Erigeron: When Pain Leads To Despair

The homeopathic Erigeron Canadensis personality presents with a nagging sense of great despair — bordering on futility. This desolation, in more ways than one, is powerfully characterised by genitourinary disorders and painful urination, among other symptoms.

- Dr Mukesh Batra

The homeopathic remedy, Erigeron Canadensis [Canadian fleabane], is an annual native plant that grows to 1 m [3 ft; 3 in] by 0.5 m [1ft; 8 in]. It flowers from June to October; the seeds ripen from July to October. The species is monoecious — individual flowers are either male, or female — also, both sexes can be found on the same plant. It is pollinated by bees and flies. It is also famed for attracting wildlife.

In traditional herbal medicine, the plant is boiled to make steam for sweat lodges, arouse sneezing during the course of a cold and burned to generate a smoke that wards off insects. In recent times, it has been praised for its causticity and employed for gastrointestinal disorders, such as diarrhoea and dysentery.

While some clinicians have found the plant useful for bleeding piles, or haemorrhoids, native literature is replete with its other therapeutic effects — anti-rheumatic, diuretic [promotes increased production of urine], emmenagogue [stimulates menstrual flow], styptic [a substance capable of stopping bleeding when applied to a wound], tonic, and vermifuge [medicine for worm infestation]. Erigeron is also a part of medicinal antiquity — a ‘potion’ of the plant was used by some old-time herbalists in North America to treat diarrhoea and internal bleeding, or applied externally to treat gonorrhoea [venereal disease] and bleeding piles. That it was used as a dependable uterine stimulant and to ease swollen, or inflamed, tonsils with ulceration and inflammation of the throat [a la strep throat], aside from menstrual irregularities, is also documented.

THE AGONY EFFECT