The greater Celandine. It grows wild all over Germany and FRance, it has a yellow acrid juice and the tincture is made from the whole fresh plant. Its chief action is upon the liver and lungs and it is, like Sanguinaria, a great right-sided remedy.
Taken altogether Chelidonium is perhaps our greatest liver remedy, it causes the liver to secrete thinner and more profuse bile than any other remedy, it has as symptoms pains of all sorts in the region of the liver, soreness, sharp stitching pains shooting from liver into the stomach or into the back. It is useful in many forms of hepatic disease from simple congestion to inflammation, and the symptoms that indicated it are swelling of the liver, jaundice, chills and fever, yellow tongue taking often, as in Mercurius, the imprints of the teeth. There is often a bitter taste in the mouth and a marked craving for milk which agrees, also a craving for acids and sour things, such as pickles and vinegar. The stools of chelidonium are characteristic being bright yellow diarrhoea or clayey.
The most characteristic symptoms of Chelidonium is a constant pain under the lower angle of the right shoulder blade. This you know is a liver pain and thus frequently indicates out remedy, in fact, this pain will indicate the remedy in almost any disease. It is a pain that sometimes goes through the chest like a rivet.
Chenopodium has a dull pain below the angle of the scapula and nearer the spinal column.
Ranunculus bulb. has pain along the inner edge of the left scapula and extends at time through the left chest.
Lobelia syphilitica has pain under the inner border of the left scapula worse after weeping.
Angustura has a cutting pain extending from beneath the right scapula to the breast.
Chelidonium is indicated in other affections besides liver affections. Prominent among these is pneumonia or capillary bronchitis in children, where there are present hepatic or bilious symptoms. In such case the face is apt to be deep red as in other members of the papaveraceae family, Opium and Sanguinaria, and there is oppression of the chest, a fan-like motion of the wings of the nose, and one foot hot not other cold, owing to a disagreement of the vaso-motor nerves.
These latter symptoms are also found under Lycopodium. The cough is rattling yet the expectoration is not easily raised. It is also indicated in diarrhoea attending infantile pneumonia or capillary bronchitis, desire for milk and wine, hot drinks, much rumbling, worse at night. There is often an aching and gnawing pain in the stomach relieved by eating, but worse from pressure. The tongue white and dry. Remember the action on the liver which may be summed up thus:.
1. Irritation of the secretory function of the liver with yellow stools.
2. Arrest of secretory function from obstruction of hepatic ducts with white stools, jaundice, brown urine, etc.
Chelidonium is especially suitable to spare subjects who are disposed to abdominal plethora, catarrhs, cutaneous affections, renewal of symptoms when weather changes. Great weakness and lassitude after eating and desire to lie down after eating.
One more use for Chelidonium is in facial neuralgia, but it will do no good unless there are hepatic symptoms present. In fact is is a neuralgia dependent upon a disorder of the liver. The pains extend from the right cheek bone into the teeth or eye or supra- orbital nerves.
The general aggravation of Chelidonium is very early in the morning. Dr. Teste recommends Chelidonium in whooping cough.
No one potency can be considered the best. No physician can abruptly change his method of practice from low potencies to high. Judgment in selecting potencies must come from industrious painstaking effort on the part of the physician seeking to cure his patient in the shortest time and by the “safest, and most certain means upon principles that are at once plain and intelligible.” The using of high potencies does not necessarily make a physician a good homoeopathist-WALTER M. JAMES, M.D., 1893.
Professor of Materia Medica in the University of Michigan Homeopathic Medical College. Member of American Institute of Homeopathy. In addition to his editoral work he authored or collaborated on: Boericke and Dewey's Twelve Tissue Remedies, Essentials of Homeopathic Materia Medica, Essentials of Homeopathic Therapeutics and Practical Homeopathic Therapeutics.