Mirza Tahr Ahmad James Tyler Kent
In Veratrum Album, the patient feels extremely cold from head to toe. It is one of the most effective treatments of cholera. Dr. Hahnemann advises its use even before the onset of a cholera epidemic. In the effectiveness against cholera, it is comparable to Camphor and Cuprum. In Veratrum Album, the stools are exuberant, rendering the patient extremely weak.
A prominent feature of Veratrum is that the patient feels extremely cold yet is drenched in cold sweats from head to toe. Similar symptoms are also found in Camphor, though the stools are scanty. In Veratrum Album, the stools are watery and exuberant, causing severe dehydration which may even lead to death.
Cramps in the legs are an essential feature of Veratrum Album, Camphor and Cuprum as well as of cholera.
A rather contradictory symptom of Veratrum Album is dryness of the gastro-intestinal tract. It is an extremely effective treatment of diarrhoea, as well as for severe constipation. Severe chronic constipation, associated with a feeling of weakness and cold sweats can well be treated with Veratrum Album. Veratrum Album can still be useful even if the weakness and cold sweats are absent. In severe constipation, Veratrum Album 30 should be used two to three times a day. It gradually softens the abdomen by alleviating the dryness of the intestines. It is recommended however that prior to the treatment with Veratrum Album, severe constipation may better be relieved with an enema or glycerine suppositories. This will soften the dry voluminous stools which are otherwise impossible to pass naturally. Veratrum Album, like Carbo Veg, may also be tried in the treatment of cold sweats associated with severe irreversible shock and impending death.
The Veratrum Album patient happens to be irritable and is easily provoked due to the constant feeling of cold. If he is kept warm all the time, he becomes mellow, showing that the irritability is not his nature.
Some Veratrum Album patients are religious fanatics. They talk loudly and rapidly. At some times, they may be extremely talkative, and at others absolutely silent. During the period of silence, they become extremely depressed and have the tendency to commit suicide. A suicidal tendency is found in many other remedies. In rare instances, Veratrum Album can also be used to treat the suicidal tendency.
Premenstrual tension and sadness in young girls may well be cured with Veratrum Album. If untreated, this condition is likely to result in life-long mental illness. There is no smile left on their faces. The physician should remember well that the feeling of extreme cold is the most important indication for the use of Veratrum Album.
There are many inconsistencies in the constitution of Veratrum Album, such as the fact that the head is not cold even though the rest of the body may be ice-cold. Sometimes, the head feels submerged in ice especially at the scalp and the nape, quite unlike Sulphur. In Sulphur, the top of the head feels burning hot. In a Veratrum Album patient, in spite of feeling extreme cold, the patient likes to drink cold water. Fruits produce gas in the stomach. Despite the feeling of nausea and vomiting, there is a feeling of scraping inside the stomach and the craving for food.
Potency: 30 to 200
by Mirza Tahir Ahmad
VERATRUM ALBUM
You will be astonished at the wonderful coldness running through this remedy.
Hardly a group of symptoms will arise without this accompanying coldness. Coldness of discharges, coldness of the body. You would also wonder at the remarkable prostration attending the various groups of symptoms, complete relaxation and exhaustion, coldness. Profuse sweat, vomiting and diarrhea.
Profuse watery discharges. These conditions occur without apparent provocation. In cholera or cholera morbus, it seems that the fluids run out of the body.
Lies in bed, relaxed prostrated, cold to the finger-tips, with corresponding blueness, fairly purple; lips cold and blue, countenance pinched and shrunken; great sensation of cold ness as if the blood were ice-water; scalp cold; forehead covered with cold sweat; headache and exhaustion; coldness in spots over the body; extremities cold as death. Full of cramps; looks as if he would die.
This state comes out during the menses, during colic with nausea, with mania and violent delirium, with headache, with violent inflammations. Is it any wonder that Hahnemann predicted that Veratrum, Camphor, and Cuprum would become remedies in the cure of cholera; he saw in their nature the ability to cure.
He saw the similitude. In cases of this sort which are characterized by superabundance of cramps, Cuprum is the simillimum. For those with coldness and blueness and scanty sweat, vomiting, and purging, Camphor is the remedy. These are called "dry cholera;" they sink down and die without exhaustive discharges. In proportion as there are coldness, blueness and scanty discharges, Camphor is indicated. In proportion as copiousness, blueness, and coldness are present, Veratrum is indicated. Secale has something of cholera in it. Podo. has exhaustive stools. Ars. anxious restlessness.
Mind: The mental symptoms are marked by violence and destructiveness he wants to destroy, to tear something; he tears the clothes from the body.
Always wants to be busy, to carry on his daily work. A cooper who was suffering from the Veratrum insanity would pile up chairs on top of one another. When asked what he was doing, he replied that he was piling up staves. When not occupied with this he was tearing his clothes, or praying for hours on his knees, and so loud that he could be heard blocks away.
Exalted state of religious frenzy, believes he is the risen Christ screams and screeches until he is blue in the face; head cold as ice, cold sweat, reaches out and exhorts to repentance. Exhorts to repent, preaches, howls, sings obscene songs, exposes the person. Fear and the effects of fear; fear of death and of being damned; imagines the world is on fire.
"Mania with desire to cut and tear everything, especially the clothes, with lewdness and lascivious talk.
Puerperal mania and convulsions, with violent cerebral congestion; bluish and bloated face; protruding eyes; wild shrieks, with disposition to bite and tear.
Loquacity, he talks rapidly.
She is inconsolable over a fancied misfortune; runs around the room howling and screaming or sits brooding, wailing and weeping."
Alternate states of brooding, screaming, and screeching. A few such remedies would empty our insane asylums, especially of recent cases.
Insanity is curable if there are no incurable results of disease. Full of despair and hopelessness with approaching insanity.
"Despair of his recovery, attempts suicide."
Insane people are not hopeless, those approaching insanity are but after they become insane, they think that everybody is crazy except themselves. Those bowed down by great grief and despair are likely to go into a state of violent mania. Veratrum carries them through the state of despair.
"Melancholia, head hangs down, sits brooding in silence."
Young girls go on for years with menstrual difficulties, and preceding each menstrual nisus is a state of despair; never smiles, the world seems blue, everything is dark; these are preparing for a marked state of insanity.
Veratrum is a remedy that would keep many women out of the insane asylum, especially those with uterine troubles. Girls at puberty suffer with dysmenorrhoea, hysterical mental states, diarrhea, and vomiting. During the menses they become cold as death, lips blue, extremities cold and blue, dreadful pains, sensation of sinking, mania to kiss everybody, hysteria with coldness at the menstrual period, copious sweat, vomiting, and diarrhoea, etc.
Head: Veratrum has troublesome headaches, neuralgic, of great violence, accompanied with coldness, vomiting of bile and blood, great exhaustion, profuse sweat.
Vomiting and retching after the stomach is empty; spasmodic retching and cramping of the stomach; you can see the effort to empty the stomach and every little while a mouthful of bile comes up.
Violent rush of blood to the head, congestion of the head with coldness of the extremities. Head feels as if packed with ice, feels as if ice lay on the vertex and occiput (Calc.). Tension in the head as if the membranes were drawn tighter about the brain; compressive pains.
I remember a farmer who consulted me in the Summer. He had strange sensation when he drank water, as if it ran down the outside and did not go down the oesophagus. It was so marked that he I requested his friends to see if it did not run down the outside. Veratrum 2 M. cured him. No remedy has produced that sensation, but I figured it out by analogy.
Violent thirst for cold water and for ice.
"All fruits cause painful distension of the stomach."
"Vomiting forcible and excessive.
Nausea with weakness; is obliged to lie down; hysterical cramps in the stomach; cramps in the muscles of the abdomen like colic.
Gastric catarrh, great weakness, cold, sudden sinking."
Pains: Full of rheumatic and neuralgic pains in the extremities; worse from the warmth of the bed; they drive him out of bed at night into the cold room and be must walk the floor for relief.
You would naturally, suppose that heat would be comforting; so it is at times to the abdomen and other parts when there is coldness, but it aggravates the pains (Merc.).
"Painful paralytic weakness in the limbs."
"Chill and heat alternating, now here, now there, on single parts.
Internal sensation of chilliness running from head to toes coming on when drinking."
Many of the complaints of Veratrum are aggravated when drinking.
Burning while in cold sweat. In the chronic mental troubles, the skin is dusky and dry with the exception of that on the forehead. But in acute complaints where physical symptoms predominate, as in dysmenorrhoea, acute insanity, etc., there is profuse sweat.
Gnawing hunger in spite of nausea and vomiting. Empty, all-gone feeling in the abdomen after stool.
by James Tyler Kent