Characteristic is the great dryness of mucous membranes, causing constant thirst.
All complaints are worse from cold, between three and five A.M. and lying on affected side. Motion and warmth ameliorate.
LYCOPODIUM.
Patients are lean, perhaps pot bellied, mentally alert, sensible, have pale-yellow to gray skin which is dry, spotted, wrinkled; burning, itching herpes, suppurating ulcers and eruptions, especially in skin folds; tongue red; eyes sunken, weak and surrounding by dark rings. Patients look shrunken, older than they are, are irritable and angry, sometimes sad an anxious dislike being alone; often of dominating position not tolerating opposition; sad, melancholy and hypochondriacal; weak memory, often choosing wrong expression. They have cold legs, especially the right; rheumatic.
Inclination to colds, enlarged glands and tonsillitis; frequent bursting headaches worse from mental work and in warm room; and above all there is disturbed metabolism. Hunger, even bulimia, but a few mouthfuls fill them up; emaciation, even when eating well. Acid taste, pyrosis, unrelieving sour eructations. Soon after meals sleepy and flatulent with borborygmi. Epigastrium distended, region of liver sensitive, not tolerating pressure of clothes. Stool dry, and after evacuation sensation as if there were more coming. Urine cloudy with red sediment; stinking perspiration especially of feet and in axillae, of onion odor.
The sickness of these patients has as a base lymphatism, blood dyscrasia, blood engorgement uric and diathesis. Diabetes, cholelithiasis, nephrolithiasis.
Characteristic are: craving for sweets, fanning ali nasi; most troubles are, or at least begin, in right side, developing slowly.
Aggravation between four and six P.M., from rest, warmth (especially of bed) and anger. Better from motion and air.
ANTIMONIUM CRUDUM.
Children and old people belong to this type children have the torpid from of scrofulosis, while old people are disposed to rheumatic-gouty conditions while obesity. Children are fat and bloated, (lymphatism), they are flabby and slow, unpleasant obstinate, do not want to be looked at or spoken to, much less touched. Adults are moody, melancholy, sentimentally in love (erotic) and ecstatic.
Irritability and anger, in consequence of ennui are just as regular as great lassitude; these people will always prefer to lie down, especially during hot weather; they are sleepy during the day, especially after meals. They complain of much frontal headache, sometime migraine, always occurring after a bath, which generally aggravates all symptoms. Night sweats.
Metabolic disturbances are here the basis of disease, and always there is involvement of digestive organs. The picture is completed by thickening of the epidermis, especially on the soles of feet; hard skin, corns, warts; sore cracked and crusty nostril and lips; finger nails grow slowly split, are crippled and discolored; falling of hair.
Characteristic is a thick, white coat of tongue with pappy taste, aversion to all food with feeling of overloaded stomach and intestinal trouble. In Antimonium tartaricum we find especially accumulation and rattling of mucus.
Aggravation from wet cold weather and cold baths and from all reflected heat, also from direct rays of sun; from overeating and acid food or drink in spite of craving them. Worse nights. Better in open air. Warm baths are tolerated.
