• Homoeopathic medicine
• Useful for shock and grief
• Helpful when there is sighing, changeable moods, disturbed sleep and eating patterns

Ignatia amara – St Ignatius Bean.

Remedy picture as described in traditional homoeopathic texts.

This remedy suits people in a sensitive or emotional state with alternating, contradictory emotions. They may be physically exhausted from long endured grief, anxiety or emotional shock. It is a remedy of great contradictions such as roaring in the ears made better for music or an empty feeling in the stomach not relieved for eating, and spasmodic laughter from grief. There is a general oversensitivity to pain and also related to ailments that recur at precisely the same hour.

Mental/Emotional symptoms:

Grieves silently and seeks solitude, sighs and yawns often; changeable moods; melancholia; sobbing and tearful. Ailments from anger, reproaches, shame, disappointments, disappointed love or bad news. They may brood in silence and have inner conflict over their imagined troubles or wrongs committed; and can be quarrelsome. The remedy often suits people who have very high expectations of other people or of themselves and suffer complaints when they are disappointed or hurt when their ideals are not met. They may feel scattered and overwhelmed.

Physical symptoms:

Head: The head feels hollow and heavy; worse for stooping. Headaches as if ‘a nail were driven through the side’ relieved by lying on it and congestion headaches after anger or grief; cramp-like pain over the root of the nose.

Face: Muscles about the face and lip may twitch; face changes colour from pale to flushed at the least emotion.

Eyes: Spasms of eyelids and neuralgic pains about the eyes; flickering zigzags.

Throat: Feeling of a lump in the throat that cannot be swallowed; sore throat with stitches when not swallowing better for eating something solid; stitches that extend to the ears.

Stomach: Sour belching; empty hollow feeling or sinking sensation in stomach relieved by taking a deep breath; much flatulence; craving for acid things and indigestible or exotic foods. Rumbling in stomach. They hold their tension in their diaphragm, stomach, or colon and can have a ravenous or changeable appetite.

Extremities: Jerking of limbs; pain and cramps in tendons of Achilles and calf on exertion; burning in foot/heel.

Sleep: Very light sleep with jerking of limbs on going to sleep; insomnia from grief and worries; dreams continue for a long time and trouble the person. Chronic insomnia from always trying to resolve conflicts.

Keywords:

Pains spasmodic and cramping. May appear and disappear abruptly

Grief, sorrow, homesickness, disappointment

Headache from crying, lump in the throat

Sighing, trembling and yawning

Contradictory and paradoxical symptoms

Exciting causes:

Symptoms come on after grief, worry, anger, fright, disappointment or shame

Modalities:

Better: Massage; walking; eating; keeping busy, hard pressure

Worse: Cigarette smoke; coffee; sweets, cold; worry; guilt, consolation

Desires: Indigestible or exotic food; sour; bread

Aversions: Usual diet; warm food; meat; fruit; milk; alcohol

Compare to: Kali Phos, Sepia, Nat mur.