At the start of baseball season, the mother of a healthy 10-year-old child, Billy, called my office. She said that the previous day while he was playing baseball, another boy was swinging a bat and accidentally hit Billy’s upper arm. Billy couldn’t finish the game because of pain. She took him to the ER for an X-ray, and there was no fracture. The mother felt the next step was to bring him in to find whether there a homeopathic remedy for the acute pain, and bruising.
When they arrived, I asked Billy how he was. He said, “Doing good.” I could tell he wasn’t—he avoided looking at me. As I approached to look at his arm, he pushed me away. He said to his mother, “I’m really OK. I want to go.”
I didn’t force the situation and didn’t touch the injury. But I could see that where his arm was hit the tissue was swollen; the skin was a dark blue–black bruise. I asked whether he could move his arm back and forth. With a little attitude, he did and told me his arm felt “very sore.”
My advice to his mother was to give him Arnica 200C, five pellets once. The next afternoon she called me to say she had only Arnica 30C and had given it to him at bedtime and in the morning. She said Billy was back to being Billy: when he came home from school, he was playing baseball in the backyard with neighbor friends.
Arnica is a plant of the Compositae, or daisy, family. It has bright yellow blossoms (daisies themselves have a range of colors). It grows in open landscapes at high altitudes with ample sunlight and many times in places where climbing accidents or falls occur. Arnica is also called wolf’s eye or wolf’s yellow because its flowers are yellow like wolves’ eyes. It also goes by mountain tobacco because it’s used as a substitute for smoking tobacco.
Arnica is a well-known homeopathic remedy that’s often indicated after a mild to moderate accident. (In more severe cases, seek medical attention.) Many times, a person likely to need Arnica has had a contusion, sprain, bruising, or after a surgical procedure. They feel physically oversensitive and uncomfortable in general, and dislike being touched. They might say they feel wounded or stunned. If you can get them to describe their pain, they sometimes say they feel sore, bruised, or beaten. But in many cases, they close themselves off to emotions and say everything is fine.
It’s notable that often, if a person is taken to by a family member or a companion to the ER after an injury, they will say they are well and tell the practitioner to leave them alone—even if the injury is visible. In our case, Billy’s mother was his advocate and knew the injury needed attention.