Colic

In post operative cases I usually give Lycopodium i 200th potency. In Raphanus I always use the 200s having found this potency worked I have stuck to it. In Opium I usually give a higher potency because these cases are pretty extreme.

There are of course endless other drugs which have colic but I am trying to pick out those most useful in emergencies. There is one other which you ought to know podophyllum. Podophyllum you will find useful in hepatic colics mainly. It is helpful in intestinal colics associated with diarrhoea. I mean with acute diarrhoea. but then you prescribe it much more on the diarrhoea symptoms than on those of the colic. But you do get indications for it in hepatic colics purely on the local symptoms.

I think in these cases where you have Podophyllum indicated in hepatic colic you always have a degree of infection of the gall-bladder and one of the first things that makes you think of the possibility of podophyllum is the fact that the maximum temperature is in the morning and not in the evening. It has a 7 O’clock in the morning peak temperature.

In addition to that the podophyllum patients are very miserable and almost disgusted with life.

There is always a degree of jaundice in the gall-bladder cases, and it may be pretty marked.

In the majority of these cases the pain in not definitely localized in the gall-bladder it is more in the epigastrium as a whole, and tends to spread across from the middle of the epigastrium towards the liver region. The pains are twisting in character and they are much aggravated by taking food.

In these podophyllum cases when the acute pain has subsided there is a horrible feeling of soreness in the liver region and you find these patients lying stroking the liver, which gives a great sense of comfort. When I see an infected gall-bladder with a morning temperature instead of an evening one I immediately think of podophyllum. It is astonishing how often one gets this indication and then you generally see the patient lying in bed stroking the liver region. In every case where the morning temperature and that relief from stroking have put me on to podophyllum I have found that the other symptoms fitted in.

Douglas Borland

Douglas Borland M.D. was a leading British homeopath in the early 1900s. In 1908, he studied with Kent in Chicago, and was known to be one of those from England who brought Kentian homeopathy back to his motherland.
He wrote a number of books: Children's Types, Digestive Drugs, Pneumonias
Douglas Borland died November 29, 1960.