Five year old Amy has a history of sleeplessness and asthma, using an inhaler since she was 18 months old. She’d been breastfed for nearly two years was still in nappies at night and had in fact only recently been dry in the day. Amy also only ate only when she was spoon fed by her mother at home, although at school she fed herself.
Amy’s mum said:
‘from her very first days until now Amy is a baby that needs to touch me whilst she sleeps, she needs that contact, she likes to sleep with her head on my tummy.’ (Mother of the year award goes to her for allowing a child to sleep on her for 5 years!!)
Her mum felt there was a deep insecurity there causing that. Her dad worked abroad and came back every few weeks and Amy was very clingy to him when he returned,
‘she’s like a monkey, clinging to him as soon as he walks through the door’.
Her asthma attacks were noticeably better when he was home and her behaviour and sleep also improved enormously when her dad was around. Her dad came with his wife and daughter to the consultation and admitted 5 years of having a child in his bedroom was a little more than he’d bargained for!
Amy attended a Montessori school as one of the older ones but came home and copied the younger children’s behaviour, sucking her thumb or a cloth, saying she was playing at being young. She was a very affectionate and intelligent child, and bilingual as her dad was foreign.
Her mum said her asthma was often worse at night so she was scared to leave her alone. Although Amy got no more than the average amount of colds her cough was constant and she couldn’t breathe deeply. She always woke up tired and said she was too tired for school although she enjoyed it once she was there.
I prescribed Amy the homeopathic remedy called Borax. There were many indications for this remedy, the main one being her unusual attachment to ‘babyhood.’ Her parents accepted her sleeping with them as fairly normal ‘because of her asthma’ and didn’t appear to consider that a five year old shouldn’t really be in nappies at night.
What was interesting was that when they returned almost six weeks later, they’d actually just taken Amy to Switzerland to see a doctor specialising in children’s asthma. Amy was so much better they told me, but we think it was the medicine the Swiss doctor gave her, not the remedy. (This is a common phenomenon for us homeopaths – cure is nearly always gentle and often not credited to the remedy). However, we have ways to find out what has affected our patients and I began to ask questions to see if it was the remedy or if indeed they were right and doctors had finally found something to help her.
I asked how Amy was sleeping now. They looked at each other a little perplexed and said that strangely three weeks beforehand she’d started using her own bed except during their trip to Switzerland where she’d reverted to joining them in their bed for the four days they were away. Then they admitted that just before that she’d refused to wear nappies at night. Her dad only remembered because he’d worried that she’d wet the hotel bed, but it hadn’t happened. Amy was also feeding herself now, so I was pretty confident that the remedy I’d given had helped Amy enormously, and surely had helped her asthma too. I doubt any conventional medicine for asthma could also affect a child in this way, and anyway, some of these changes had occurred before she’d received it.
Her parents weren’t totally convinced – which was a shame because for a while Amy had medication which she didn’t need, but after a couple more visits they took her off it and said that all indications of asthma – and especially her cough – had gone.
If you would like to see if homeopathy can help your child's asthma, contact me for some information: