IPECACUANHA


IPECACUANHA symptoms of the homeopathy remedy from Homeopathic Drug Pictures by M.L. Tyler. What are the symptoms of IPECACUANHA? Keynote indications and personality traits of IPECACUANHA…


Introduction

      OLD School studies and experiments with and teaches drugs for their physiological action, and lays down the maximum non-lethal doses for adults and for children. Homoeopathy studies and employs, often, the same drugs, but for their exactly opposite effect, and in the fine dosage of vital stimulation.

Old School knowledge of drugs is therefore only half-knowledge, i.e. of their crude toxic and subversive action: and it is only in a few instances that it recognizes and employs them for their homoeopathic action. Ipecacuanha is interesting as being one of the drugs that Allopathy uses to cure homoeopathically : uses to cure homoeopathically: uses both ways, in fact, to provoke and to cure vomiting. It is especially in the vomiting of pregnancy that, forsaking the emetic dose of “grs. xv to xxx”, it is given in one-minim doses of Ipecacuanha wine. It works for us in the high and highest potencies. Ipecac. 200 is a mighty prescription.

But, in sensitive, as we shall demonstrate later, Ipecac. can cause, and therefore cure, the most terrible attacks of asthma and suffocation, and it is anything but a universally safe emetic. Its poisonings and provings are interesting, graphic, and instructive.

It will be seen that Asthma bulks largely in the poisonings and provings of Ipecacuanha, vide the following condensed quotations from the Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy. Clinical confirmation in the use of the drug has laid special stress on its nauseating properties–provocative and curative:–and the “Nausea not relieved by vomiting”, and the “nausea, constant, with a clean tongue” have come to be the main suggestive symptoms for its exhibition. And yet–in its chest troubles, with agonies of dyspnoea and suffocation, there may be little or no nausea. Or, again, there may be nausea, with violent efforts to vomit and to cough at the same time producing indescribable terrors of suffocation; seeming to threaten life.

HALE WHITE tells us that the drug affects not only the stomach, but the vomiting center in the medulla, which may account for the clean tongue?–in characteristic cases.

Recently we have seen a most interesting case:–asthma of years standing, combined with a skin disease; the two, apparently, not alternating, but co-existing. A few doses of Ipecac. in highish potency, started almost immediate improvement in the skin condition–which one had not expected: but also greatly improved the asthma, which is “better than for years”. The prescription was consequent on this attempt to produce a Drug-Picture of Ipecac. By the way, a clever old homoeopathic chemist used to say.” The young doctors make good prescriptions, because they are reading up Materia Medica.” But–we should all do that–incessantly: and certainly writing up drugs, and teaching drugs, does, or ought to, teach oneself.

Who uses Ipecacuanha for “skins”? Our books say, indeed, that it may be useful to bring out suppressed eruptions. As in scarlet fever, etc., “eruptions suppressed, or tardily appearing, with oppression of the chest; vomiting and tickling cough”. In erysipelas, “where the redness disappears, with vomiting”. And it has “Itching of the skin, with nausea; has to scratch till he vomits” And Hale White says, that Ipecac. applied to the skin is a powerful irritant, produces redness, vesication and pustulation.

Now first, we will condense a few cases from Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy, which show the effects of crude Ipecacuanha on sensitives, and thus point to the help it may give in the potencies to patients rendered thus sensitive by disease.

1. Poisonings: from pulverizing Ipecac. root. Inhaled a quantity of the dust, which caused him to vomit three times and gave him oppression of the chest. He left off pounding it, but one hour later had the most violent attack of suffocation, constriction of windpipe and throat, earthy cadaverous complexion, the most frightful anxiety during the suffocative attack. These symptoms increased every minute after five hours he thought he would be suffocated. Respiratory symptoms lasted for several days, though in a more moderate degree.

2. Mrs. S., married to a doctor, had very troublesome shortness of breath, with a remarkable stricture about throat and breast, with a particular kind of wheezing noise. The fits were sudden; often so violent as to threaten immediate suffocation; generally went off in two or three days with spitting of a tough phlegm of disagreeable metallic taste. It was at last discovered that these attacks occurred whenever Ipecac. was being powdered or put up. For seven or eight years, by carefully keeping out of the way, she was clear of the attacks. But one day her husband, without considering, opened a packet of a large quantity he had received, and put it into a bottle. She, not far off, called out that she felt her throat affected, and was seized with stricture upon her chest, and difficulty of breathing. She was exceedingly ill at night, and at three a.m. was seen, gasping for breath at a window, pale as death, pulse scarcely to be felt, in utmost danger of suffocation. Bleeding and laudanum had little effect. About eleven a.m. she got up after some sleep, and was less distressed till evening, when it returned in force and continued all night. This was repeated for eight days, and in a mitigated form for six days more. A slight return of menses, in the middle of the time:–coughed up at times small quantities of blood; and there was some blood mixed with stools and urine.

3. A doctor, putting up a powdered dose of Ipecac., was suddenly seized with a violent attack of asthma, attended with the most distressing dyspnoea and oppression at the precordia. In spite of bleeding and active cathartics it lasted five or six days. Much later, having occasion to take an emetic, he chose Ipecac. wine. The moment he had swallowed it, felt in throat and stomach as if he had drunk melted lead the distress settled into one of his worst attacks of asthma, and from that time was subject to them whenever exposed to the drug, or to the fumes of burning sulphur. He observed in some of his attacks that when expectoration became free, in the mornings, mouthfuls would be thrown up, which any person might have pronounced to be a mass of small nearly transparent worms, but which were thickened mucus, which had collected in the small bronchia during sleep, now thrown off as casts of these tubes, often in such quantity as to surprise him that sufficient air could have passed through the lungs in sleep for the purposes of life.

4. Another sufferer, a doctor, supposing that it was only the powder inhaled which made him suffer, took some of the powdered root in tepid water, it having been weighed and mixed in a distant part of the house. In about the usual time for an emetic to work there seemed to be a simultaneous effort to breathe, cough and vomit, producing a state of suffocation totally indescribable by words. The whole muscles of chest and abdomen seemed in a state of violent irregular spasm, every effort to vomit being interrupted by an attempt to cough. Though a cold March wind was blowing he had to open the window, and support himself in the erect position for nearly an hour to prevent immediate suffocation–which was momentarily expected by his friends. The attack suddenly passed and at his request he was laid on the bed: breathing was free, but weakness was extreme, and the whole surface of the body was burning and covered with an erysipelatous eruption, covering every apt. The patches were circular, from the size of sixpence to the palm of a hand, elevated with thick rounded edges, and of a fiery red colour.

5. In another case, where a small quantity of Ipecac. powder had been scattered, “I” was instantly attacked by one of the most fearful paroxysms of asthma–extreme sense of suffocation, oppression at the precordia, a most exhausting nausea, convulsive but ineffectual efforts to vomit with simultaneous spasms of the diaphragm and muscles of chest and abdomen, producing a state of suffering which defies description. The quantity of Ipecac, inhaled must have been infinitesimally small.

6. In some cases, pain in the eyes and loss of sight, with copious lachrymation was caused by pounding Ipecac. with, in one case, nausea and vomiting. Saw flames before eyes, and woke later with violent pain in eyes, and pillow quite wet. Right eye worst: quite blind; with left saw iridescent rings of fire. The pain was incessant and aggravated by a bright light.

Hahnemann says, “It will be seen from the following symptoms” (provings), “though they are not complete, that this powerful plant was not created merely for the purpose of causing a forcible evacuation of the stomach by vomiting (which in most cases is to be reckoned as one of the useless cruelties of ordinary practice), but that far higher and more important curative objects are attainable by its means.

” We may learn from its symptoms that, as it can relieve some cases of tendency to vomit similar to its own, so it must, as experience has shown, exert a specific curative action more particularly in haemorrhages, in paroxysmal, spasmodic dyspnoea and suffocative spasms and also in some kinds of tetanus–provided that in all these affections the other symptoms of the patient are met with of a similar character among those of Ipecac.

Margaret Lucy Tyler
Margaret Lucy Tyler, 1875 – 1943, was an English homeopath who was a student of James Tyler Kent. She qualified in medicine in 1903 at the age of 44 and served on the staff of the London Homeopathic Hospital until her death forty years later. Margaret Tyler became one of the most influential homeopaths of all time. Margaret Tyler wrote - How Not to Practice Homeopathy, Homeopathic Drug Pictures, Repertorising with Sir John Weir, Pointers to some Hayfever remedies, Pointers to Common Remedies.