Calcarea Phosphorica — Homeopathic Remedy Profile

Prepared from tricalcic phosphate by trituration, Calcarea phosphorica is one of the great mineral polychrests of the materia medica. The picture runs from the newborn with the paper-thin skull to the scrawny adolescent who cannot fix on a page for five minutes together. Prescribing runs from trituration through the low decimals to 30C, 200C and higher; the register in which the remedy is given determines what the prescription can be expected to do.

At a Glance

Source and Preparation

Calcium phosphate exists in the body as the mineral scaffolding of bone and tooth. The homeopathic preparation is made, in Hahnemann's manner, by dropping dilute phosphoric acid into lime water and triturating the resulting precipitate through the decimal and centesimal scales. Boericke lists trituration and all potencies. In the low decimals (Ø through D6, and the biochemic 6X) the register is nutritional and organopathic, and questions of dose and absorption remain in view. At 30C and above no molecule of the salt remains; what acts is the dynamic preparation, prescribed on the totality of the case. The two registers require the two ways of prescribing, and confusing them is the commonest technical error a beginner will make with this remedy.

The Essence of Calcarea Phosphorica

Where Calcarea carbonica is chalky-white and fat, Calc-p. is generally emaciated, dirty-white or brownish, the abdomen large but flabby. The skull can feel thin and soft under the fingers, as if it would crack like paper when pressed upon. Fontanelles remain open too long, particularly the posterior. Bones do not ossify on schedule. Teeth appear late and decay quickly. The child walks late, and when they do walk the neck is too thin and weak to hold the head with any conviction.

Two threads run through the picture. The first is nutrition: bones and glands are the tissues chiefly wanting, and the self-governing principle meets a body that cannot make good use of what is given to it. The second is a peculiar susceptibility to weather. Every draft of cold air brings a rheumatic pain at a joint or a suture; every change of weather is felt in the head, the ears, the back. The child craves fat bacon and the salt of smoked meats. Digestion is feeble and every feeding brings colic. Growth outstrips nutrition, and the tall, thin scholar with growing pains and an inability to fix his mind is the same picture continued into adolescence.

There is a restlessness here that is quite unlike Calc.'s fixed, dependable inertia. The Calc-p. child, and the Calc-p. adult, wants always to be somewhere else. At home they want to go out; away from home they are homesick. Discontent, boredom, and the constant desire to go from place to place stand as prominent mental keynotes.

Clinical Portrait

Mind and Temperament

The mind is prostrated by talking, by mental strain, by grief. Ignatia and Phosphoricum acidum stand nearby for ailments after grief and disappointed love, but Calc-p. adds slow comprehension, mistakes in words, and the obtuseness that follows a sorrow the child cannot articulate. Bad news makes them beside themselves; the fear of hearing bad news lingers for weeks afterwards. They shun society and seek solitude, then find the solitude unbearable and go looking for company again.

Children are peevish, fretful, obstinate, hard to please. Consolation makes irritability worse. Temper tantrums arrive without warning and pass without lesson. During dentition the irritability is at its worst; during headache it returns. Sadness in girls before puberty belongs here, as does homesickness in a boy sent away to school. Weeping is worse for the well-meant consolations of parents and teachers.

A practitioner in the north of England once described a boy of nine brought in for what the parents were calling "concentration problems." The school had suggested medication. He was tall for his age, thin, pale with a brownish cast, and could not sit through a paragraph without complaining that his legs hurt at the shins and knees. He had returned from a two-week camp the summer before sobbing at the school gate, and had not been the same since. Asked to write down the words of his favourite song, he wrote two of them twice on the same line. Calcarea phosphorica 200C, one dose weekly for four weeks; the pains at the knees settled, the reading returned, and the mother stopped speaking of the camp as a wound. Nothing in the practice room did the work. The remedy met the state and the state loosened.

Head and Sensorium

Headache in the schoolboy from over-study, worse with a change of weather, better lying down. A sensation of coldness at the vertex, sometimes at the eyeballs, at the tip of the nose or the fingers; cold spots that persist in a warm room. Slight drafts of air bring rheumatic pain into the sutures. The fontanelles of the infant will not close on time.

Digestion

Colic is one of the great keynotes. The infant nurses; the abdomen fills with wind; the infant screams. Every feeding brings the same picture. The mother's milk may be found to taste sour or salty, and the child refuses the breast. Vomits easily and wants to nurse again. In the older child, ice cream, cold water and fruit provoke colic. Stools are green and slimy, or hot and watery, with fetid flatus.

Dyspepsia in the adult carries an idiosyncratic mark: the pain is better for a short time on raising wind, and when fasting the pain travels through to the spine. An empty, sinking sensation lodges around the navel, sometimes in the whole abdomen. A weak, sinking feeling in the abdomen accompanies leucorrhea in the female. For clinicians accustomed to reading digestive complaints as isolated events, this remedy is a reminder that the abdomen answers to the constitution.

Bones and Spine

This is the ground on which the remedy is most often prescribed and where its reputation is most secure. Weak bones, slow to heal. Demineralization. Slow ossification. Non-union of fractures, the ground shared with Symphytum, which acts more locally on the periosteum, and with Silica, which meets suppuration and fistula around bone. Osteomyelitis, acute or chronic. Rickets. Osgood-Schlatter disease in the growing knee. Paget's disease of bone. Osteogenesis imperfecta.

Backache is worse in stormy weather and worse with menses. Curvature of the spine to the left is a specific keynote; the lumbar vertebrae bend to the left. Spina bifida and Pott's disease are indications given by the older writers where the constitution agrees. A violent stitch at a small spot between the left ilium and the sacrum, brought on by the slightest motion, is one of the small, exact particulars that will identify a musculoskeletal case at first sight.

Growing pains are the classical indication. The child cannot say where; the pains shift. Every draft of cold causes pain in joints or sutures. Sensations of crawling and numbness travel through the limbs. Trembling of the hands accompanies the pain, or accompanies any other complaint the child brings.

Chest and Cough

Chronic cough of the young, when the limbs are cold and the picture is one of malassimilation rather than acute inflammation. Suffocative cough, better lying down; cough worse sitting up. Cough during dentition. Whooping cough of obstinate character. Pain through the lower left lung; sharp pains where cartilage and rib meet; a pain across the sternum that takes the breath away with deep breathing. A cough that runs from six in the morning to six in the evening and leaves the child exhausted at bedtime.

Female Sphere and Breasts

Sadness in girls before puberty. Nymphomania before menses. Leucorrhea with the weak, sinking abdominal feeling. Backache with the menses, or with uterine pains. Griping and rumbling in the bowels before menses.

At the breast, the infant that wants to nurse all the time and vomits easily; the child that refuses the breast because milk tastes sour or salty; milk that is acid, watery, thin. Weakness after prolonged nursing. Breasts feel as if larger, as during the last half of pregnancy. Tumors in the breast, painful on pressure, are given as a keynote by the older writers; where the constitutional picture agrees, this indication belongs here. Sexual desire increased during breast-feeding is another peculiar particular.

Ears and Eyes

Coldness of the tips of the ears, of the nose and chin. A cold feeling in the ears followed by throbbing, heat and diminished hearing. Tearing in the ears when the weather changes to cold. All bones around the ears ache and hurt. Sudden swelling of the external ear. Excoriating discharge from the ears in the scrofulous child. Conjunctivitis during dentition; capillary vessels visible in streaks running from the corners toward the cornea; a cool feeling behind the eyes that patients report without prompting.

Modalities

Worse:

• Change of weather, especially to cold and damp
• Drafts of cold air
• Any mental or physical exertion
• Slightest motion, in the sacro-iliac stitch
• Getting wet
• Grief, disappointed love, bad news
• Over-study
• Thinking of the complaint
• Consolation

Better:

• Lying down (cough, colic)
• Lying on the side, in the child who starts convulsively lying on the back
• Passing wind, and passing stool
• Raising wind, briefly, in dyspepsia
• Warm, dry weather
• Being at home, at first, though the desire to go out returns

Relationships

Complementary. The remedy is closely related to Calc. and often follows it or is followed by it in a long constitutional case. Calc. is the chalky-white fat baby; Calc-p. is the thin, brownish, restless child of the same underlying disposition, further on in years or further along the wasting. Symphytum, which the older writers place beside Calc-p. in the non-union of fractures, works on the periosteum where this remedy addresses the failure of mineralisation itself.

Compare. In curvature of the spine, Calcarea fluorica and Silica share the ground; Calc-f. answers to elastic fibres and hard, stony indurations, Silica to the suppurative tendency, Calc-p. to the failure of ossification. Among ailments after grief, Ignatia holds the acute grief with its sighing, Natrum muriaticum the silent grief closed off for years, and Calc-p. the grief that produces obtuseness and a weak memory in a still-growing body. In colic of infants after every feeding, Chamomilla stands nearby for the angry child that must be carried; Calc-p. is the peevish child who will not be pleased and cannot be quieted. Where Tuberculinum's desire to travel is felt as a longing for wide horizons, in Calc-p. it is a fretful going from room to room.

Antidotes. The older repertories give no strong specific antidote. The action of the remedy tends to be gentle and long. Where confusion arises between Calc. and Calc-p., the constitutional picture — the ossification pattern, the skin colour, the appetite for fat bacon, the desire to go from place to place — decides.

Clinical Uses

Non-Union of Fractures and Delayed Bone Healing

Where a fracture has been reduced and immobilised and the callus fails to form, or forms weakly, Calc-p. is one of the first remedies to consider. The indication is not merely local; it belongs to the whole nutritional state. The practitioner who prescribes on the totality will find the general condition improving as the bone consolidates. 30C or 200C, repeated at intervals sufficient to observe the response, is the usual practice; higher potencies are given where the constitutional picture is clear and the case has stalled.

Slow Dentition, Delayed Development and Rickets

The classical field, and the reason the remedy earned its place in children's health. Late fontanelle closure, late walking, late talking, teeth that arrive slowly and decay quickly, a head too heavy for the neck. Rickets in the modern sense, with the deformities of poor mineralisation, belongs here, though the practitioner will attend to nutrition and sunlight as well as to the remedy. Growing pains in the thin, tall child are met where the pains shift and every cold draft brings them on.

Anemia and Recovery After Acute or Chronic Illness

The child who has been through pneumonia, whooping cough, glandular fever or a run of intestinal illness and cannot regain weight or energy. The anemia after acute disease that resists ordinary measures. The chlorosis of the pale girl. Boericke and Kent both record the picture: cold limbs, feeble digestion, peevish irritability, the shortness of breath on the smallest exertion. Calc-p. meets this depletion at the level of the constitution.

Adolescent Spinal Curvature and School Fatigue

The tall, thin adolescent, often a bright child, who develops a scoliosis with the lumbar vertebrae bending to the left; who cannot sit through a lesson without headache; who is worse for over-study and better for a change of scene. Here the desire to go from place to place is a diagnostic mental particular, and the picture is often confirmed by coldness at the tip of the nose and the fingers even in a warm classroom.

Chronic Cough in the Cold-Limbed Consumptive

Boericke gives the indication as chronic cough of consumptives who suffer with cold limbs. The remedy meets the terrain, not the pathogen. Where the picture is one of malassimilation, cold hands and feet, night sweats and a cough running the length of the day, Calc-p. supports the constitution while other measures address the disease. Prescribing at higher potencies and observing the response over weeks is the older practice, and remains the safer one.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Calcarea phosphorica differ from Calcarea carbonica? Both are calcium salts and both meet the scrofulous constitution, but the pictures are distinct. Calc. is chalky-white, fat, sweaty at the head, chilly, slow, and prefers to be left alone with a fixed routine. Calc-p. is generally emaciated, dirty-white or brownish, restless, always wanting to be somewhere else, with a specific bone-forming failure at sutures and symphyses. In practice, one often follows the other across a long constitutional case.

Can this remedy help a fracture that is slow to unite? The older writers place it at the head of the list for non-union, alongside Symphytum. It is prescribed on the picture of the patient, not on the radiograph alone, and it is given time to act. Repetition and potency are matters for the practitioner attending the case.

Is it suitable for growing pains? Growing pains in a thin, tall child with shifting joint pains, worse from any cold draft and any change of weather, is one of the confirmed indications. Where the picture agrees, prescribing follows the totality rather than the single complaint.

What potency is used? Boericke lists trituration and all potencies. In practice 6X or 12X finds a place in the biochemic and dental indications; 30C and 200C in constitutional prescribing; higher potencies where the mental picture and the general state confirm the choice. The register determines what the prescription can be expected to do, and the practitioner adjusts on observation.

References

• Hahnemann, S. Organon of the Medical Art, 6th edition.
• Boericke, W. Pocket Manual of Homœopathic Materia Medica with Repertory.
• Kent, J. T. Lectures on Homœopathic Materia Medica.
• Murphy, R. Nature's Materia Medica.
• Clarke, J. H. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica.