To what extent the indication of dysmenorrhea membranacea is useful or bromine, still requires testing. The toxic actions of bromine on the sexual organs are like those of iodine. At first the testes and ovaries swell and then atrophy and harden. The breasts also swell and pain.
The chief use of bromine preparations in homoeopathy up to the present has been in affections of the upper air passages. All halogens seem to have a special affinity for the throat. Animal investigations have shown a membranous inflammation of the diphtheritic type. However, the bromides are more rarely used in laryngeal croup and diphtheria than the iodides and cyanides, although the bromine symptoms are pictured as extremely similar to severe laryngeal diphtheria. An indication for bromine is also said to be its general modality: worse from heat, from hot water; and the etiology is said to be cooling after overheating, excessive coverings, close spaces. For bromine there is a specially type of blond, blue-eyed children with reddened face. In such children bromine is preferred in croupy coughs, also in simple laryngitis, in scrofulous catarrhs, and in hard, nonsuppurative swelling of the cervical lymph nodes, the brunette types corresponding more to iodine.
The hoarseness is, as are all symptoms, worse from becoming warm and from overheating. Dry cough with hoarseness and burning under the sternum is spasmodic. Here the well-known use of bromoform in whooping cough is to be recalled. Inhalations provoke coughing in which the inhaled air seems cold, although the weather is warm (indeed, in the state of overheating). Inspiration is labored; attacks of suffocation appear in a warm room and there may be mucous rales in the larynx and air passages. In bromine the inflammation can extend into the bronchi and lungs (pneumonia is frequent in experimental bromine poisoning and also in bromidized epileptics) but still bromine is much more rarely employed than iodine. The laryngeal symptoms are decisive, and thereby the larynx should be very sensitive, especially to dust. So bromine is considered a remedy in sailors who have asthma ashore and again lose it at sea.
As with iodine there is also an irritant state of the nasal mucous membrane with much sneezing, which was also observed by Schabelitz on the twenty-second day with sodium bromide. Thereby pressure in the frontal sinus seems to be frequent. The feeling of coldness of the inhaled air, aggravation from heat and overheating, can perhaps give an occasion to select bromine in place of the usual iodine.
The well known skin manifestations of bromine are rarely utilized medically. However, Clarke recommends kali. brom. highly in the 30th in simple acne. Ammann has observed an eruption like psoriasis in bromine intoxications and has employed kali. brom with results in psoriasis.
SUMMARY
Chief Trends:
(1) Psychic: Hypomanic state (sedative and antiepileptic action many times curative?)
(2) Upper air passages: laryngeal croup.
Spasmodic cough (blond, blue-eyed children).
(3) Modalities: better by moving around; worse from heat and overheating.
DOSE :
Usually bromine (fresh preparations!) are recommended in the lower potencies, usually as kali. brom.
CHLORINE
Chlorine in molecular form, that is, as the yellow-green gas, comes into consideration for medicinal use just as little as molecular fluorine. The severe toxic action of chlorine is associated with its great chemical activity toward almost all elements, in particular its avidity for oxygen. This so great that a hydrolysis of the chlorine molecule occurs even in water whereby ClOH, hypochlorous acid, and HCl, hydrochloric acid, are formed. The destruction of water by chlorine is catalyzed by higher temperature and light. By the development of HCl, oxygen is liberated, this constantly oxidizing Cl to ClOH and this again in HCl and O. By this process oxygen constantly becomes free, and so chlorine acts as strong oxidizing agent on substances containing water and destroys all living substances.
ACTIONS OF MOLECULAR CHLORINE
When chlorine is in a sufficiently strong concentration, the organism is first involved in regard to the respiratory passages: spasm of the glottis, cough and dyspnea; the dyspnea is expiratory. If the amount of chlorine entering is sufficiently large, then there soon follow dyspnea, cyanosis, cold sweat, eventually pulmonary edema, accelerated small pulse and death through cardiac and respiratory paralysis. If there is prolonged stay in a chlorine atmosphere of moderate concentration, the reflex defenses are penetrated so that there develops bronchitis, pneumonia, pulmonary bleeding or edema. Bronchial maladies, pulmonary hemorrhages, the development of tuberculous foci on such a damaged soil, have been observed in subacute toxic concentrations, and, moreover, in chlorine workers, gastric pain, acid, eructations, pale, greenish appearance, emaciation, premature old age. The first acute irritative manifestations of small concentrations of chlorine are burning in the eyes and nose. Lewin also reports turbidity and inflammation of the cornea.
In regard to the narcotic action of aliphatic chlorine compounds (chloroform, chloral hydrate), the observation of Cameron is worthy of note, in which is reported a narcosis through chlorine gas (sleeping in the region of smashed boxes of calcium chloride) and free chlorine was demonstrated in the tissues by smell. Moreover, Binz reported narcosis and the appearance of free chlorine in the tissues in rabbits. A cerebral action expressed itself in the proving of chlorine water in the symptoms: loss of memory, especially for names, fear of losing the mind. The mental weakness is particularly worthy of note because of the similarity with more expressed action of the closely related bromine.
Likewise, not because of its therapeutic utility but for the understanding of the working relationships with the other halogens, bromine, and iodine, the so-called chlorine acne should be mentioned here. It is naturally assumed that it is not the free chlorine but organic compounds of chlorine (especially with tar derivatives) which are the cause of this affection of the sebaceous glands. Still, one, may assume that the organic combination merely conditions conduction of chlorine to the skin just as the aliphatic compounds favor conduction to the nervous system.
AQUA CHLORATA AS A REMEDY
The homoeopathic use of chlorine in the form of potentized chlorine water, aqua chlorata, is recommended in croup, spasm of the glottis, asthma with expiratory dyspnea, coryza with sudden flow of acrid corrosive mucus, and loss of voice in damp weather; but it is rarely used. Chlorine water is, moreover, too unstable a preparation since it contains constantly changing amounts of hypochlorous acid and hydrochloric acid, even with fresh preparation and preservation in brown bottles which excludes light. The use of aqua chlorata, which has survived from older medicine in the febrile diseases in which it should produce a slowing of the pulse and lowering of the temperature with an outbreak of sweat, in typhoid, in aphthous stomatitis, in dental spasms, is probably explained by the hydrochloric acid and hypochlorous acids being the active constituents. For the similarity of the indications with those of muriatic acid, as we shall soon see, is striking.
CHLORINE ION AND SODIUM CHLORIDE
Chlorine is of great significance in the organism in the ionic form, primarily in its neutral salt compound with sodium. In sodium chloride are bound two very aggressive elements, each of which attacks water; sodium turns water into a strong alkali, chlorine turns water into a strong acid. And the neutral compound, NaCl which is so extensive in the lithosphere and the hydrosphere as sodium chloride, is not only taken into the body daily in amounts of grams, but is granted so wide a physiologic range that the thought of any damaging or medicinal effect of this food and condiment at first seems to be very remote. The capacity for adaptation in the intermediary metabolism for quantities of sodium chloride is so great that in the adult twenty to thirty grams in a day scarcely provoke any alterations, at least not for brief periods of observation. It is otherwise in children in whom even three grams of a concentrated solution can provoke fever.
SODIUM CHLORIDE AS A DRUG?
It must seem as highly strange that such a material is conceded to have the medical effect ascribed to it in homoeopathy. For this reason natrium muriaticum is a favorite source of attack on homoeopathy. Still, the problem here is no different than it is with potassium and calcium salts. The homoeopathic assertions seem impossible only when the glance is cast at the quantity of the material. Just as little as we deal with quantitative factors in the salts of potassium, calcium and magnesium concerning a theory of deficiency, so is it true of sodium chloride. The different, unusual state of form is perhaps one of the conditions whereby we attain new type of working possibilities with such a substance. For the fulfilling of this condition, the type of preparation of such a remedy is significant and should be a trituration with sugar of milk, carefully performed up to 6th decimal potency; only beyond this is a dilution in diluted alcohol arranged.
Leeser, a Consultant Physician at the Stuttgart Homeopathic Hospital and a member of the German Central Society of Homeopathic Physicians, fled Germany in 1933 after being expelled by the German Medical Association. In England Otto Leeser joined the staff of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. He returned to Germany in the 1950s to run the Robert Bosch Homeopathic Hospital in Stuttgart, but died shortly after.
Otto Leeser wrote Textbook of Homeopathic Materia Medica, Leesers Lehrbuch der Homöopathie, Actionsand Medicinal use of Snake Venoms, Solanaceae, The Contribution of Homeopathy to the Development of Medicine, Homeopathy and chemotherapy, and many articles submitted to The British Homeopathic Journal,