Sabadilla

Generals

The Sabadilla patient is a shivering patient, sensitive to the cold air, a cold room, cold food.

He wants to be well wrapped up; wants hot drinks to warm up his stomach. He is subject to catarrhal conditions, and in these he wants hot air. The catarrhal conditions of the throat require hot drinks and food. Warm things are grateful to him. It is difficult to swallow cold things; they increase the pain and difficulty in swallowing.

We often study remedies by contrast. This remedy travels from left to right , and at once a good prescriber connects it with Lachesis . The soreness, pain and inflarnmatory conditions of the throat commence on the left side and spread to the right in both Sabadilla and Lachesis . But warm things aggravate the pain in Lachesis ; they cause a spasmodic condition, with a sensation of choking, and therefore he wants cold things, which relieve; they are swallowed more easily and ameliorate the pain in the throat. Sabadilla on the other hand is relieved by heat, either outside or inside.

Nose

Catarrhal condition of the nose, with constant sneezing; sensation of great rawness in the nose; burning; stuffing up of the nose.

Discharge at first of thin mums and later thick mucus. It has all the appearance of a coryza. The coryza is ameliorated from inhaling hot air. He sits before an open grate or register, with the head close to it, inhaling the hot air. Especially useful when the catarrhal state of the nose is prolonged; a prolonged coryza, which does not yield to ordinary remedies; a lingering coryza, and the discharge is exaggerated by the odor of flowers. Even thinking of the odor of flowers makes him sneeze and increases the flow from the nose. So thinking of various things aggravates his complaints.

Many hay fever patients are sensitive to the odor of flowers, to the, odor of the hay field, to dying vegetable matter; so oversensitive to the odor of fruit are some that apples have to be removed from the house. Inhalation of odors that are beautiful, as that of the lavender, some hay fever patients cannot tolerate; such things may bring on an attack out of the season. Now Sabadilla is of this sort oversensitive to surroundings, to odors; these increase the catarrhal state of the throat and posterior nares.

Sneezing and a flow of mucus from the nose; goes on even to ulceration. Periodical attacks; a rose cold in June; in autumn about August 20 as a hay fever. Hay fever is often an easy thing to palliate with short acting remedies; they will cut short an attack in a few days. But the cure requires years, and the patient must be treated in the interim and according to his symptoms. When the hay fever symptoms are present he has no others; one group is manifested at one time, and another group at another time. But the patient is sick and all the symptoms must be gathered together and the case treated accordingly.

Mind

Many of the annoyances of this individual seem to be imaginary.

His mind is filled with strange things. Imaginations concerning persons or himself are strange. Imagines the body is withering, that the limbs are crooked, that the chin is elongated, and larger on one side than the other. She feels that this is so and believes it even in spite of her vision. It is a sensation which she believes, a delusion, an insanity.

"Erroneous impressions as to the state of his body."

"Imagines himself sick; imagines parts shrunken; that she is pregnant when she is merely swollen from flatus; that she has some horrible throat disease that will end fatally."

The imaginations are groundless; nothing is visible, and the suffering is greater than if there was something to be seen. These patients often get no sympathy; they should really have a remedy. Thuja has erroneous impressions as to the state of the body; thinks she is made of glass; the idea is not that of transparency, but rather of brittleness fears that she would break in pieces.

There are but a few remedies which have fixed ideas; these ideas may be concerning religion, politics, clothing, things of the family and life. I once had an insane patient who would get out of the street, ear if anyone entered who wore a certain color, because she had a fixed idea that this was of evil import to her.

The Pulsatilla mental state in a man is that a woman would be a detriment to his soul; it is a delusion, a fixed idea. Iodine is full of fixed ideas. Anacardium has a fixed idea that a devil is sitting on one shoulder talking into his ear, while an angel sits on the other shoulder talking into the other ear, and he halts between the two and says nothing.

"Delirium during intermittents."

"Mental exertion aggravates the headache and produces sleep."

A sleepiness comes on from thinking, meditating, reading. While meditating in a chair he falls asleep like Nux moschata and Phosphoric acid.

Head

Dizziness; vertigo.

He wakens up at night with vertigo. Vertigo, in the open air; under all sorts of circumstances. Full of headaches. Headaches on one side of the head. The meditation which drives him to sleep brings on headache.

Headache in school girls. Feeble children, who have to be taken from school because of headache, come home with strange imaginations concerning school and themselves. Headache stupefying and associated with coryza; in the frontal sinuses, above the eyes.

Fullness, bursting, stupefying, aggravated by jarring, sneezing, walking. Stupefying headaches with coryza. Often gets up with it in the morning, increases during the forenoon. Head covered with a cold sweat. Many of the symptoms are closely related to Veratrum , especially in the cold sweat on the forehead with complaints.

Hay fever when there is spasmodic sneezing, fluent coryza; nostrils stuffed up; inspirations through nose labored; snoring; itching in the nose; profuse bleeding from the nose; bright red blood comes from the posterior nares and is expectorated; very sensitive to the smell of garlic; coryza with severe frontal pains and redness of eyelids; violent sneezing; copious watery discharge from the nose.

A peculiar kind of itching coming on in some hay fevers is an itching in the roof of the mouth, on the soft palate, and for relief the patient must draw the tongue back and forth over the soft palate, with this coryza, sneezing, etc. Wyethia will cut the attack short.

When the itching extends to the larynx and trachea, with great irritability and sensitive to cold: Nux vomica.

When the discharge burns a red streak over the upper lip and about the wings of the nose, with sneezing and profuse, watery nasal discharge: Arsenicum .

Copious acrid lachrymation, and copious bland flow from the nose with sneezing: Euphrasia .

Copious, bland, watery discharge from the eyes and copious, acrid, watery discharge from the nose: Allium cepa .

But these are not the constitutional remedies; they do not cure, but only palliate during the severe attacks. These symptoms are the outcome of the psoric constitution, and this constitution must be treated by antipsorics. Sometimes the hay fever is so severe that it seems to be the only manifestation of psora in the patient, but if it is restrained or stopped up by bad treatment he is not well during the whole year.

If let alone he has good health during the rest of the year. Many a time the hay fever goes through the whole winter and only by constitutional up building can it be mitigated. But with constitutional treatment each yearly attack is lighter, and at the end of treatment he is able to live in his own climate unaffected.

He must not go to the mountains to mitigate it. If to any place, he should go where the affection would be worse, so that all its manifestations would be apparent. The hay fever will only be cured if the patient is curable, but if not, if his constitution is so broken down that he is incurable, his hay fever will not be cured.

The most striking place of attack is the mucous membrane of the nose, throat, trachea and larynx. Violent acute inflammation of the mucous membrane of these parts.

Stomach

Great thirst for hot drinks.

The appetite is singular; it is commonly seen in pregnant women. She says she is never hungry; never wants anything to eat, and often there is an aversion to food; but when, from a matter of reason, she concludes to eat, and she takes a mouthful, it tastes good, it recalls the appetite, and she makes a good meal. At other times not only a loss of appetite, but a disgust and loathing of food.

"Disgust for all food, for meat, for sour things, for coffee, for garlic."

"Morbid hunger or loathing for food."

A routine remedy in pin worms, seat worms, all sorts of worms stomach and tape worms. A careful prescriber never thinks of prescribing for worms. He takes all the symptoms of the patient and these guide him to the remedy. I remember one time in a lady's house seeing a dog drag his hinder parts over the carpet as if to scratch the anus. She said:

"Doctor, can't you give the dog a remedy?"

I put a dose of Sabadilla in its mouth. Some time afterwards she asked me:

"Doctor, what did you give the dog that medicine for?"

I inquired why she asked.

"Why," she said, "in a few days it passed an awful lot of worms."

Sabadilla and Sinapis nigra are well adapted to cases in which pin worms are present. Often a remedy restores the patient to order in general and then all his particular parts are set in order.

Female sexual organs.

"Nymphomania from ascarides."

"Cutting pains, as from knives, in ovary."

"Menses too late, with painful bearing down a few days previous; decreased, How by fits and. starts, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker; blood bright red."

Hysterical patients; a patient with a strangely unbalanced mind, accompanied by various nervous manifestations.

"Twitchings, convulsive tremblings, or catalepsy from worms."

It is true that worms will not prosper in a perfectly healthy stomach, intestine or rectum. They can only thrive in the unhealthy. Many a time I have had a patient bring me a tape-worm in a bottle after I had put them on an antipsoric, even when I did not suspect its existence.

Turn the economy into order and the parasites go. The same applies to germs. They only exist as a result of disease. They have never been known to exist without the disease having first existed. If you ignore the worm, but select the remedy on the totality of the symptoms, the patient will be restored to health, and, so far as the worm is concerned, go without a symptom.

The worm becomes smaller, shrivels and finally departs. It is rarely the case for the worm to disappear inside of six weeks after the remedy. If, on the other hand, you eject the worm by violent means, the patient may go for years with troublesome symptoms, and you do not know why you fail to cure him.

Prescribe for the patient first. No results of disease should be removed until proper constitutional treatment has been resorted to, and be sure that it is proper.