M.T. Ahmad J.T. Kent
Cina is very famous for the treatment of worm infestation in children. Its peculiar nature is that of ill temper. Its patients (children) get outraged over trivial matters. Nothing can please them. They are very sensitive. Their hypersensitivity is not only of their nature but it also affects their skin. The patient does not let anybody come near him or touch him. Even a light touch with the hand is unbearable. He hesitates to face a stranger. Like the patient of Chamomilla, the patient makes strange demands, and when the demand is met, he throws away the object. Being stared at by somebody upsets him.
The Cina patients grind their teeth during the night, which is interrupted by frequent jolting and waking up. Fear scares them and wakes them up. In their frightful dreams, they see dogs, demons and ghosts. They scream during sleep and wake up trembling. The children like to sleep on their hands and knees.
The Cina patient has a peculiar glossy gleam in the eye. He experiences an array of colours, especially yellow. The pupils are dilated. The patient experiences blackouts. There is constant irritation inside the nose, which needs to be constantly rubbed. The irritation is never ending. The margins of the nostrils shrink inside. Around the mouth and the lips, yellowish or bluish round spots develop.
Convulsions are a special characteristic of Cina. The limbs feel tight and jerky. As in Cicuta, the neck of the person arches backwards (Opisthotonus). The fingers turn in. There is a feeling of chilliness and quivering all over the body. When such a patient is patted on his back, he develops headache.
The symptoms of Cina aggravate after taking food. The patient feels very hungry. The child throws up clotted milk. The nature of Cina resembles somewhat with that of Aethusa. Besides the mind, heat affects the stomach and intestines; but the symptoms are expressed a little differently than in Aethusa. In Aethusa, the child vomits milk as soon as he drinks it and is mostly constipated but in Cina, diarrhoea or dysentery is more common. The stools are mixed with a whitish sticky material (mucus). When the infection has become well established, the diarrhoeal stools become green in colour.
In a Cina patient, the sensation of touch and taste are either enhanced or reduced significantly. In other words, they are out of balance. Often, the patient eats one thing and perceives the taste of something else. Ingestion of food, milk or water causes a rumbling noise in the throat. This symptom is also found in Cuprum and Arsenic. Cuprum is also useful for the treatment of worm infestation.
The stools of a patient of Cina are foul-smelling and propulsive, like Podophylum. A peculiar symptom of Cina is that when the child lies prone on his stomach, his diarrhoea stops showing that pressure over the abdomen offers relief. Cina should not be forgotten in the treatment of epilepsy developing after a malarial attack.
In Cina, there is violent coughing in the morning, and one may develop spasms of the throat due to incessant coughing. There is pain in the chest. The attacks of whooping cough also occur. In women, during pregnancy, sudden unexpected news of happiness or grief can precipitate headache or pain in the abdomen which can linger on for quite some time. Cina can be administered to control this kind of suffering. The symptoms of Cina aggravate after food at night and in hot weather.
Antidotes: Camphor, Capsicum
Potency: 30 to 200
by Mirza Tahir Ahmad
CINA
Cina is pre-eminently a child's remedy, but it is suitable for conditions in adults that are seldom thought of. A marked feature running through is touchiness, mental and physical.
Child: The child wants something, but does not know what. The child is aggravated by touch and even by being looked at, and is worse from seeing strangers. The skin is sensitive to touch. The scalp and back of the neck, the shoulders and arms are so sensitive, that it is almost a soreness as if bruised. The hyperesthesia is both mental and physical. The old routine of giving Cina for worms need not go into your notes, for if you are guided by symptoms the patient will be cured and the worms will go.
This patient is disturbed by everything, worse after eating even a moderate meal. The child takes a moderate supper and dreams all night, jerks and twitches in sleep, rouses up in a fright, talks excitedly about what he has dreamed, thinks it is real, and sees dogs, phantoms, and frightful things lie has dreamed about.
The dream is prolonged into the wakeful hours. Screams and trembles, with much anxiety on waking; whines and complains. While this little patient is aggravated by being handled yet he wants to be carried and kept busy, like Chamomilla; although not so intensely irritable as that remedy, yet he must be carried. At first on taking him out of the crib he screams when taken bold of; the first touch aggravates.
This aggravation from touch and sensitiveness runs through the convulsions and fevers, with delirium, glassy eyes, drawn mouth and white ring around the nose and mouth. With a disordered stomach he has convulsions after eating, with the head drawn back and glassy eyes.
The stomach is sour and the child is always spitting up sour milk and belching sour wind. The child smells sour.
The mother says that
"Baby has a worm breath," but the same odor is present when there are no worms. In the convulsions there are loss of consciousness and frothing at the mouth.
Hallucinations of smell, sight and taste, in the delirious state, after taking cold, or on waking from sleep; wakes up with the delusion. Things taste and smell differently. The senses of taste and touch are exaggerated or perverted.
In some cases of internal hydrocephalus, not with enlarged skull but with increase of the fluid in the ventricles and central canal of the spinal cord, the patients take on Cina symptoms. Rolling of the head frequent headaches; sensitiveness to jar; cannot be touched or tapped along the spinal cord without headache always worse in the sun - the head is hot and the feet are cold in the sun.
Cina will cure some of these cases. They cannot stand any kind of disturbance; it produces a convulsion. They cannot be punished because they go into convulsions. If the iter a tertio ad quartum ventriculum is closed they will be incurable, the internal pressure will go on and they will die from it. Such congenital states are incurable.
Dull headache with sensitiveness of the eyes. Headache before and after epileptic attacks and after intermittents. Before and during the headache sensitiveness of the skull. Cina children cannot have the hair combed, and the Cina woman must have her hair down in head and nerve complaints.
There is coldness of the, extremities and also some itching of the skin, but the head symptoms are predominant. From slight disturbances of the mind he cannot digest, and he has diarrhoea. The complaints are aggravated in summer; the heat affects the brain, arrests his functions, and on comes diarrhoea with green, slimy stools or white stools, and the child vomits.
It is pre-eminently brain in Cina; the orders are not received from the brain and so stomach symptoms develop, and worms hatch out. If he is cured the healthy gastric juice will chase the worms out
The child turns his head from side to side.
The pains are sometimes better from turning the head from side to side. You will see this in sensitive women, who must have their hair down; rolling the head relieves, not shaking as in the text, that is too violent.
Eyes: All sorts of colors before the eyes. Objects look yellow. It is useful in sensitive women, sensitive nervous women, who are always worse from using the eyes, and get pain in the head and eyes from sewing. It is like Ruta in that respect, symptoms of eye-strain. It is not so much indicated in young people but more when presbyopla is beginning in middle-aged women, and there is the effort to strain the eyes on fine work or print.
Rubs the eyes and can then see more clearly. On rising from the bed blackness before the eyes; different colors, especially yellow. Strabismus when worms are present, depending really on brain trouble because the worms are dependent upon that.
Face: Face sunken, pallid, wings of nose drawn in. Blue ring or gray streak around the mouth.
"A sure sign of worms," the mother says.
Child rubs its nose with the hands or on the pillow or on the nurse's, shoulder. Child bores into the nose until the blood come. The sickly aspect is striking, but it is representative of brain trouble, central trouble. The brain symptoms are the highest and most important. It frightened, whipped, or scolded, the brain is disturbed and the stomach disordered.
They get indigestion and breed worms; white or blue appearance about the mouth, grinding of the teeth during sleep. Before the child has teeth it has a chewing motion, a side to side movement. Sensitiveness of the teeth to the cold air and cold water.
Bleeding from the mouth, and nose. Inability to swallow liquids; they gurgle down the oesophagus before and after convulsions. When the head symptoms are present, the milk or water gurgles down the oesophagus with a gurgling cluck. This is present in diarrhoea and vomiting with brain symptoms.
Ars. and Cupr. are also prominent in gurgling down the oesophagus when swallowing. Choreic movements extend to the tongue.
The child or adult is not relieved by eating, is still hungry. The stomach is loaded and yet he is hungry. After vomiting you would expect there would be, an aversion to food, but there is in Cina, the same empty, hungry feeling.
When there is gnawing in the stomach after eating, or when the child has taken all it can hold yet cries for the bottle, or empties its stomach by spitting up and vomiting the food and then reaches out whining and crying for more, think of Cina. Shuddering when drinking wine as if it were vinegar.
Abdomen bard and bloated. Very often the Cina child will flop over on its belly and get to sleep in that way. If it is turned on the side it wakes up again. While in the mother's arms it will go to sleep with the abdomen resting on the mother's shoulder, but when she puts it on the side in bed it wakens.
If you had a child with copious, gushing, violently foetid stool, ameliorated by lying on the abdomen, and it would have another stool if lying any other way, Podoph. would be the remedy. That would not be Cina. The Cina stool is not very copious, and often white.
Gagging cough in the morning. Short, hacking cough at night. Spasmodic cough. Whooping cough.
Oversensitiveness to touch; trembling, spasms, chorea. Spasmodic yawning. Child cannot sleep unless on the belly or in constant motion.
by James Tyler Kent