| | HSI Graduates! Promote Your Practice! Email Us: Your profile, picture, and a cured case to be featured in the next newsletter, the HSI website, Facebook and Twitter. |
| Join our list |  |
|
| Spider Bite Mania |
| by Barbara Seideneck, CHom, CCH, RSHom, Faculty of HSI Imagine, you are waiting in line at the grocery store and a woman in front of you can’t stand still for a second. She jumps a foot off the ground several times, then all of a sudden turns around and lunges towards you. What would you do? I took a step back, looked up and realized that I knew this beautiful young lady, and that she was behaving rather strangely. She proceeded to call out my name loudly while she pulled her t-shirt way down her cleavage and then on the back almost to her waist. “Do you see this?” What I saw were many slightly infected bumps on her chest and 6 or 7 red pockmarked eruptions on her back. She explained that she had been bitten by something, and after being prescribed steroids she felt much worse. She listed everything that had happened to her in the last few days very quickly, and said  | Tarantula bite |
that she was in the store to look for a homeopathic remedy. At this point the cashier was ready for payment and the young lady paid for her groceries in a great hurry. I offered to have her stop by my house to talk about this some more. This is her story: “Five or six days ago I slept in an attic in Wyoming. I dreamt about a spider, woke up, felt crazy and couldn’t sleep. Soon after, I got stabbing, shooting pains. They are moving through different spots, and come very suddenly. I thought I had been bitten by a spider but I don’t know for sure. I used to get Black Widow bites all the time, but it was never like this. Three days later I broke out with these bumps between my breasts. Now my muscles are sore. I am sore in the armpits, breasts and back. I can’t sleep. After I took steroids I felt yucky and like bugs were crawling all over me.” Read on… |
| Tarantism - Tarentula Hispanica | | "Dance manias, taking the form of epidemics of raving, jumping, dancing and convulsions, were reported as early as the 10th century.
One such episode, occurring in Italy early in the 13th century, was recorded by physicians of the time whose records have been reviewed by the medical historian H.E. Sigerist. He has written: ‘The disease occurred at the height of the summer heat. …People, asleep or awake, would suddenly jump up, feeling an acute pain like the sting of a bee. Some saw the spider, others did not, but they knew that it must be the tarantula. They ran out of the house into the street, to the market place, dancing in great excitement. Soon they were joined by others who like them had been bitten, or by people who had been stung in previous years. …Thus groups of patients would gather, dancing wildly in the queerest attire.’
…Known as tarantism in Italy. …Legend has it that an epidemic of tarantism swept through the town of Taranto in southern Italy between the 15th and 17th centuries. Victims, referred to as tarantati and almost always women, were seized with a dancing frenzy, born of the idea that the bite would be fatal if the victim did not dance hard and long enough, perhaps to sweat the poison out of the system." The dance became known as the Tarantella, a well-known Italian dance!"
 | TARANTELLA |
Excerpted from: Prisma, The Arcana of Materia Medica Illuminated
by Frans Vermeulen |
|
|
Visit us on facebook
Follow us on twitter
