Constipation, with ineffectual urging, is an indication for causticum and is often associated with the causticum headaches. The stools are tough and shining and are often passed more easily when standing. In men the straining to expel hard, knotty motions may cause the escape of prostatic fluid.
LEADING INDICATIONS.
The chief spheres of action of causticum are the urinary, respiratory and nervous systems.
(1) Restlessness.-Cannot lie still or get into a comfortable position; must move about, but movement does not relieve (cham.).
(2) The subjective sensation of “rawness and soreness” is present in connection with many mucous and cutaneous surfaces or orifices.
(3) Causation.-Many maladies for which causticum is required acknowledge one or more of the following causes: (a) dry, cold winds; (b) chronic diseases; (c) long-standing grief and anxiety; (d) fatigue and mental strain from less of sleep and night watching; (e) sudden emotions, painful or pleasant.
(4) General sensitiveness to cold and draughts.
(5) Weakness.-In pronounced causticum cases the patient is weak and trembling, scarcely strong enough to move freely, and having no wish to move.
(6) Paresis.-The weakness extends to paretic or paralytic conditions of bladder, lower extremities, larynx, upper lids and other single parts, such as unilateral paralysis of the seventh nerve (cranial), and post-diphtheritic paralysis.
(7) Mind.-The patient is melancholy and full of forebodings, worse before menstruation; brain power, like muscular power, seems exhausted-is inattentive and disinclined for work. The memory is impaired.
(8) Incontinence or retention of urine from shock of operation or other; or in early spinal diseases; urine cannot be felt as it passes. Incontinence at night during sleep, or when coughing, sneezing, &c. Retention with urgent desire to micturate.
(9) Sour-smelling perspiration at night or when walking.
(10) Bruised feeling of parts lain upon or touched.
(11) Aphonia, with or without hoarseness, indistinct utterance.
(12) Rheumatic affections, with contractions around joints- fibrous, not bony.
(13) Right side more affected than left-head, testes, calf, facial paralysis. Left side-loin, hip.
(14) Cough, from tickling in paroxysms, with sore track down windpipe, relieved by sipping cold water.
(15) Warts, large, pedunculated, bleeding readily; or small, all over body, especially the face.
(16) The most suitable subjects for causticum are people with dark hair and dark or yellow complexion (bry.) who have broken down from chronic maladies.
AGGRAVATION:
Morning (sneezing, hoarseness and cough, also evenings); morning and evening (general); night (uneasiness); walking, eating (abdominal pain); warmth of bed (cough); dry weather, draught of cold air, coffee.
AMELIORATION:
Lying down (stomach pain); sip of cold water (cough and gastric burning, &c.); in damp and wet weather, warmth of bed (rheumatism).
Edwin Awdas Neatby founded the Missionary School of Homeopathy and the London Homeopathic Hospital in 1903, and run by the British Homeopathic Association. He died in East Grinstead, Sussex, on the 1st December 1933. Edwin Awdas Neatby wrote The place of operation in the treatment of uterine fibroids, Modern developments in medicine, Pleural effusions in children, Manual of Homoeo Therapeutics,