A person who has once proved Thuja, has the effects a lifetime, unless it was carefully taken in the very high potencies. If you take Thuja, one dose, high, it will bring out symptoms in five or six weeks, that are peculiar. If you repeat that again and again, you will have that which will remain a lifetime. Few crude drugs impress the vital force lastingly. An individual who is thoroughly and properly sensitive, as sensitive to potency as to contagion, who undertakes to prove by repetition, night and morning, will fasten upon himself a life long miasm.
Give a medicine and wait for the symptoms to come and go in the natural manner. To a great extent, the tendency with sycosis, is outward. We see in the proving of a drug, what we see in the disease. When a gonorrhoea is contracted, it goes through the natural prodromata, and then comes the disease, which, if let alone, has in its nature the power to eradicate itself from the economy and then the patients do not suffer from lasting effects.
In the old school, they suppress the discharge, and there are those in the new school who do little better.
The frequent repetition by which one is exposed would not increase the gonorrhoea itself, because the susceptibility is satisfied.
The repetition of the drug in proving it, does little harm, if the one who has charge of the proving, realize when symptoms begin to arise, and then stops the drug. By repeating the doses after the symptoms arise, we force the drug into the economy when it is already poisoned, and by this means get a confusion in the symptoms, and a drug disease engrafted upon the system.
Many of the proving of Thuja give us that kind of confusion, so that we see only now and then symptoms cropping out that are striking; in fact, the great bulk of the Thuja proving has been wasted, because there is so much confusion in a great number of the symptoms. The earlier proving brought out many of the characteristics of Thuja, the Vienna provings to a great extent, confused its image so, that by clinical experience only, we have been able to draw out the finer features of the drug. It requires more than a schoolboy to do that.
New provings must be carried on in a different manner.
Thuja has some striking bowel symptoms; gushing, watery, morning diarrhoea, like water coming out of a bunghole, with noisy flatus. Sinking in abdomen and stomach. Motions as of something alive in the abdomen. Flatulency with noises like the cry of an animal, croaking. Spinsters think themselves pregnant. Chronic diarrhoeas, beginning after vaccination, find suitable medicine in Thuja- Thuja, like Caust. and podoph., have a greasy, oily-looking evacuation.
There is also a general catarrhal condition running through the body; catarrh of the nose, ears and chest. In catarrh of the chest it produces an intense hacking cough, with expectoration in the morning of greenish mucus, sometimes a copious expectoration.
It is often suited to old cases of pneumonia, in such individuals as have had suppressed gonorrhoea fig-wart gonorrhoea.
The kidney and urinary symptoms are also striking; congestion and inflammation of the kidney; sharp pain in the kidney; burning urine; inflammation of the bladder and urethra that is not always gonorrhoeal; pus from the bladder; paralysis of the bladder, must wait a long time for the urine to start; retention of urine, continuous urging to urinate, tearing in the urethra, a sensation as if urine were constantly dribbling down the urethra, like Kali bich., Petros., and Lact, Urine cloudy, yellowish, tough, mucous sediment; sugar in the urine.
In the urethral disease of sycotic character, Thuja leads all other remedies. In the non-sycotic variety, Cannabis sativa is sufficient, but Cann. sat., though it ameliorates the burning during and after urination and the thick yellowish-green discharge, needs some other remedy to follow when the disease is shown to be sycotic. It is not so with Thuja, because it is capable of finishing the case.
Round, elevated, offensive ulcers upon the foreskin; excoriations behind the glans, with sensations as of a splinter like those found under Arg. n., Hep., Nit. ac. The same sensation may be found in primary syphilitic ulceration.
Canth., Cann. sat., Thuja, Puls., Nux, and even at times Nat. m, are indicated in an acute gonorrhoea.
Canth., Cann. sat., are violent in attack, with bloody, watery discharge; Thuja has a watery discharge, but is less violent; Puls. has a yellow-green discharge with constant dribbling of urine; Nux has a pain in urethra extending towards the rectum, causing frequent urging to stool, ineffectual; Nat. m., when the pain is after urination showing distinctly that the remedy was needed before the accession of the disease. For impotence following gonorrhoea do not neglect the study of Agnus cactus.
The dropsical infusion of the foreskin produced by Thuja, is usually inflammatory in its nature. Nit. ac. Fluor. ac. have dropsy of the foreskin, in both syphilis and gonorrhoea. In the female there is often a thickening of the mucous membrane as to seriously prevent coition. In the woman suppression will be followed by inflammation of the uterus, of the ovaries, peritonitis, etc.
In the most violent cases, with bloody urine, extreme salacity, great torment, bloody, watery discharge from the urethra and bladder, no rest day or night, Cantharis is indicated and is capable of finishing the case in from several hours to eight days. Many are cured in twenty-four hours. Such a patient must be in excellent health; this is not a usual case. They are generally drinking men and smokers. Tobacco is one of the most troublesome complications and many cases will not recover promptly if they are tobacco users and great smokers, wine drinkers or convivial men. Like sycosis we have in Thuja worse from coition.
With the system broken down from high living, there may be no decided curative action, until you have forced the patient to abandon excess and have enjoined a light and simple diet, diminished the smoking and withheld the drink. This is the first thing. If he is a man of family, we have to contend with great mental distress, and so, also, if it is a woman.
Usually, the sycotic miasm is troublesome to begin with, and one that will bother the young physician. It is impossible to exchange the right method for a wrong one, as that will make a cripple for life. The suppression of the disease, as usually tried, cannot be thought of by the sincere and earnest homoeopath. If the patient wants it checked suddenly, send him somewhere else, but warn him what will take place, and that he will have untold disease and suffering.
There are three spheres presented for our observation in chronic conditions, and we remedial measures adequate to their removal. These spheres were discovered by Hahnemann to be attributable to psora, syphilis, and sycosis. Hahnemann in pursuing his experiments and studying their effects, found that Sulph., Merc. and Thuj., were the typical psoric, syphilitic and sycotic remedies, having a broader sphere in these several directions, being more deeply anti-psoric, syphilitic, and sycotic-which only means having the power to return the disease manifestations, through its primary manifestations, to health- that they were more frequently indicated in the primary manifestations; more satisfactory intercurrents, when other indicated remedies had finished their work in either direction, and that the provings were more definitely similar to the diseases produced upon the human system by those miasms, than any remedies yet proven.
In our day we have remarkable provings and verifications of Psorinum, and are completing those of Syphilinum and Medorrhinum, finding them deeper intercurrents and rationalizers of many chaotic conditions, otherwise impossible to overcome, and increasing our power over the sick to an extent one believed impossible.
All the symptoms of a Thuj. patient are worse after 3 p.m., and in the night.
The mental symptoms, the headaches and the stomach symptoms are greatly aggravated by tea and sweets, while onions produce diarrhoea. There is much craving for salt, as in Nat. mur., also many eructations while eating, like Nit. ac.
The hair follicles become sensitive to pressure, even of the pillow. The hair becomes thin and lusterless as if dead, and it as a musty odour.
There is aggravation from heat in many conditions, the toothaches, headaches, and rheumatic symptoms, are greatly increased from the warmth of the bed. The pains in the eyes are worsened from warmth, from washing and wrapping, but the patient is better in the open air.
The eye symptoms of Thuj are many and grave. We find ulceration of the conjunctiva; iritis with a rough, jagged- looking iris, as in Staph and Sil., syphilitic-iritis with condyloma; enlargement of the meibomian glands of the lid margins; violent, sharp, sticking parts; discharges smelling like putrid meat with increase from warmth, from bathing, from covering. The conditions met in the iris may be all controlled without dilatation. Thuj has also cured inflammation of the sclerotic.
Calcutta