Read before the Bureau of Materia Medica and Homoeopathic Philosophy at the Fifty-fifty Annual Convention of the Southern Homoeopathic Medical Association in joint session with the Pan American Homoeopathic Medical Congress, at Cincinnati, Ohio, October 11th, 1939.
(From The Journal of th American Institute of Homoeopathy).
THE club moss from which this amazing remedial agent comes was one of the first plants emerging from the seat to appear on the earths cooling crust.
Coming down from that early time when the world was young and its foundations were becoming stabilize, this medicine presents a strange correspondence for its use to the needs of early human life. Also it is one of our fundamental constitutional remedies occupying a sphere of action both broad and deep in the human economy.
Clarke, in his dictionary of Materia Medica, calls it “one of the pivotal remedies of the materia medica,” and further adds that “an intimate acquaintance with its properties and relations is essential to a proper understanding of the materia medica as a whole, because it ranks with Sulphur and Calcarea in central trio around which all the rest of the materia medica can be grouped”.
Often in chronic and obstinate cases of disease resulting from the mixed miasmas, many of the old masters gave in sequential order Sulphur, Calcarea and Lycopodium to effect and complete cures which had proved resistant to the single remedy even in a series of potencies.
Among the marked and important spheres of Lycopodium is its action on th nutritive system, hence its vast influence on growth and development.
Loss of appetite with clammy or bitter taste, especially in the morning, with nausea.
Nausea referred to the pharynx and stomach; nausea in the morning and when riding in a carriage. In modern times the automobile has proven to be equally unpleasant, and this might be a good remedy even for the sickness of airplane flying if the totality of symptoms are present.
There is much sourness of the moth and stomach, or sour taste of the food. Often a loss of appetite with the first mouthful; sudden satiety or immoderate hunger; bulimia, aversion to cooked or warm food, rye bread, meat, coffee, tobacco smoke. Craves sweat things; inability to digest heavy food-it ferments and quickly bloats and distresses the patient.
After a meal, hepatic pains, oppression and fullness in chest and abdomen with nausea, heat in head, redness of face, pulsation and trembling over whole body, hands hot, palpitation of heart, colic, etc.; sourness and diarrhoea after taken milk; and because of this fact it frequently is a good remedy for the marasmus of infants.
Cabbages, onions and other green vegetables frequently aggravate the LYCOPODIUM digestive tract and great flatulence and acute distress follow their intake.
The thirst of Lycopodium varies with time, circumstance and condition. Thirstless in chronic states often with a dry mouth; there may be nocturnal thirst, absence of thirst or burning thirst.
Burning, sour or greasy bitter risings are common features, sour regurgitations of food, especially milk.
Nausea in a warm room, going away in the open air; heartburn, cancer of the stomach; vomiting of food and bile especially at night; vomiting after a meal or at night; vomiting at the menstrual period; or between the heat and chill in intermittent fever. Vomiting of blood.
Gnawing gripping pains an region of stomach, slow digestion; pains in stomach after drinking wine; pains relieved by heat of bed, applied heat, and hot rinks sometimes relieve; most of the other Lycopodium complaints and pains are < by heat, especially the head complaints.
There is must pain and distress in liver region; pain when walking, in upper part of right hypochondrium, as if the superior ligament of the liver would tear.
Violent gallstone colic, sharp in dorsal hepatic region and in right shoulder and arm; inflammation and induration of the liver, dropsical swelling of abdomen, incarcerated flatus with great distension and pain with imperfect expulsion of gas.
Rumbling and noisy flatulence through whole abdomen with much impaired function of the gastro-intestinal tract and the liver; we need not be surprised to find long-standing constipation, heart stool with ineffectual urging to evacuate; desire for stool followed by painful constriction of anus; haemorrhage from rectum even after a soft stool. Grey. light coloured stools.
The pains and distress often end in syncope; constriction or diarrhoea of pregnant women. Faeces pale and of a putrid odour; thin brown or pale green mixed with hard lumps, thin yellow or reddish yellow fluid, shaggy reddish mucus, haemorrhoidal excrescence in rectum with prolapsus. Itching eruption in anus.
The Lycopodium patient is a sensitive, irritable, highstrung individual, often melancholy and deeply despondent.
Sensitive to noise light, jar and vibrations and impressions.
Inability to concentrate confusion and unable to perform even simple mental labour, without confusion and exhaustion.
Many fears and dryads; fears darkness, solitude, yet dreads men and desires to be alone; bad effects from anger or excitement, tearful yet sympathy aggravates, wants to cry and laugh at the same time.
Memory weak and extreme fatigue from mental labour; unable to express himself correctly misplaces words and syllables, confused speech. Confusion about everyday things but rational talking on abstract subjects.
Inability to remember what is read, stupefaction and dullness.
A peculiar state of this remedy is the dread of appearing in public for fear of failure, but on getting started h goes along to success. Silica has much the same condition but the latter belongs to he decidedly cold group of remedies white Lycopodium is sensitive to heat in all of its general states.
Lycopodium in some disease conditions presents a lack of vital heat but at the same times is sensitive to any air like Pulsatilla and Argentum nitricum.
The Lycopodium patient is restless and hurried and impatient again as in Arg. nit.; these remedies run parallel in their symptomatology a long way, in only some of their particular symptoms do hey differ; one is the Argentum patient craves cold things in the stomach which relieve and the Lycopodium patient is better by warm or hot drinks.
Many symptoms and disturbances referred to thee head, eyes, ears, nose and throat are caused and cured by this medicine.
Dizziness as if intoxicated, on seeing objects whirl about she feels as if her body were turning about.
Whirling vertigo, especially when stooping or in a warm room, with inclination to vomit; headaches from vexation. Headache with disposition to faint. Fainting is a strong tendency in this remedy from pains anywhere, in a warm room, while at stool, at the menstrual period Semilateral headaches are a marked feature, generally right-sided or travelling from right o left.
Headaches aggravated by jar, noise, anger, excitement and mental exertion, throbbing with every paroxysm of cough aching as if the brain were swishing to and fro, could not work or scarcely step without vertigo. Headaches worse lying down and at night in be, relieved walking slowly in pain air, from cold and uncovering the head; pressive headaches as if a nail were driven into the head. Headaches < in afternoon and evening, especially coming on from 4 to 8 p.m.
Marked tendency to take cold in head especially after becoming overheated.
Eruption on scalp and behind and around ears and fetid suppuration sometimes with obstruction of glands of neck.
Premature graying of the hair is a noted symptom also found under Phos. acid. Grey hair after abdominal disease or after parturition with violent burning and itching of scalp < becoming warm. Scurf over whole scalp, the child scratches it raw at night until it bleeds. Hair falls from the scalp but increases on other parts of the body. Many Lyc. symptoms are found in the eyes, inflammatory conditions, styes, etc. Double vision or half vision, intense photophobia and night blindness.
In the ears there is impaired hearing following inflammatory and catarrhal states. Noise and buzzing and roaring yellow crusts around and behind the ears, sticky eruptions, like those of Graphites.
Many severe nasal symptoms and sufferings are inflicted on the Lycopodium patients.
The snuffles of infants may often be cured by this remedy, blocked nasal passages from adenoids, swollen turbinates and polypoid growths.
Chronic catarrhal and sinus infections even blocked sinus often following local nasal packs of argyrol and other powerful antiseptics.
The discharges are yellow, grayish-green and often blood streaked, catarrhal ulcers with tendency to bleed after the removal of crusts from the nasal cavities.
Fanlike motion of the nostrils in pneumonia is a strong indication for Lycopodium (compare Ant. tart.). Coryza with acrid discharge excoriating the upper lip. All kinds of coryza; dry coryza with obstruction of the nose. Dryness of posterior nares with abstraction of nostrils at night compelling mouth breathing. Childs breath often in sleep even when mouth is open (Lach., Op., Am. carb.).
In his book The Collected Works of Arthur Hill Grimmer, Grimmer spoke out against the fluoridation of water and vaccinations. Grimmer wrote prodigeously, Gnaphalium, Homeopathic Prophylaxis and Homeopathic Medicine and Cancer: The Philosophy and Clinical Experiences of Dr. A.H. Grimmer, M.D.