It takes a long time for this remedy, in the proving, to develop its symptoms. It is a very deep-acting medicine, and an antipsoric, antisyphilitic and anti-sycotic.
It is insidious in its action and its symptoms are slow in approach; it is like the deepest and slowest and most tedious diseases, the miasms, and hence it is suitable in the very slowest and lowest forms of disease.
While it has in its nature some febrile action, it is not for this purpose that it is oftenest called for its most typical febrile action is very slow and insidious. It corresponds to overheated states of the system, old cases of nightly fevers, coming on week after week and year after year.
It is an unusually hot-blooded remedy at times, and again it has conditions of coldness. In the evening and night great heat seems to evolve from the body without increase of temperature. The skin becomes very hot.
That patient is often < from warm things, < from covering, < from warm air; suffocates somewhat like Pulsatilla in a warm room. He wants to bathe the face and head in cold water; such bathing is grateful.
The feet burn and are put out of bed in the night; he hunts around in bed for a cool place for the feet and bands. The soles perspire, and the palms perspire, and the sweat is acrid, making the parts sore; excoriation from the sweat between the toes.
The perspiration is offensive; offensive, acrid sweat between the toes. Burning, unusual heat and acridity are words that modify a great many symptom s; an acrid lachrymation or other discharge from the eye; acrid discharge from the nose, acrid sweat, etc.
Sensation of burning and burning pains in parts; heat evolved from the body as a chronic state. Aggravation from heat, from outward heat and from inward heat, belongs to this remedy. It is a strong feature, of this remedy to be worse from drinking tea and coffee. Warm, drinks bring on a diarrhea, or flatulence, or disturbance in the stomach, and cause indigestion to manifest itself in various way The symptoms are worse standing and sitting and better in the open air.
It is a remedy of great depth of action. It so disturbs the functions that there are peculiar outward signs in the nails, in the hair, in the skin; they are all imperfectly developed.
Skin: Whenever such is the case, we know that a remedy has great depth of action and that it is very long acting. It forms like incrustations here and there upon the skin that seem to have no tendency to heal.
A crust forms, but there seems to be no healing beneath the crust. The hair loses its luster; it falls out, and if examined closely under the microscope it is seen to be necrosed; little ragged ulcers will be found along the course of the hair.
The ends of the hair are dry, the hair mats and splits and breaks, becomes ragged in masses and lustreless. The nails are crippled, likewise corrugations in the nails; the nails grow too fast and grow awkwardly; that is, they are deformed and crippled, too thick in some places, and too thin in others; break easily, brittle.
There is a tendency to breaking down of a slow character, where the circulation is very feeble and the skin is near bone or cartilage as in the cartilages in the ears, and in the cartilages of joints.
Ulcers develop over the tibia. There is feeble circulation in the hands and feet and they become cold. In the evening the extremities burn and are feverish, because that is the time of the feverish state; but in the morning and in the daytime there is coldness of the extremities.
The patient is pallid and sickly, and at times becomes waxy and dropsical; oedema of the extremities, and particularly of the lower extremities; oedema of certain parts; oedema of the prepuce.
When a debilitated subject, one suffering from bone and cartilaginous troubles, contracts gonorrhoea, with it he will have enormous swelling of the prepuce, and nothing seems to act upon it. Fluoric acid will cure oedema of the prepuce with gonorrhoea in such a subject. Cannabis sativa has the same symptom, but it is especially useful in robust cases.
Fluoric acid will prevent the manifestation of disease in sycotic subjects, will prevent formation of fig warts. It cures fig warts. It produces hardened, dry warts, and dry crusts upon the skin, and crusts not unlike rupia. It is useful in syphilitic rupia.
Bone affections stand out prominently. Necrosis, especially of the long bones, but also of the bones of the ear. It creates an offensive acrid discharge from the ear. It establishes an offensive oezena, an acrid discharge, with necrosis of the nasal bones.
It is very analogous to Silicea, and it is one of the natural followers of Silicea where Silicea has been too frequently repeated by persons who do not know that Silicea does its best in a single dose and that it is a long acting and slow medicine.
It not only antidotes the abuse of Silicea, but also follows Silicea, After practicing a while you will be surprised to observe the Pendulum like -action between beat and cold in various complementary remedies.
To make that clear I will illustrate it by using the series in which this remedy is set and to which it naturally belongs. You take a patient who is hot-blooded, who is always suffering from the heat, from too much clothing and too warm a room especially in the evenings, a patient that is tearful and sad, and may be a blonde.
Why you say, I am trying to describe a Pulsatilla patient. Well, yes; anyone can see that. Pulsatilla is a hot-blooded patient, but after using that remedy a while you notice that the patient goes to the other extreme and becomes chilly, and wants much clothing; the heat is taken out of the case. Silicea is the natural follower of Pulsatilla, and you would be astonished to know bow often a patient leaving Pulsatilla runs toward Silicea
Silicea goes deeper into the case, it does more cutting, and it is the, natural chronic of Pulsatilla Other remedies of course follow Pulsatilla, but Silicea more frequently than any other medicine. Now, that is the second step; the patient has gone from a warm to a cool state; the overheated state has been lost and he has gone into Silicea, but when Silicea has been administered for a while it cures the cold state, and removes the chilliness of the patient (remember, however, that Silicea has at times something of Pulsatilla in it; in some of its complaints it is < from being overheated) and the patient under Silicea goes back to the warm state again, becomes hot-blooded, wants the warm covers thrown off, wants to be lightly covered.
Then it is that this medicine comes in the series. Acidum fluoricum follows Silicea as naturally as Silicea follows Pulsatilla They exist in threes.
Series: There are other remedies that exist in threes, but the most common ones you will think of will be:
Sulph., Calcarea and Lycopodium;
Sulph., Sarsaparilla and Sepia; and
Coloc. and Causticum and Staphysagria, which often follow each other and rotate in this way.
Do not let these facts make you give a routine remedy unless the symptoms agree, but it does help to remember that remedies are somewhat similar. It is true that Pulsatilla, Silicea and Acidum fluoricum are similar all along the line as to the nature of their symptoms.
Pulsatilla corresponds to more acute disturbances, or to the earlier stages of chronic disease, the more active or violent operations of chronic disease. It will take off the wire edge of the disease, and it will be followed by some medicine that is complementary to it, always to be determined by the symptoms that arise.
There are cases that would be greatly injured by so deeply acting a remedy as Silicea if given in the beginning, that is, the suffering would be unnecessary; but if you commence with Pulsatilla you can mitigate the case and prepare it to receive Silicea, providing the two would appear to be on a plane of agreement.
A very serious case had better first receive Pulsatilla, and the way being paved by that remedy follow it up with Silicea
Bones: Think of the remedy, then, in vicious bone diseases, in necrosis and caries, in fistulous openings, fistula leading to the teeth, fistula lachrymalis and fistula in ano; in calcareous degenerations; in deformity of the nails, hair and teeth; in affections of the thigh bones and leg bones, with chronic fistulous openings leading to bone discharging pus which excoriates the parts all around.
The patient is over-sensitive; is made worse if the bowels do not move regularly; is distressed if the menstrual flow is slightly delayed; suffers if the call to urinate cannot be immediately attended to, hence, as in the text, “headaches > by micturition.”
Headache: That symptom is all that is given in the text; but remember something that is analogous to it, viz.; If the call to urinate be not attended to the headache will continue to grow < until the urine is avoided.
That is a peculiar symptom, and it sometimes leads to the study of Fluor, ac. Violent congestive headache with beat and fullness. Violent occipital headaches, worse from motion.
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.
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