Aggravations: Eating rich foods and stimulants; cold in general; morning, touch, noise and mental exertion. ((>)) from rest, quiet, heat, lying down, being alone and in the evening.
NATRUM CARBONICUM
Pseudo-psoric. Menses too late and scanty or too soon and profuse, almost to flooding; during menses great pressure in the hypogastrium as if everything would come out. This pressure is toward the genitals; there are sensations of movements in the uterus as of a foetus. Menses sometimes preceded by drawing pain in the neck with headache; sensation as if head were too large, as if it would be drawn back. (Gel.)
Concomitants: Sad and despondent during menses; is made < by music, especially piano music (reverse Tarentula), and by a thunderstorm; great aversion to men (Pulsatilla); she experiences great debility form the least mental effort; < from heat of summer; pale looking skin; dark rings about the eyes; inability to think; wholly taken up with sad thoughts; no sunshine in her life whatever. Flashes of light before the eyes on awakening; over-sensitive to noises; thick, yellow or yellowish-green discharge from the nose, especially from the posterior nares.
Aggravations: Music, during thunderstorm; exercise; heat of sun; mental or physical exertion; during full moon; headache form mental efforts. This remedy follows well after Sepia in bearing down pains; compare also with Lilium, Murex, Nat. sulph., Phosphorus, Silicea and Nat. mur.; ameliorated by gentle pressure, and rubbing of the affected parts. It is adapted to leuco-phlegmatic women with weak ankles and inability to do mental work.
NATRUM MURIATICUM
Pseudo-psoric. The menses are either too early and profuse or too late and scanty. Suppressed menses in young women; first menses are slow in appearing, and difficult; Jahr says “the primary effect of the salt is to shorten the menses and its secondary action is to prolong the flow.” The flow is usually dark, and continues day and night, accompanied with great sadness; low spirited, and despondent, < in the morning. Gloomy, anxious, very sad; severe headache on awakening in the morning or beginning about 10 a.m. and lasting until sun-down. Headache, frontal, with sensation of little hammers beating in the brain, or headache beginning with blindness accompanied with zigzag flashes of light before the eyes. Dysmenorrhoea with bearing down and pressing towards the genitals, which is only relieved by sitting down. Fluttering of the heart with a weak feeling about it. Menses a week too soon; thin, watery, scanty; more at night; chilliness, with goose flesh during the flow or at the beginning of the menses. Herpes simplex, usually appear about the mouth or chin at the beginning of the monthly period; constipation with depression of spirits; fluttering and palpitation of the heart, with weeping; weeps easily (Pulsatilla, Ignatia, Tuberculinum, Cyclamen). Bitter or salty taste with craving for salt; wants food highly seasoned with salt or eats it raw. She has numbness of the fingers, toes, lips, tongue; very absent-minded, forgetful; heaviness of the hands, legs, or feet; feet or hands go to sleep; loses flesh while living well (Iodium)
Indicated in pale anaemic, tubercular individuals, where the tubercular taint produces despondency; also in hysterical conditions peculiar to the tubercular taint. It is complementary to Ignatia and is the chronic of Ignatia; we often have to differentiate it from Calcarea carb., or Silicea.
Aggravations: At 10 a.m. in the morning; sea air; lying down; sitting still; lying on the left side; ((>)) lying on something hard; evening; lying on the back, and walking. There is frequently a great desire for much salt in the food, or the saliva tastes salty.
NICCOLUM
Menses are late, scanty, and of short duration. They are accompanied with much pain in the small of the back, great debility, and much bloating of the abdomen with severe colic. There is much thirst day and night, with burning flatulence; nausea; much distension of the abdomen, and sour eructations. Mentally the patient is apprehensive, low-spirited and despondent, is easily vexed and made angry; at night she is much <; being very restless (like Rhus. tox.); changes position frequently; often her restlessness is accompanied with colic and vomiting when menses are suppressed. In the morning vertigo and pressure in the vertex.
ORIGANUM
Psoric miasms very marked. During menses and long after, great sexual irritation, erotomania; nymphomania, with suicidal tendencies; intense sexual excitement as if she would lose her mind, driving her to onanism; practices it often; rapid failing of memory and loss of mind from it. Lascivious impulses; dreams of sexual intercourse, and thinks of sexual subjects continually during the day; voluptuous tingling in sexual organs; sexual inclinations so strong she cannot overcome them; she is dull, listless, morose. This remedy is to women what Staphisagria is to men; it has the intense sexual irritation of Cantharis, but not the physical symptoms. Unlike Lachesis, the symptoms are largely confined to the sexual organs. It is a much neglected remedy and a little known one. Tuberculinum is another remedy often indicated the sexual irritation of women. When the tubercular and sycotic or psoric elements combine and spend their forces upon the sexual organs, we can expect severe sexual irritation in sensitive nervous women.
OLEUM ANIMALE
Menstruation too early and scanty, with great languor in hands and feet; discharge usually dark and very scanty (Sepia). Before the flow appears, cutting, colicky pains in abdomen, also sticking pains in small of back which is < while sitting.
Concomitants; Sad, peevish; ill-humored; filled with grief; a sensation of giddiness when in the open air; blood rushes to the base of brain in a warm room (reverse Pulsatilla); morning vertigo with pressure over the eyes and quivering of eyelids; complexion earthy. Her thoughts vanish suddenly; dry prickly heat in different parts of the body; burning, biting itching on the skin like flea bites. OLEUM CAJEPUTI
Menses suppressed or greatly diminished in quantity; they may be suppressed by a sudden check of perspiration, with constant choking sensation in throat; nervous distension of the bowels from nervous uterine reflex; tongue fells as if swollen, and when speaking she lips. Spasmodic coughing; nervous hiccough; nervous vomiting, nervous dyspnoea, and nervous dysmenorrhoea.
OLEUM JECORIS ASELLI
Pseudo-psoric and syco-psoric. Menses premature and very copious; rheumatic dysmenorrhoea; pains in sacrum and back; great soreness of the ovaries; menses cease suddenly from taking cold; dysmenorrhoea in advanced stages of tuberculosis; chronic sore throat or diarrhoea due to tuberculosis; expectoration yellowish- green; great weakness in chest and back; burning heat in chest with cough; rheumatic pains in all the large joints and back; constant loss of strength will emaciation. The patient is ((>)) in the summer, < in winter; cough and rheumatic difficulties, also ((>)) from heat; adapted to pale cachectic tubercular women who have engrafted upon that diathesis, a tertiary sycotic taint. Often the tuberculosis has been stirred up by receiving the sycotic infection; after a few years the mixed miasm presented itself in a malignant form. It is more frequently indicated in thin nervous blonds, with a white transparent skin in which the blood vessels show through of a bluish tint. Greater hunger is almost always present, like Psorinum, Iodine, Sulphur and Tuberculinum.
OPIUM
Menses profuse or suppressed with rush of blood to the head. During the menses, violent colic, compelling her to bend double; labor-like pains with drowsiness and desire to sleep; restless all night from heat of bed; tosses about, searching for a cool place; unconscious, often in a comatose state; face red; congestion of blood to the head; climacteric states, very imaginative; full of illusions and fancies; very sensitive to sounds, odors and noises. Her sleep is heavy and accompanied with snoring. Indicated in corpulent and good natured women, who suffer with stubborn constipation and a prolapsed or an atonic relaxed condition of the uterus. She has spasms or convulsions from fright, anger, shame, overjoy, or any great emotions; sometimes attacks of epilepsy at night followed by stertorous breathing, red face, and a semi-comatose condition following. Quite often there are no symptoms whatever, excepting the stupor of this remedy. Suitable to elderly women who are fond of stimulants, and narcotics (Belladonna), also adapted to school children in certain mental states. Delirium, staring, wide open eyes, constantly talking, flushed or pale, hot, and bloated face following suppression of the menses. Skin covered with cold sweat; threatening collapse; aggravation during and after sleep, perspiring warmth of bed, ((>)) from cold or walking.
PULSATILLA
Indicated more frequently in the pseudo-psoric; it being the acute of Silica, you can readily see the dyscrasia behind it; sometimes the remedy that meets fully a pseudo-psoric state will cure almost any disease. Menses retarded, delayed, especially in young girls, at or about puberty. Pains, cramp-like, colicky, accompanied with chilliness; menses scanty, dark, thick, even black, coagulated. It may, however, be normal in color or pale and watery. Menses suppressed from cold, from becoming chilled; the pains as well as the mental symptoms are changeable; menses as well as the mental symptoms are changeable; menses accompanied with chilliness; she weeps with her pains. Before menses, weeping, sadness, moody, melancholy; goose flesh during menses, (Nat. mur.); nausea, often vomiting, with heaviness and pains in abdomen; colic with vomiting; she is pale; feels faint; shivers as if cold; weeps often and easily; tongue coated white, no thirst. Breathing difficult, cannot get a full breath when in her room, must throw windows and doors open, which relieves her at once. Menses with pains in back, sides and abdomen, with pressure in abdomen and small of back as of a stone, with ineffectual desire for stool (Nux); adapted to mild, cheerful, gentle blondes, of a yielding disposition, whose symptoms are constantly changing; to lymphatic constitutions; paleface, light-haired, blue-eyed women who have a great tendency to catarrhal troubles and leucorrhoea. She craves ice cream, butter, fat things which aggravate her very much; milk in breast during menstruation (Mercurius sol.); breast sore and tender during flow (Mercurius sol. Conium); milky leucorrhoea during menses. Sleeps with hands over head (Platina), and cannot sleep on left side as it aggravates her heart symptoms; chilly; thirstless; veins distended; puffy about the face and eyes during menses. She is aggravated in warmth; evening; on beginning to move; lying on left side; by fats; rich pastries; warm applications; ((>)) from gently moving about; cool air; eating cold things, and cold applications.
J.H. Allen was a student of H.C. Allen. He was the president of the IHA in 1900. Dr. Allen taught at the Hering Medical College in Chicago. Dr. Allen died August 1, 1925
Books by John Henry Allen:
Diseases and Therapeutics of the Skin 1902
The Chronic Miasms: Psora and Pseudo Psora 1908
The Chronic Miasms: Sycosis 1908