Unfolding Platina through miasm.

Dr Merlin Liza James

Introduction:

• Metals are part of the mineral kingdom. They affect every vital system of the body.
• Metals are used as therapeutical agents.
• They are used for chemoprophylaxis.
• Greatly used in surgery and dentistry.
• They have fitted in dentures and fillings
• metals affect the skin.
• They are outstanding conductors of electromagnetic current.
• Platina is one such metal which widely used as homeopathy therapeutic agent as well as other use such as jewelry and as the catalytic converter.

HISTORY:

• In 19th century platina was given a remedy for syphilis.
• The name originates from the Spanish word platina meaning ‘little silver’.

PROPERTIES:

• Symbol of Element : Pt
• Atomic Number of Platinum : 78
• Number of Protons/Electrons in Platinum : 78
• Number of Neutrons in Platinum : 117
• Colour of Platinum : silver-white

EVOLUTION OF PLATINA:

• PHASE OF PHOBIC

Both mental and physical side of the patient is sensitive. You dare not approach her, she is proud, haughtiness, fault finding. She is very large in her own imagination while others feels insignificant and small. It is this egotism that makes her undesirable companion. Arrogance is marked in every feature of her countenance.

She walks straight like a queen, her head erect, and her eyes turned away from all contemptible creatures around her, they all seem far too beneath her dignity to be taken note of.

WHY- they are superior, haughty, egoistic, arrogant, looks on down????

The platinum women have the feeling of being very small initially. She feels that unless she proves her nobility, and greatness, people will not come to her, and she will be alone. So, she must grow large to survive.

She believes that growth depends upon her performance, and she pushes herself to reach great heights. The expectation felt by platinum is to something special, the level of performance much above the normal.

RUBRICS

• Ailment from deceived ambition.
• Delusion, that she is noble.

So, she feels superior and feels there is no place for her in the world. She is rare, she doesn’t belong to her family, extremes of haughtiness, contempt and ambitious.

She feels left out in a world of ordinary people. She cannot mix or mingle with them. She cannot form relationships with other people just as noble platinum cannot easily from a compound. So, there is feeling of loneliness, of isolation, a feeling of being the queen, yet being alone.

Her survival depends on saying “I don’t care what they think of me. They are born low, and I’m born high. She is above ordinary feelings and the reaction of the people around her. She becomes contemptuous, haughty, ambitious, if these persons are not being given the chance to be big or super-special, they can go into fancies, or imagination of being very big or powerful.

If this ego hurt it leads to social frustration, anger then in turn to phobic stage (ailment from loss of position, status)

They develop with fear and anxiety, fear of people particularly large group, they fear of going insane, fear of immanent death.

RUBRICS:

• Kent: presentiment of death
• Fear of ghost
• Fear that they will kill someone.

Free- floating anxiety more common in insane platina, alternating with feeling of power and superiority. She is liable to feel immense anxiety after anger, after sexual arousal.

• STAGE OF HYSTERIA

Platina pride is accompanied by a sensitivity to rejection which is ironic in the view of her own attitude towards other people.

Like natrum and ignatia, she easily feels slighted, ignored, pr abandoned.

RUBRICS:

• Ailment from scorn
• Over-sensitiveness delusion, forsaken.

Like Natrum she is aversion to company and conversation, feels worse from consolation and better for crying.

Again, like natrum and ignatia she will not get close with someone because she may be devastated when she loses them.

RUBRIC:

Kent: Ailment from grief

There is alternating states are highly characteristic of platina individual. Even sane platina is subject to alternation of mood.

RUBRIC: Kent: Mood, alternating.

• She may be morose and next day she is euphoric.
• One day she is calm, the next day she sis extremely irritable and insane.
• Similarly, her physical symptoms alternate with psychological symptoms.
• One may even complaint of sexual excitement with depression or headache alternating with anxiety.
• The periodicity of alteration may be within days and weeks.
• Another character is tendency to laugh inappropriately and is often sexually obsessed.

RUBRIC: Kent: Laughing over serious matter.

Comparison with Hyoscyamus, they laugh at everything and anything. Whereas platina laughs specifically at the most serious things that are said or that she thinks.

Example, she will finally get up the courage to tell her homoeopath about her sexual fantasy, and immediately after describing it she will laugh, or she will laugh during the interview when she considers talking about a serious matter such as her fear that she is going insane.

RUBRIC: Kent fear of loss of reason

She cannot stop herself from laughing like a reflex response. They have irresistible desire to whistle and sing that they do even though they know that decency should be there.

Next expression of hysteria is HOMICIDAL TENDANCY.

Example, Jule candy mentions that of a case of a women who could not go to the dining table for fear that she would thrust the knife into the bosom of her Husband whom she passionately fond of. The very sight of the knife brought about the homicidal craving. And given platinum which relived her symptoms.

PHASE OF PERVERSION

• SANE PLATINA:

Platina women is sensitive, emotional person not unlike ignatia. Like ignatia she is passionate, not just sexually but many other things. The sexual level of platina is more intense and more persistent than that of any other type. Although it may bring pleasure when it is indulged, it also causes distress as well. Sensible women complaints that they cannot escape from sexual thoughts.

RUBRIC:

• Kent: Sexual thoughts intrude.

This perversion interrupts her normal thinking with sudden intensity, as if they were not her thoughts at all, and with tremendous sexual desire. Because she knows that this is abnormal, she may be too ashamed to seek help, or she may think that there is nothing can be done about her sudden sexual impulses. Then it will be hidden in her mind. To cope with sexual urges, some platina will resort to frequent masturbation. They were not able to control anything that cannot end up in one-to-one relationship that end up in different partners.

• INSANE PALTINA:

Expect a lot from partner

• Not satisfy, as they feel all are inferior – they feel male are not big enough to satisfy them– Try in different means – Homosexual, With child. Still not satisfy

It will be Expressed as Sexual dreams.

SEXUAL EXCESS AND RELIGIOUSNESS: A patient did not tell during history but on the third visit she told regarding her powerful sexual urge because she trusted me. She was married and religious, and felt a little guilty about her urges, which she said that she did. Her fantasies more like of hallucinations and delusions.

RUBRIC:

• KENT: Religious- alternates with sexual excitement, religious affections.

CASE
She felt at a time that she had the body of Jesus, and she was angry with Jesus for taking over her body, since it gave her the sexual feelings of a man, which she describes as “brutish’. She said that at these times she wanted to make love with women (Kent: lovesick with one of her own sexes.) or that Jesus was making love with her. She was aware that these feelings were crazy, and was able to talk sensibly with me, but she also treated these delusions as more real than imaginary and felt that she was being made love to or possessed by Jesus. A young woman once told me a harrowing tale of her upbringing with her insane mother, who was almost certainly a platina constitutionally. Her mother was a religious fanatic and described herself as “the bride of Christ.” She would talk about demons in the house, (Kent: fear of evil.) and sometimes she talks to air, telling her children not to bother her whilst she did this. One day she emptied all the furniture out of the house somewhere. (She ordered her terrified children to assist her). My patient told me to all her chores, while she was a queen, expecting those around her to do all her chores, while she went out and had good time. In particular. She treated her daughter as” slave” whereas son could do wrong, presumably because she found them attractive, and used them as surrogate husbands. (Her husband had committed suicide when the pt. was 4 yrs old). Nothing her daughter did was good enough for her, and they lived constant fear of punishment. My patient also lived in constant fear of being killer by her mother. She had a vague memory of mother smothering her.

RUBRIC

• Kent: propensity to kill.

She also had a feeling that her mother had sexually molested her when she was very young. Her mother gave the impression publicly of being very chaste after becoming widow but have many affairs from her religious community. Alternation of mood seen insane platina can become and alternation btw sane and insanity as the pathology progressed. Sexual arousal with rampant fantasizing and religiousness with delusions of grandeur or fear of damnation.

PHASE OF DEJECTION, SAD, GRIEF.

• Time passes, Weary of life
• Suicidal response, No courage
• Turns to religion – try to attract God by
• praying loudly
• They become after some time into dejection, melancholy,
• Apathy that weeps for hours, lose all their interest in affairs of life.
• Mental traumatism, express as wound of mind- heart- soul.
• Ie, feeling very hurt, deeply wounded, cut to hear, lacerating feeling, of being broken hearted.

PHASE OF RELIGIOUS:

• Turns to religion – try to attract God by praying loudly & pervert.
• Perversion, sexual excess along with religiousness.

SYPHILITIC PHASE

• Phase of malicious
• Desire to kill – child, husband or someone whom she secretly dislike.

PLATINA – TRI-MIASMATIC REMEDY:

“Illusion of fantasy on entering the house after walking an hour, as if everything about her were very small and all persons physically and mentally inferior, but she herself physically large and superior”.

We find this repeated in almost all books on Materia medica so much, that the platinum constitution came to be identified with superiority complex, haughtiness, exaggerated notions of self and his body.

This identify for platina is so ingrained that most of us rule out platinum where this theme is not present. This interpretation as its essential theme of platinum holds good only for Sycotic defense, where the patient come to us with Sycotic expression of the disease. For a patient to have come into this Sycotic phase, he must well pass through Psoric defense. And we need to know the drug picture of Psoric as well as syphilitic.

Psoric phase  goes to  Sycotic phase then leads to Syphilitic phase.

• INFERIORITY COMPLEX– PSORA

Some people feels that they must somehow hide their defects from those around them, so that they are not looked down upon. This feeling of low of himself referred to as” inferiority complex”

• SUPERIORITY COMPLEX- SYCOTIC

Such people who have inferiority complex, or feeling of failure, which is a Psoric phase, later he adopts a behavior to highlight his greatness often referred to as superiority complex or haughtiness which is a Sycotic defense.

RUBRICS:

• MIND-DELUSIONS- great person is a
• MIND- DELUSION- appreciated, she is not
• MIND-AILMENT FROM- disappointment
• MIND-AILMENT FROM- honor; wounded &-scorned; being
• MIND- SADENESS- ANXIOUS
• MIND – DELUSION- looking- down; he was looking- high place; from a
• MIND- EGOTISM
• MIND- CASTING OFF people against her will
• MIND- ABUSIVE-Children-parents; children insulting.
• MIND SELFISHNESS.

The reaction when this Sycotic defense strategy, superiority complex and haughty behavior fails, as when someone around him refuses to accommodate it, depends upon the type of constitution of the individual.

In the platinum constitution, his only solution is to adopt the syphilitic mode of defense, ie. To cut off all relationship with those persons who feels have not given respect due to him.

• PSORIC NEEDS:

Every organism has basic needs for survival and growth. These are air, water, shelter, and food at the physical level and love, support, independence, self-esteem etc. The Psoric need of a platinum constitution is respect from others.He needs to be the center of authority and others around him must obey his wishes. When this need is not obeyed, the miasm shifts to sycosis, still later to the syphilitic miasm or directly it shifts to syphilitic mode. If they offend them that they cut all the relationship, be it his own parents, brothers, son, children etc.

Syphilitic have extreme feeling to kill them with a knife.

• PSORIC DEFENSE IN PLATINUM: ANXIETY:

Anxiety is psoric. (FEMALE GENITALIA/ SEX- TINGLING, VOLUPTOUS – anxiety and palpitation.)

“Anxiety on attempting to talk in company, with palpitation; Agg. Waling with palpitation with trembling of hands and flushes of heat over whole body; deathly, as if her sense would vanish with trembling of limbs, oppression of breath and palpitation; frequent, sudden throughout the whole body.” Weeping mood after mild reproaches; weeping Agg. Evening Amel. Open air and out of sorts with the whole world, everything seems to narrow (pulsatilla); with sticky tears; with aversion to eating, and laughing, yawning, again weeping, aversion to everything; so that she was vexed with herself, with silence. Feeling that he shall die soon, with shuddering at the thought. Thinks that she stands alone in the world.

GENIUS OF THE REMEDY- PLATINUM:
Comparison is the genius of platinum.

Illusion of fantasy on entering the house, after walking an hour, as if everything about her were very small, and all persons are physically and mentally inferior, but she herself physically large and superior. The comparison of sizes or of social status or of the body organs is an essential feature of this remedy that runs through every perception, action, or behavior of the platinum constitution.

A patient suffering from OCD may say. “I don’t know why, but I always compare the length of hair on my head with that of everyone passing by me”, or I always compare my height with anyone passing by me”, or my leg seems shorter than my right leg”, whatever may be the name of the psychiatric disorder, if this theme of comparison is present, platinum will be the remedy.

A platinum women may dread coition thinking her organs is too small and narrow if she is a Psoric phase.

RUBRICS:

• MIND DELUSION- terrible; everything seems; pulles- she was- thread- vanish- would vanish- senses.
• MIND – DELUSION- narrow everything seems too)

If she is in Sycotic, she may think that her husband has an organ too small deserve to be her husband and she goes into promiscuous behavior as fluoric acid.

Platina women in Psoric phase will be attracted to lesbianism as the safest way to conquer fear of penetration by one on whom she may not have any control during the act.

• FEAR OF PENETRATION:

Platinum has such an extreme level of SENSITIVENESS OF THE VAGINA that impossible for the physician to make an examination with the index finger. The vulva and vagina are extremely sensitive during coition, sometimes preventing the act.

Where this fear of penetration was occasioned not by the size comparison, but because of her feeling fragile as if made of glass and compound by the horrible stories of the first night experience read in some women’s magazine.

REFERENCES:

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Dr Merlin Liza James
PG scholar
Under the guidance : Prof. Dr. Srinath .C. Rao.
Department of Homoeopathic Materia medica
Father Muller Homoeopathic medical college.