Alumen - General symptoms - Kent Lectures

GENERAL

General

Weakness. This medicine, like Alumina ^Alumina, seems to produce a peculiar kind of Paralytic weakness of the muscles in all parts of the body, a sort of lack of tone.

The extremities are weak. This weakness is felt especially in the rectum and bladder. The stool becomes impacted from want of ability of the rectum and colon to expel their contents.

The bladder is also slowed down in its action, and it is with great difficulty that the urine is voided. After urinating, the bladder often remains half full. The urine is very slow to start, and when the patient stands to urinate the urine falls down perpendicularly, as in Hep Sulph Calc ^Hepar From this we see the sluggish action. The paralytic condition extends also to the veins producing a vaso-motor paralysis.

Induration. Another peculiar condition running through the remedy is the tendency to induration wherever there is an inflamed surface.

Ulcers are common in Alumen, and this induration underlies the ulcer; ulcers with indurated base. Or little scales may appear upon the skin where the circulation is feeble, over cartilaginous portions for instance and a great thick indurated mass forms.

Infiltration takes place under this crust, the crust keeps coming off, and a lack of healing follows because of the weakness of the tissues from a vaso-motor paralysis.

Glands. There is also in this medicine a tendency to induration of the neck of the uterus and the mammary glands.

Glands become slowly inflamed, and do not stop with ordinary congestion and hardness, but become as hard as bullets.

Alumen induration extends to the various glands of the body, but is especially noticeable in the tonsils.

For those who have a tendency to colds which settle in the throat, especially singling out the tonsils and indurating these.

those who keep on taking cold and the tonsils keep on growing, and indurating, we have in Alumen a medicine that fits the whole process, the hardening and infiltration, and it cures these cases according to the law of similars, when the symptoms agree.

It cures young children growing up with enormously enlarged and very hard tonsils in whom every cold settles in the throat.

If we can find symptoms which picture the constitutional state we have no trouble. When the symptoms have been well gathered the case is as good as cured; it is easy then to find a remedy.

Partially proved. Alumen is imperfect from the fact that it is only partially proved. I do not care to dwell upon partially proved remedies, but when they have a number of striking features that fit into everyday life it is important to know them. The mental symptoms of Alumen are very few.

The remedy, Alumen, should be proved in the higher potencies upon sensitive persons in order that the mental state may be brought out.

"Doctor, it burns right there like fire, and it presses as if my skull would be crushed in, and the only relief I get from pressing hard upon it and from an ice cold cloth pressed upon it."

She wants the cloth changed and made cold every few minutes. It is a queer thing that a pressing pain is made better from pressing upon the part. This is like Cactus Grandiflorus ^Cactus, pressing pain on vertex relieved from pressure.

The rubric of remedies with that symptom is very small, and hence Alumen fills a place.

There are some strange, rare and peculiar symptoms for which paucity of remedies, and we have to work in other channels and along sidetracks in getting the constitutional state of the patient.

Alumen cured the pressing pain on the vertex in one patient in whom it alternated with the most troublesome chronic, irritable bladder.

" Vertigo lying on his back, with weakness in pit of stomach; better opening eyes; better turning on right side."

It would strike anyone as something very singular, because palpitation is generally worse lying on the left side.

A heart that is fluttering, enlarged or disordered is generally worse while lying on the left, as the heart has less room then, but it is strange, rare and unique when these symptoms are worse lying on the right side.

When this condition is present in a patient it is necessary to find a remedy having just exactly that symptom, and very often it will be seen that the rest of the symptoms of the case fit into the remedy that has produced this peculiar state.

There is one more feature that you must add to these things, viz. slowness and sluggishness of the muscles throughout the body, a slowing down of all the muscles, a sense of weakness in the arms and legs.

Alumen is a very strong feature in an Alumen constitution.

Catarrhal conditions prevail throughout the remedy.

The veins become varicose and bleed, so that there may be bleeding from any of the inflamed or catarrhal areas and bleeding from the ulcers.

Alumen will often overcome this tendency and enable them to go back to their business. Etc,

He is kept awake at night by a sensation as if the blood rushed through the body. Many complaints come on during sleep. Night mare. He is sensitive to weather changes and very sensitive to cold.