Ammonium Carbonicum
von E. B. Nash — Leaders in Homoeopathic Therapeutics
Nose-bleed when washing the face in the morning. Weak, anæmic, flabby women. Weak, no reaction. Addicted to the smelling bottle.
Tendency to gangrenous degeneration of glands, as in scarlatina; the parotids.
Guernsey says: This remedy seems particularly useful in constitutionally delicate women who faint easily and want some kind of smelling salts around them most of the time. They are weak, with deficient reaction and generally of the lymphatic temperament. Such patients want stimulants, especially such stimulants as act through the olfactory nerves, like spirits of Ammonia, Camphor, Musk, Alcohol, etc. In the first onset of such a suddenly prostrating disease as cerebro-spinal meningitis this has been found a good remedy to excite reaction and place the patient in a condition for the choice of the next remedy indicated by the now aroused vital force in conflict with the disease (so-called). One thing Ammonium carb. is good for is dry or stuffed coryza, acute or chronic. The patient is worse at night, has to breathe with the mouth open. Sambucus, Lycopodium, Nux vomica and Sticta pulmonaria may be compared with it.
Another frequently verified symptom of the nose is epistaxis while washing the face. (Kali carbonica.) I don’t know why it comes on them, but it does, and this remedy cures it. The only other affection in which I have found it very useful is scarlatina. The body is very red, almost bluish-red, and the throat seems to be the center where the force of the disease seems to be expended in malignant intensity. The eruption is faintly developed, or has seemed to disappear, from sheer inability from weakness of the patient’s vitality to keep it on the surface. (Zinc. has convulsions from the same cause.) Erysipelas of old, debilitated persons comes under the same head. Cerebral symptoms, simulating a drunken stupor, are present in both cases. The whole system seems to be overpowered by the toxic effect of the disease poison. (See also Ailanthus.) Ammonium carb. will sometimes help us out in such cases.