Calcarea carbonica^{[ † ]}

Summary

The things you need to know by heart, the good confirmations, are: chilly people, worse for cold, worse for cold damp, worse for exertion, worse for ascending, worse at the full moon. Frequent colds, sleeps on left side, strong desire for sweets, eggs, salt, cheese, icecream. Fear of heights, insanity, cancer, mice, infections. Despair of recovery. Vertigo especially turning quickly or from heights. Low back pain. Lumbago. Nails break easily. Feet icy cold and then warm up later. Leg cramps especially at night during sleep.

These are symptoms which you must know, not just individually but as a pattern. We are pattern recognizers and if you know these symptoms as a coherent whole when you take your case you have all this information. You spend 1 fi hours with a patient and collect this volume of information and then do not know where to begin. But look at your case and see first one symptom, then another—overweight, chilly, worse damp weather, desires sweets and salt—and you can forget anything else and give Calcarea, for this is a Calcarea case. You have these things together as a pattern. It is actually a fairly simple medicine and you will mostly miss it because it is a very big one. The patients will give you many symptoms and you will get lost in them, missing the simple pattern that makes Calcarea. Most of the Calcareas I miss, which are then pointed out to me by my colleagues, are of that nature.

^† Scottish Annual Seminar 1990.