The Kali carb. patient is a hard patient to study, and the remedy itself is a hard one to study.
It is not used as often as it should be, and the reason is that it is a very complex and confusing remedy. It has a great many opposite symptoms, changing symptoms, and thus it is related to patients that withhold their symptoms and have many vague symptoms.
Mind: The patient is whimsical, irascible, irritable to the very highest degree, quarrels with his family and with his bread and butter. He never wants to be alone, is full of fear and imaginations when alone, “fear of the future, fear of death, fear of ghosts.”
If compelled to remain alone in the house he is wakeful, sleepless, or his sleep is full of horrible dreams. He is never at peace, is full of imaginations and fear.
“What if the house should burn up!”
“What if I should do this or that!” and
“What if this and the other thing should happen! ”
He is oversensitive to everything, sensitive to every atmospheric change; he can never get the room at just exactly the right temperature; he is sensitive to every draft of air and to the circulation of air in the room. He cannot have the windows open, even in a distant part of the house. He will get up at night in bed and look around to see where that draft of air comes from. His complaints are worse in wet weather, and in cold weather.
Pains: He is sensitive to the cold and is always shivering. His nerves feel the cold; they are all painful when it is cold. The neuralgias shoot here and there when it is cold, and if the part affected be kept warm, the pain goes to some other place. All his pains change place and go into the cold part; if he covers up one part, the pain goes to the part uncovered.
This remedy is full of sticking, burning, tearing pains, and these fly around from place to place. Of course Kali carb. has pains that remain in one place, but usually the pains fly, around in every direction, Pains cutting like knives. Pains like hot needles, sticking, stinging and burning.
These pains are felt in internal parts and dry passages. Burning in the anus and rectum, described as if a hot poker were forced into that passage; burning as with fire. The hemorrhoids burn like coals of fire. The burning of Kali carb. is like that of Arsenicum.
Again from studying the text it will be seen that it is a common feature of this medicine to have its symptoms come on at 2, 3 or 5 o’clock in the morning. In Kali carb. the cough will come or have its greatest < at three or four or five o’clock in the morning.
The febrile state will occur from 3-5 in the morning. The patient, who is subject to asthmatic dyspnoea, will have an attack at 3 o’clock in the morning, waking him out of sleep. He will wake up with various symptoms and remain awake until 5 o’clock in the morning, and after that to a great extent they are relieved.
Of course, there are plenty of sufferings at any time in the twenty-four hours, but this is the worst time. He wakes up at 3 o’clock in the morning with fear, fear of death, fear of the future, worries about everything and is kept awake for 2-3 hours and then goes to sleep and sleeps soundly.
His body is cold and requires much clothing to keep it warm, but in spite of the fact that he is cold he sweats copiously; copious, cold sweat upon the body. Sweats upon the slightest exertion, sweats where the pain is, sweat over the forehead; cold sweat on the forehead with headache.
Neuralgia of the scalp and the eyes and the cheek bones in association with the nervous shooting pains. Violent pains here and there in the head, as if the head would be crushed. Cutting and stabbing, in the head. Violent congestive headaches as if the head were full. Head hot on one side and cold on the other; forehead covered with cold sweat.
Head: It has catarrhal congestive headache.
Whenever he goes out in the cold air, the nose opens up and the mucous membranes become dry and burn; when he returns into a warm room the nose commences to discharge, and the nose stuffs up so that he cannot breathe through it, and then he feels most comfortable; so that it has stuffing up of the nose in a warm room, and opening up of the nose in the open air. When the nose is open so that he can breathe through it, that is the time the head is most painful; it is painful to the cold air and the cold air makes it burn.
The cold air feels hot. All these patients suffer from a chronic catarrh and when they ride in the wind the catarrhal discharge ceases and then will come on a headache, and thus he has headache from riding in the cold wind.
Whenever the discharge ceases from taking cold in a draft on comes headache, and as the discharge becomes free again the headache is relieved. Neuralgic pains in eyes and scalp and through the cheek bones from a cessation of chronic catarrhal discharge, and when the discharge starts up again, these pain cease.
With the chronic catarrh of the nose there is a thick, fluent, yellow discharge; dryness of the nose, alternating with stuffing up. The one who suffers from a chronic catarrh will also have the discharge in the morning, which will fill up the nose with yellow mucus. In the morning he blows out and hawks up dry, hard crusts that fill up the nasal passage, clear over into the pharynx and down into the throat.
These crusts become dry as if they were partly formed upon the mucous membrane and when they are blown out there is bleeding. The bleeding starts from where the crusts are lifted up. He is subject to sore throat, is always taking cold, and it settles in the throat. He is also subject to enlarged tonsils and with these has enlargement and chronic hardness of the parotid glands-one or both. Great knots below the ear, behind the jaw.
These grow and become hard, and at times, painful; shooting, darting pains when he is moving about in the open air. When air strikes these enlarged glands they are sore and painful, and he is ameliorated by going into a warm place.
The acute colds extend into the chest, but Kali carb. has been found most suitable in the chronic catarrh of the chest, chronic bronchitis.
Chest: The chest is very often affected in just the same way as the nose.
There is the dryness and dry barking, hacking cough in cold air, but a copious expectoration of mucus when it becomes warm, and that is the time he is most comfortable, for the expectoration seems to relieve him. He suffers mostly from a dry, hacking cough with morning expectoration. The cough begins with a dry, hacking, increases gradually and sometimes very rapidly to a violent. Spasmodic cough with gagging or vomiting, and when coughing it feels as if his head would fly to pieces.
Face: The face becomes puffed, the eyes seem to protrude and then there is seen that which is commonly present in Kali carb., a peculiar sort of a swelling between the eyelids and eyebrows that fills up when coughing.
Your attention is called to that peculiar feature, for although there may be bloating nowhere else upon the face that little bagging will appear above the lid and below the eye brow. It fills up sometimes to the extent of a little water bag.
Such a swelling has been produced by Kali carb., and sometimes that symptom alone guides to the examination of the remedy for the purpose of ascertaining if Kali carb. does not fit all the rest of the case.
Boenninghausen speaks of an epidemic of whooping cough in which the majority of cases called for Kali carb., and this striking feature was present. No remedy should ever be given on one symptom. If you are led to a remedy by a peculiar symptom, study the remedy and the disease thoroughly to ascertain if the two are similar enough to each other to expect a cure. Any deviation from that rule is ruinous and will lead to the practice of giving medicines on single symptoms.
Dry, hacking incessant, gagging cough with whooping, blowing of blood from the nose, vomiting of everything in the stomach, and expectoration of blood-streaked mucus, is a whooping cough that will be commonly cured by Kali carb., but especially if there is present that peculiar and striking feature of a bag-like swelling below the eyebrow and above the lids, puffiness of the eyes.
There are some cases of pneumonia that need Kali carb, in the stage of hepatization (like Sulph.). Again, when pneumonia has passed away think of Kali carb. if every time the patient takes a little cold it settles in the chest with these symptoms that I have described.
There is sensitiveness of the body to weather changes, to cold air and to wet, a continuous dry, hacking cough, with gagging, the aggravation from three to five the morning, and the patient, has flying neuralgic pains. These symptoms gradually increase and the patient dates them back to his pneumonia. He says:
“Doctor, I have never been quite well since I had pneumonia.”
The catarrhal state has settled in his chest and there is a chronic tendency to take cold. These cases are threatening to go into phthisis and will hardly be likely to recover without Kali carb. In this tendency for catarrhal states to locate in the chest, Kali carb. should be thought of as well as Phosphor., Lycopod. and Sulphur.
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.