Food
I crave sugar. Find that I am nibbling food all day because of boredom.
Vegetarian
Think I might have a problem with yeast as I get bloating in my abdomen
Aggravated from spicy food sometimes so I tend not to eat spices

Temperature
Chilly. Always feel the cold. However in bed might sometimes get hot and throw the covers off.

So we have here a mild, gentle woman who feels unappreciated in her marriage and dominated by her husband. She is very sensitive to arguments and fearful of any confrontation and and will not assert her own needs because of this particular sensitivity. There is no bitterness and no sense of seething anger in our patient – more a feeling of frustration and resignation about her situation. She is a yielding type of woman, always ready to go out of her way to help others but does not expect the same in return. We felt that this was the essence of the case. We are also treating her husband at the moment for diabetes and although the patient insists that he is very domineering, we did not feel that he was excessively so. He is actually a very benign and charming man. Whilst he may be more dominating in his own home, we felt that this sense of being dominated was more due to the yielding nature of our patient rather than the reality of living with a very tyrannical husband.

The patient had been prescribed Sepia and Staphisagria on and off over the years by my colleague and both had helped her in terms of her energy and well-being. But the central theme of the case i.e. our patient’s sense of being dominated and her inability to confront and assert her own needs had not really been touched by either remedy. We tested out the following remedies with our technology: Palladium, Manganum, Staphisagria, Calc Carb, Pulsatilla but none produced the type of photographic clarity which indicated a correct prescription. We suspected at this point that we did not know the remedy our patient required and our hearts sank at the prospect that it may be a plant remedy which we did not know since the themes of many of the plant families remain vague and rather obscure. When we reach this point in a session we wait a while hoping for some kind of inspiration to come to us! Suddenly I saw my colleague switch on the computer and turn to the notes I had given him from Scholten’s seminar on the Compositae. He had remembered a few lines from one of the cases and wanted to check the remedy out. This is often how we work when we don’t know the remedy and we suspect that a laborious repetorisation will yield nothing. A line read in a particular materia medica will suddenly come to consciousness and we then follow this up. (I recall another case of a highly loquacious female patient who had not responded to the obvious snake remedies. I recalled a line in a book by Grandgeorge about Lyssin where he said that patients requiring Lyssin were often the most loquacious patients in his practice. This one line led to a correct prescription of the remedy.) My colleague turned to Jan Scholten’s case presented above and we found the following:

This seemed like a possibly good match for our own patient and, for want of any other ideas, we tested her with this remedy. Result: a crystal clear photograph! We then turned to other material medica but did not find much information other than its use as a haemorragic remedy. We noted that our patient had had excessive menstrual bleeding of bright red blood which her doctor had treated with progesterone. This was an added confirmation for Erechthites as a possible prescription. Interestingly we had earlier considered Manganum as a possibility with its theme of a suppressed person under the domination of another (see Sankaran, Substance of Homeopathy) and Scholten writes that this plant contains much Manganum and therefore has a lot of similarities with this remedy. The clarity of the photographic image and the similarity of our patient’s state to that of Scholten’s little patient gave us the confidence to prescribe the remedy.

The remedy had caused a dramatic shift in our patient both physically and psychologically and we were pleased by this result. When we photographed our patient on arrival her base photograph was completely coherent and clear. This indicated to us that we did not need to repeat the remedy at this point. We gave our patient another few doses of Erechthites 200c to take away with her and told her to phone us if she felt she was relapsing and required another dose.

The patient did not require a repeat of the remedy until January 2000 (approximately 5 months after the original prescription) as she felt her energy was going down somewhat.

The good result we obtained from Erechthites inspired us to re-read our Scholten seminar notes and also to try and find more information about this family. Scholten says that the Compositae have some similarities with the Carbon series (see Homeopathy and the Elements) in that there are problems and issues around self-worth. He says that the person has a problem becoming independent and being able to show themselves in the world. They either fight too much or not enough and are not able to stand up for themselves. There is sometimes the sense that their space is being intruded upon and that they are not able to decide for themselves. Boundaries and borders are a strong theme and this is reflected in the haemorrhagic nature of a lot of the remedies. ‘One bleeds when ones boundaries are not strong enough. Blood is the carrier of the ego and when you lose your ego your boundaries are hurt.’ (Scholten)

We have divided the compositae remedies into a number of different groups each with a different general theme. For instance Group III contains: Carduus Benedictus, Carduus Marianus, Taraxacum officinalis, Liatris spicata and Centaura tagana. This group, has the theme of anger and boundaries, with the liver being primarily affected. We put Erechthites hieracifolia in Group II with Arctium Lappa, Echinacea angustifolia, Echinacea purpurea, Eupatorium perfoliatum and Eupatorium purpureum. The principal theme of this group, is that of not wanting to be dominated by another.

Whilst we feel that much of this material needs to be borne out in practice, we can at least endorse Scholten’s insights about Erechthites in our own case and we look forward to prescribing more remedies from this wonderful daisy family.