TASTE
Putrid or taste of blood or pus. Expectoration of pus that tastes sweet. Salty taste or a rotten-egg taste.
Taste of blood; it may or may not come during menstrual period but is present frequently in morning.
All metallic tastes make us think of SYPHILIS or that the TUBERCULAR element is present.
Any miasm may have a partial or complete loss of taste.
VERY IMPORTANT. Taste should be neutral and any perversion of falsification has a miasmatic basis
Foul taste of Nux-vom worse morning.
Bitter taste of Bryonia worse morning.
Nat mur and Phos have a bloody taste.
Aloes has a bitter taste yet cures inky taste.
Elaps cor has bloody taste before coughing.
Mercury has a metallic taste.
Hepar and Tuberculinum and Pyrogen have taste of pus before coughing.
DESIRES AND AVERSIONS
Extremists; like hot or really cold things.
Long for indigestible things, chalk, lime, slate, pencils, etc.
If the system is not assimilating a certain thing they will crave it; this is seen more in young girls, in children and in pregnant women. They are great cravers for peculiar things-salt- and will eat it alone from the dish. They eat more salt than all the family put together. Long for stimulants, beer, wines or hot aromatic things.
Desires and cravings for the unnatural things to eat, with desires and cravings for narcotics such as tea, coffee, tobacco and any other stimulants, have often their origin in PSORA or PSEUDO-PSORA.
Craves potatoes and meat.
All toxic drugs become sooner or later prime disturbers of psora or the chronic miasm in general but particularly PSORA.
Desires and aversions stand high in therapeutic value as they are basic miasmatic symptoms next in importance to perverted mental phenomena in disease.
HUNGER
Faint if hunger is not satisfied or extreme hunger with all gone, weak, empty felling in the stomach (but with psoric origin.)
They sometimes have constant hunger and eat beyond their capacity to digest, or they have no appetite in the morning but hunger for other meals. Great desire for certain, things but when he receives them; in fact they are repugnant to him. (We see this perhaps more in children than in adults.)
STOMACH SYMPTOMS
Weak, “all-gone” sensation.
Hunger soon after food. Hunger with “all gone” sensation in pit of stomach 10 a.m. or between 10 and 11 a.m.
Crave meat.
Crave meat, many reject the fat.
Thrive better on fats and fat foods; also require much salt. Starches are not easily digested by them.
Desires salty fish.
Desire cold things to eat and drink.
“The cravings and longings of the patient are basic miasmatic phenomena of great therapeutic value.
CHEST, HEART AND LUNGS.
The curves and lines of chest are imperfect, the chest is often narrow, lacking not only width laterally, but depth anterio- posteriorly, the subclavicular spaces are hollow, or certain areas sunken or depressed; quite often one lung is larger than the other, or the action of one is accelerated and the other lessened; one side is fuller than the other, showing a better development and a greater respiratory area, often the expansive power of the lungs is greatly limited and the amount of residual air lessened.
Breathing is not so full and resonant, although there may be no impediment or obstruction in the air cells or passages. Shoulders are rounded, inclined forward infringing on the chest area, and the free lung action. Poor breathers, they have no desire to take a full respiration, seldom do we find them breathing diaphragmatically. thus the lung never comes to its fullest expansion and the air cells are not brought into use and simply become diseased from lack of that life-giving principle they should receive from oxygen. From lack of work they atrophy and become useless, the least obstruction glues them together and destroys their office.
Faulty nutrition.
Afraid of cold air.
Worse on least exposure to cold.
Voice coarse, deep with base-like chest tones, throat slightly sore at times, a rawness and a croak-like sounds develops in voice; constant desire to hawk or clear throat; of a viscid, scanty mucus.
(Sore throats of Hepar and Phosphorus)
Cough-deep prolonged, worse morning and when patient first lies down in evening. Expectoration purulent, or muco purulent and in advanced, cases greenish yellow, often offensive and usually sweetish to taste, or salty. (Dependable indication of the combined psoric and syphilitic taints. (R))
Sometimes it smells musty or offensive; or it may be bloody or followed with haemorrhage. Cough deep ringing, hollow, no expectoration or none to speak of.
Cough can be dry and tight and induce headache, or whole body shaken by paroxysms. These people are always full of hope-the last thing that they think of is that they are incurable- or death. Always planning for the future, building castles.
Glandular changes in cervical region (this often precedes the lung changes). Weakness, anxiety difficult respiration, laboured respiration.
Sense of great exhaustion, easily made tired, never seems to get rested; tired at night; tired even after sleep; as the day advances they become better or as the sun ascends their strength revives a little, as it descends they lose it again.
These patients are often worse in the night-which they dread- and they long for morning (this comes from the SYPHILIS part).
Look out for patients with the nightly aggravation, no matter what the pathology may be.
The non-resistance of the tissues, the slightest bruise suppurates- the strong tendency is to pustules. The same may be said of the pus-like nature and copiousness.
THE HEART
A rush of blood to the chest especially in the young.
Violent palpitations with beating of the whole body.
Heart troubles are accompanied with fainting, temporary loss of vision, ringing in the ears, pallor and great weakness worse sitting up and better lying down, usually. Cannot climb mountains as disturbed circulation affects brain and they become dizzy and faint, often fainting away when they get to a rarified atmosphere. Brain becomes anemic at a high altitude.
Small thread-like pulse and quick.
In these cases, there is a gradually falling away of the flesh, rush of blood to the chest and face.
The dyspnoea is often painful in PSORA or PSEUDO-PSORA. The dropsies or the anasarcas of the PSORIC or PSEUDO-PSORIC are always greater than SYCOTIC- they smother or drown the patient before death takes places.
The SYPHILITIC and SYCOTIC heart conditions are much more dangerous than the psoric, but the PSORIC patient worries about his condition, takes his pulse frequently, fears death and remains quiet. In the combination of SYCOSIS and PSORA we get the right soil for valvular and cardiac disturbances with changes in organ structure; these are the condition that cause the fatalities. With these sycotic heart conditions there is none of the and apprehension that we find in PSORIC patients. (R)
ABDOMEN
Patients easily chilled about the abdomen causing colic or diarrhoea, dysentery and many severe bowel troubles to follow.
Peritoneal inflammations.
We often find the worst forms of constipation or inactivity of the bowels in PSORIC AND PSEUDO-PSORIC patients.
You can often feel the beating of the carotids through abdominal wall.
In children we find ulceration of umbilicus with a yellowish discharge which smells offensive, carrion-like.
In menstrual difficulties we may find reflex pains, spasmodic symptoms and bearing down sensations, especially in tubercular patients. Skin is pale with an underlying bluish tint showing the venous stagnation.
Hernia-seldom found outside the tubercular organism.
Usually found in flabby, soft-muscled people. Hernia is due to this lack of tone in the muscular system throughout the whole abdominal region. The shape of the tubercular abdomen is saucer- shaped or as a large plate turned bottom side up.
BOWELS AND INTESTINAL TRACT.
Morning aggravation in bowel troubles, Still more sensitive to cold.
In bowel difficulties, gone empty feelings in the abdominal region; sometimes it is a great weakness after stool, felt only in the region of the abdomen.
General exhaustion or loss of strength a feeling as if all vitality is leaving patient at each evacuation of the bowels.
True SYPHILITIC or TUBERCULAR, patients are worse at night; they are driven out of bed by their diarrhoea sometimes this is accompanied with profuse warm or cold perspiration, which is very exhausting and debilitating
It is characteristic of these tubercular children suffering from bowel troubles to develop a sudden brain stasis, or brain metastasis. Sometimes the tubercular manifestations in the brain alternate with a bowel difficulty.
Verbascum Alb., Arsen., Camphor and Cuprum Met. diarrhoeas and dysenteries are so characteristic in tubercular patients. They look well to-day have a sudden attack of dysentery and are dead within 48 hours.
Podophyllum has painless, copious, yellowish and very offensive stool worse at night and morning and worse for milk. A tubercular child cannot use cow’s milk in any shape. Least exposure to cold brings on diarrhoea in tubercular children.
