedy is discovered through its experimentation on healthy subjects, - a low score means that the symptoms do not show up in most subjects, but only in the most susceptible probers.

But on the question of the prescription of the remedy, what it means is that those symptoms do have a low diagnostic value. It is true that some patients may find this remedy useful to thwart their, let's say jealously, but only in those cases when the physical symtoms (open absceses with supuration, hypertrophy of glands or lymph noes, skin or digestive conditions) are also present. More over, there are plenty other remedies indicated in case of excessive/undue jealously; Lachesis, Hyosciamus and Apis are some of the better known.

So, all in all, I will have to say that Calcarea Sulphurica does not seem to have a personality at all. Mental symptoms, sure; but those do not seem to coalesce around a full fledged personality. I don't recall if I said it before, but not all remedies have personalities, as a matter of fact most do not.

In this case, the aforementioned lack seems to be related with today's salt being basically plaster. I know the argument is shaky at best, but the material is bland, so it's not surprising its effect on the mental plane is bland as well. It was a bit of a disappointment for me, because I wanted to continue the trend we established before, and discuss the implications of what Sulphates bring to the table. We will have a few more chances down the road, and one extra I was not expecting at all.

And with this, we have completed the first milestone in this project, which is to review the Calcarea family within Schuessler's salts, from a psychological-homeopathic point of view. My original plan was to continue with the Kali family, the salt compound that include Potassium as a main component, but I thought better of it. You see, while reading on Calc-S, I realized there's a remedy that is very close to it, - a polycrest with a strong and, for lack of a better term, sulphuric personality, - and one that is indirectly related to the Calcarea family. So, next week we are going to take a little detour, leave Schuessler salts aside, and take a good look at Hepar sulphur calcareum.

[1] Deníz, Octavio. Psico-Homeopatía. Remedios para la mente y el corazón. 1st edition. :Lulu.com: 2007
[2] Vijnovsky, Bernardo. Tratado de Materia Médica Homeopática. Buenos Aires:Macagno, Landa y Cia:1978

Current Mood: discontent

Rehashing what we discussed last week, the main traits of the Calcarea family are shyness, parsimony and hesitation. Since these are all mineral elements, the Calcium traits are to be compounded and given context by the other elements in the formula, but the basic pattern should hold.

In the case of Calcium Phosphate, this is a tricky question. There are actually a great number of salts which mix Calcium cations with (oxigenated) Phosphorus anions, and there may or may not be some extra hydroxiles thrown in there for good measure. To the best of my knowledge, the actual phospate used in both Schuessler's and Homeopathic remedies is a naturally occurring mineral called Hydroxyapatite, - formula Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2, - which constitutes somewhere between one-half ant two-thirds of the human bone mass (and an even larger percentage for dental enamel).

So how do this Phosphorus atoms fare into the mix? Well, it can be said that if the keyword "insecurity" was associated with Calcarea Fluorica, its sibling Calcarea Phosphorica should rather be labeled with "immaturity" instead. It is worth noting, - even if these are not mental traits on their own, - that Calc-p is prescribed for illnesses that have to do with poor nutrition and slow (or even arrested) development in children: Slow dentition (sometimes followed by diarrhea), growing pains in the limbs, famished children with bloated guts, etc. It is as if, instead of manifesting the slowness and shyness in your external behavior, your own body and mind have a tendency to take a sweet long time to grow into what you are meant to become.

That's maybe why in order to make sense of Calcarea Phosphorica's mental symptoms, we need to use the tools of neurology/psychology of development. The mind, along with its physical brain, takes decades to reach the full traits associated to adulthood. While high achieving teenagers are often comended as "mature", in reality they are merely meek, - they do not give trouble to the grown-ups, - but deep down they're just as challenged with the actual hard stuff as any of their peers would be, and will remain so until well into their twenties. Contrast that with Calc-f, whose mental symptoms are textbook examples of (fully adult) neurotic responses to external stressors.

In the intellectual sphere, Calc-p do show "difficulty or slowness to learn" and "confusion after mental efforts", - mental effort tend to worsen its other symptoms, - also "ideation deficit. poor memory, does not recall what he's just done", or "uses the wrong word when writing, or repeats the same word twice". Note how most of these are failures to execute complex mental processes. Talking is a natural ability, but writing has to be learned, and the further the written symbols stray away from the phonetics, it is harder to write. Difficulty to learn, can simply be another way of saying "poor memory", but if it's meant as "difficulty to comprehend" I will say that the neural circuitry to think in abstract patterns starts developing around puberty, but is not fully mature until the early 20s, and then capacity for reflection comes somewhat later after that. Most of these symptoms may well be understood as a yet-to-mature-brain trait.

The ones implying poor memory, lack of imagination, etc are more concerning. Healthy kids are really good at those from a young age, sometimes even better than adults. In this case we could talk about an "arrested development" syndrome. It is stuff that ought to have happened a long time ago, but conditions were not right back then and now the window of opportunity has closed. It is analogous as having bad teeth or frail bones.

Just as there are symptoms for underdeveloped intellect, there are those for volition as well. Calc-p feels a sort of uneasiness that compels him to be constantly on the move. On the positive side, this can be a motivator to go travel the world, to see around and learn about what's worth to learn. However, when not balanced this compulsion becomes aimless. The person will want to go somewhere (or get/achieve something, or be with someone) but once he's there, he will want to be elsewhere. Or it may be that he did not even got that far. Maybe the situation got a little harder than expected, and this anxiety will be the perfect excuse to leave the former goal behind and reach for anything else. Perseverance is a virtue that Calc-p will take some effort to master, but at the same time it's one of the things that will ground him and help him bloom.

Another part of volition is impulse control. In Vijnovsky we have, on top of the tendency to wander, a couple of apparently unrelated symptoms: "aversion to work [specially intellectual]", "Nymphomania". Octavio Deniz mentions a tendency to run away from problems. I see this situation more of a psicosocial disorder than a neurological one. While it is important to be able to perceive the consequences of your own actions in order to be responsible, the main mechanism I see for this is the interiorization of rules. Children moral is all about doing what your parents (or other authority figures) tell you. A little bit later, you are able to think in concrete rules, and further down in abstract principles that allow you to apply the rule within a context. It is all well and good, but the piece that is missing here is not the intellectual analysis of ethical calculi, but the capacity for fairness. To feel when you are not measuring up to expectations come relatively early, but it takes time to learn the wisdom on how to go around expectations that do not fit with our preferences or desires. On other words, it takes maturity to internalize rules instead of just following them, and you cannot expect to follow them blindly without running out of will power from time to time.

There are a number of minor symptoms also: Fear to darkness, irritability/crying worsened by comfort, sadness out of unrequited love, indignation, anger-triggered disorders, etc. These all have a vibe of immaturity on them (sometimes the image is that of a young child, sometimes an adolescent), but my model is stretched enough already. Please consider them on your own, and drop a line if you want to comment on those.

Current Mood: busy

Ok, let's talk about the Calcarea family. As a reminder, I am going to talk about the remedies as if they were people. While I suspect that this technique is at least partially mnemonic in nature, it is also true that homeopaths talk about their patients as if they are incarnations or personifications of the remedies. There are two non-mutually exclusive lines of thought on this: first, there is the so called the "constitutional remedy". You are believed to have been born with a unique sensitivity to some particular set of maladies above others, and your constitutional is the remedy (usually a polycrest) that is the closest to address those maladies in the precise modalities that they present to you most often. On the other hand, thanks to the history of our lives, we are said to go through "stages" when our particular sensitivity is best matched by some other remedy. This is believed to be caused by some external force or influence that is perturbing your life-force field at the current time, but may or may not become a long term trait of us.

Back to the Calcareas, the first thing to know is that, in general, Hahnemann expected his remedies to come from species as could be found in Nature. When he first experimented with Calcarea Carbonica (the polycrest and "flagship" Rx of this family) he did not produce a chemically pure salt by combining Calcium and Carbon in a lab. He used the grounded shells of oysters, which are somewhere in the ballpark of 85% Calcium carbonate AFAIK.

So, Calc-c come from oysters and it is not a surprise at all. Calcarea family have a tendency towards introversion, slowness and passivity. There's no value judgment there. A person with a Calcarean personality may reach balance within her life, and therefore will express those traits as reflectiveness, attention to detail, prudence, etc; while another person with a more unbalanced stance will manifest instead laziness, shyness or hesitancy. Leaving personal uniqueness aside, the way those positive or negative traits will be expressed by the individual depends on what other elements are present in the salt formula. Continuing with the example of Calcarea carbonica, the Carbon archetype is that of the dim witted burly-man, with a robust frame of big bones meant to support and project the force of large, powerful muscles. When you combine that with the Calcium traits, you get sedentarism, which causes lack of exercise and therefore accumulation of body fat; put insecurity on top of that, and a tendency to not talk much unless addressed directly and you get the stereotype of the big, dumb, fatso.

So what else is there in stock for the Calcareas? They have a tendency for fear and insecurities, sometimes manifested in sleep disorders. Every normal human being do show stress responses from time to time, and in the healthier people these tend to be related with anxiety. Because of their introvert personalities, Calcareas tend to be self conscious, so these anxieties may take the form of self doubt, low self esteem, and worry about what others may think of the self. Depending on the person's formative years, there may be a religious anxiety component there, of the sort where there's a sense of guilt or shame beyond the normative response to transgression, even having doubt about the salvation of their soul (yes, it is a Christian concept; Homeopathy was originally created in a mostly Lutheran environment, and expanded first to other Christian countries first). The hearing of bad news, horrible events or even sad stories have a debilitating effect on this patients, too.

When stress cannot be handled this way, other more dysfunctional neuroses arise, we may find a tendency for either phobias (rodents are said to be particularly fearful for the Calcarea type) melancholy or depression. In extreme cases, delusions or ilusions manifest themselves though the particulars depend, as we stated before, on what other elements may be present in the formula.

Speaking of Calcarea Fluorica in particular, its dysfunction seems to spin around money or the lack there-off. While several other Calcareas do have some fears related with not having enough, or towards the consequences of poverty (hunger, low social status, etc) it is Calcarea Fluorica that manifest the most money-centered pathologies of all. Calc-F do seem to have a tendency to accumulate material wealth for the sake of accumulating it, and have a difficult time to assess correctly how much wealth has been socketed away. Calc-F do fear poverty, and will believe to be poor himself even if, objectively speaking, he's better of than a number of his peers. Unfortunately, his self doubt may result in a self-fulfilling prophecy: they rarely put their best effort at work because they expect to fail, so they may end up as underachievers. Also, given that they tend to be in the smarter side of the intelligence scale, they expect to find solutions to their financial limitations that are based on extrinsic factors: this make them easy prey for the sort of scammers that tell pretty stories to the wishful and the naive who are itching to believe those.

Other trait of the Calc-F is that these patients tend to have a hard time making decisions. Again, this is a consequence of their self doubt. They will agonize over decisions, unable to make up their minds until outside circumstances forces their hand. Also, they get dispirited very easily so they need to roll some extra will tries in order to persevere in their projects and take those to good term.

When dysfunction advances even further and the ego barriers begin to crumble, Calc-F show a darker side. They have a severe tendency for great depression. They have a way to look for the uglier side of things, and this drain their energies. They expect that whatever that might go wrong will, and it will go wrong at the worst possible time too.

It is getting pretty late tonight, so I will cut this session now. Thanks all for your attention.

Next time: CALCAREA PHOSPHORICA

Edit: (04/02/2019) Typos, redaction.