Sleep, Pain and Poppies
"Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole!” Wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge used Laudanum for a painful knee but like many of the other great poets, artists, and musicians of the 18th Century, also took it to help his creative process and for sleep. In various forms, opium has been used as a painkiller or a sleep aid for thousands of years, and was known to the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. It was a staple of every medicine cabinet in every home up to 1920 when the Dangerous Drugs Act came into force.
When we talk about holistic therapies, this can conjure up a range of images but in essence it is where someone’s entire health is taken into consideration. If I were seeing Mr Coleridge today I would want to know, not only how his knee is, but also how and what he is eating, any other physical complaints, how he feels emotionally and very importantly - how he is sleeping.
This lunchtime, I attended some training on Joint Support Strategies for Everyday Life, presented by Anisha Joshi, author of Heal Your Back and she described sleep for joint health as a “clinical priority”. She told us poor sleep increases cytokines which drive cartilage degradation and consistently sleeping 5 or less hours a night will mean you have an elevated inflammatory load. Of course, anyone who is dealing with significant inflammation or pain will know sleep can be very difficult to attain.
When I want to understand the action of a substance, the homeopathic Materia Medica is my best resource. This is a sort of dictionary of plants, minerals, chemicals and animal substances and what they will do to you if you took them in their original form. The way homeopathy works is by studying these substances and the action they have and then matching this to the symptoms seen in a patient. A simple example might be the watering eyes caused from cutting an onion which are very similar to the watering eyes of hay fever. So by understanding our original substances, we have a better idea which remedy might help certain symptoms.
The photo above of the unopened poppy flower I found on a walk last week. Homeopathy also draws on the Doctrine of Similars to help understand the “essence” of a substance and of all the plants doesn’t this look the sleepiest? The head is so heavy it can’t hold it up.
Each remedy has its own distinct pattern of mental, emotional and physical characteristics. In the case of Opium it is associated with a particular state: a person who feels stunned or numbed, often after a fright or shock, with a profound drowsiness that's difficult to shake and senses that feel dulled or slowed down. Someone in this state might look sleepy too - eyes half open, fixed pupils and an intoxicated look about them.
This is part of what makes homeopathic prescribing individualised: matching a person's actual pattern to a remedy picture, rather than treating a named condition with a standard approach. When someone comes to me, I take a full case history to understand which picture genuinely fits, which is why two people with what looks like the same problem can end up with completely different remedies.
If you are struggling with pain or trying to get a good night’s sleep why don’t you book a free 15 minute call with me.
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