Pretty Lips!
A couple of weeks ago I had a new patient come in for Heilkunst treatment. Her intake form indicated that she was two and a half years old. As soon as her Mom and she arrived, it took me about 30 seconds to apprehend her Constitution. Mom had a harboured exasperation and the child made a bee-line around the whole of my home before landing in my office. Because I’m well versed in Constitutions, I started to think about what in my office I truly valued as I knew that no stone would remain unturned and unexplored. I accessed and offered the little wooden horse, book on the very hungry caterpillar, water-based markers, paper, the shells I keep on my desk and the timer I use for my timing the waits between Bowen moves thinking these items might be a hit with this very busy babe. The mom was apologizing profusely for her precocious child and it was easy to see that the offered diversions were not going to be absorbed into this babe’s obvious vortex of exploration. It was difficult for her to receive anything proffered when postured with the accelerator to the floor. We had a wee tasmanian devil in our midst.
While the Mom and I attempted to talk, she throwing bits of food at the maw of the perpetually hungry and thirsty babe to try and placate her need to turn all the focus onto her. The food was just adding fuel to an already hot little fire! You could just feel the tension in the child and I bided my time until she superseded Mom’s capacity to quell her imaginative hunger versus her desire to thoroughly explore my office without us getting in her way. I let Mom know that we’d get only as far as we could today and that it was no problem to set up a short telephone consultation afterwards so that we might answer any left-over questions she might have about her child’s Heilkunst treatment at a time more conducive for her when the child was at daycare.
This little girl was so brilliantly engaging that she just obscured and virtually cancelled out her Mom who kept apologizing, attempting to get the child to “be polite,” coercing her to say polite phrases to thank me. I laughed to myself thinking about what a botched mission this would be from the get-go as her rebellious nature was already in motion. This babe was a riotous blur of movement and activity, and rightfully, the last thing in her mind were “please and thank yous.” It was just a matter of time, before the Mom and I became so engaged that we lost track of the two year old on her mission to turn my office upside down as a function of her destinal path. I even typed her blood, thinking that would slow her down a bit. That lasted about 10 minutes!
I have a little spot on my desk where I keep hidden a bottle of peppermint essential oil to put in my water, on occasion, along with an all natural peppermint lip balm made by Saponetta Divino. Before I could move to retrieve my two valued personal items, she had the cap whipped off the lip balm which canon-balled across the desk to land, on the other side of the room, somewhere in my blood typing kit, not to be located until I next typed another patient’s blood a few days later. The next thing the Mom and I knew, the child had smeared the contents of my lip balm all over her mouth and chin. The next thing we heard was her exclaim, “Pretty lips, Momma, pretty lips!” We both laughed pretty hard, diffusing the tension. Apparently she does the same with her Mom’s lipsticks on occasion. We both agreed by affirming the babe, “Yes, darlin’ pretty lips for sure.”
She went home with the pretty lips stick, without the lid, and my firm understanding of her constitution. I also knew why the respiratory issues plagued her, as they were derived from up her parent’s and grand-parent’s genetic history. The following week, I had the pleasure of starting to treat the Mom, bolstering her confidence about how to effectively navigate a Sulphur constitution, and extending my sympathies.
My boy is a Sulphur as well, so I know all about this. After two years of treatment with Heilkunst, he is now much more calm and mild-mannered. When we mentioned to a friend the other day, that we were once concerned that my son might be ADHD (amongst many other things), he could not believe it.
Hello, I am quite confused as you include SULPHUR both as genotype and phenotype.. I find all this theory very interesting and original, I am quite convinced that it must be like that as it really provides order in the mess of 600 or more remedies..
I would appreciate a comment of clarification . Thank you.
George, when we are examining the remedy of Sulphur within a constitutional context, it is a genotype, and not a phenotype. As with any of the 12 constitutional remedies, however, you’ll find a crossover in terms of a remedy which may be used to treat a constitution (taking Sulphur as the example), may also, in another context, be used to treat a specific disease. The Sulphur genotype, and the Sulphur disease are two different things, but which are treated with the same remedy.
Your point about typology is very key in terms of matching the structure of the system of medicine to the actual structure of nature, which is largely made up of typologies.
Thank you very much for the comment. I thought sulphur was in the phenotypes too, because it is placed here among the other ones, I understand now.
You know Wilhelm Reich tried to exorcise character from the human beings as disease but it seems there is no human personality without it and the more flexible the character is the more successful the individuals are, so I believe the genotypes will give a person a healthy character and the phenotypes an impeding quality in that character which must be treated, it makes sense , what I still wonder is what to do with the rest of the remedies, for example I thought that my disease, phenotype , was argentum nitricum which I used recently to treat my endless counting and fixed ideas , I believe successfully,and although I can identify myself with calc carb I can’t identify with any of the phenotypes you present here.
Is their number exhausted in 6? And also taking the constitutional-genotype remedy will cure the phenotype as well? According to classical homeopathy , I think the answer must be yes.
HI George,
Yes, I think that my last response helped to clarify some of your questions, but I see it has left others not completely addressed.
Behind all of this, you need to understand the basic concept of the difference between health and disease. To use Wilhelm Reich’s work to illustrate, as you brought up, he did certainly identify a number of character types which represent states of disease. He did also identify a healthy character type, which he called “the genital type” – this is not representative of a state of disease, but a state of health. Reich’s character types, by the way, apply to neurosis, but do not cover the other side of disease which is psychosis. That is a whole different ball of wax.
There are exactly six genotypes – everyone is born into one of them, yet everyone has qualities of all six, the healthier they become. Review my blog series again, and you’ll see I make points related to this at different points along the way.
Argentum Nitricum, as you bring up as an example, is neither a genotype or a phenotype, but it is a disease state. This represents the entirety of what Dr. Hahnemann worked on in his life – the treatment of specific disease states through the law of similars.
Calc carb is one of the genotypes, and it is possible that you don’t need any of the phenotype remedies.
As to your last question, the answer is a humongous “no!”, when you ask if the genotype remedy will cure the phenotype as well. The only thing that the remedy for the genotype will do is BALANCE the person’s constitution – it will NOT touch the phenotype, nor will it cure any of the patient’s diseases. It is an example of the application of regimen (balancing) rather than the strict jurisdiction of disease (cure based on the law of similars). This is one of the terrible pieces of confusion that “classical” homeopathy has introduced to the world, along with a number of other misinterpretations and corruptions of what Dr. hahnemann actually taught within his system of medical Heilkunst.
If you re-read my whole blog series, I think all these points will start to become clearer to you.
How would you approach a situation where you know the genotype, but the person’s primary phenotype has shifted throughout their life — for example, when young they display a strong Staphysagria disease, but when older, they overcompensate into responsibility and show more Sepia. Would you address several masks that show up in a history or only the one currently running?
Or, let’s say you have a male who has an emotional phenotype and compensates with an ars alba mask, but also displays some traits of Nux Vomica foreign to his original constitution. Would you treat for multiple phenotypes concurrently or focus on only the most dominant?
Thank you so much for these posts, it’s given a way to think about constitutional treatment that seems so clear.
Thank you for your comment. The question is very complicated and spans much greater than what we can cover here.
Practitioner, Allyson McQuinn, would be happy to have you book into her schedule, to discuss the thoughtware behind genotypes and phenotypes and how treating the tonic diseases on the sequential timeline help to eliminate all the micro-management of these states.
If you would like to make an appointment, you can reach Reception via email at reception@arcanum.ca .
Thanks so much,
– Diane Nowlan, Office Manager, Arcanum Wholistic Clinic