Thuja Occidentalis

Lecture

The general appearance of the Thuja subject, if he has a characteristic picture, is that of a waxy, shiny face, it' looks? as if it had been tearing, burning, bursting pains, as if the parts were being torn out, makes her cry aloud, she goes into a hysterical state. This a very strong Thuja group. It has the opposite of Zinc, and Lachesis, for in these, relief comes with the flow.

Many women suffer from grumbling pains in the ovaries all the time, they have a sense of the organ, which they should not feel ; pain from taking cold or in change of weather ; the increase of the pain in the left ovary is the first sign ; sometimes the pain is so severe that the right one suffers apparently from sympathy. Where the ovaries have been affected for some time there will be mental symptoms, a most violent irritability, jealousy, quarrelsomeness, ugliness. This irritability is likely to be shown towards individuals about the house, toward the husband and the mother ; she is yet able to control herself among strangers and the doctor may not be able to find out about it, because she has in her nature a disposition to cheat ; she wants to be alone and takes upon herself fixed ideas, that she is pregnant, or that an animal is in her bowels, she feels the motion of a child’s arm, thinks she is followed, or that someone is walking beside her, thinks that soul and body are separated.

Now, these are fixed ideas, and there is no use trying to reason them out of her. It seems to her that she is very delicate, that she is made of glass and that she will break. The idea is that she will break, and not that she is transparent. Associated with this condition, we have violent, intense, tearing headaches, tearing in the eye, ameliorated by heat. The eye-ball pains are better from heat and the rest are better in the cool open air.

Pain localized in small spots. A nail driven in the head, side of head and forehead, like Ignatia and Anacardium, These pains are intensified into tearing pains, and affect the eye-ball, making it so sore that it can hardly be touched ; worse from heat and worse from lying down ; worse in a warm room and better in the open air.

Rheumatic head symptoms are worse in damp air. They are worse from sour things and also from stimulating and exciting things.

Crude drugs do not impress the vital force so lastingly, but an individual who is thoroughly sensitive and properly sensitive, as sensitive as contagion, then if you undertake to prove by giving it night and morning, you will rivet upon him a life-long miasm.

If you have given a medicine, wait for the symptoms to come and go in the natural manner. To a great extent, this is the tendency with sycosis, the tendency is rather outward.

We see in the proving of a drug what we see in disease. When a gonorrhoea is contracted, it goes through the prodromal period and then comes the disease, which, if let alone, has in its nature a tendency to eradicate itself from the economy, and then the patients do not suffer from lasting conditions.

In the old school, they always suppress the discharge, and there are those in the new school who do little better.

The frequent repetition by which one is exposed, would not increase the gonorrhoea itself, because the susceptibility is satisfied.

The taking of more of the drug to prove it does not do so much harm, provided the one who is directing the proving realizes when the symptoms begin to rise, and then stops the drug. Now if we go on with the proving by repeating the doses after the symptoms come on, we force the drug into the economy when he is already poisoned, and by this means we get a confusion in the symptoms, the drug disease engrafted upon that individual for life.

Many of the provings of Thuja give us that kind of confusion, so that we see only now and then symptoms cropping out that are striking ; in fact, the great bulk of the Thuja provings has been wasted, because there is so much confusion in the great number of symptoms, while the earlier provings brought out many of the characteristics, the Vienna provings, to a great extent, confused the image of Thuja. So that, by clinical experience only, we have been able to draw out the finer features of Thuja. It requires more than a school boy to do that. The new provings must be carried on in a different manner.

Thuja has some striking bowel symptoms ; gushing, watery morning diarrhoea, like water coming out of a bunghole.

There is also a general catarrhal condition running through the body ; catarrh of the nose, cars andkhest. In the catarrh of the chest it produces an intense hacking cough, with expectoration in the morning of greenish mucus, sometimes a copious expectoration.

It is often suited to old cases of pneumonia, in such individuals as have suppressed gonorrhoea, fig-wart gonorrhoea.

The kidneys and urinary symptoms are also striking ; congestion and inflammation of the kidneys, sharp pain in the kidneys ; burning urine ; inflammation of the bladder and urethra that is not gonorrhoeal ; pus from the bladder ; paralysis of the bladder, must wait a long time for the urine to start ; retention of urine, continuous urging to urinate, tearing in the urethra, feeling as if the urine were constantly running along the urethra, like Kali bich, and Petros.

In the urethral disease of sycotic character, Thuja leads all other remedies. In the non-sycotic variety, Cannabis sativa is sufficient, but those cases that have proved to be sycotic Cann, sat. left uncured, it ameliorated the burning during and after urination and the thick yellowish-green discharge, but some other remedy had always to follow, when they were shown to be sycotic. It is not so with Thuja, because it is capable of finishing the case.

In the most violent cases, with bloody urine, extreme salacity, great torment, bloody, watery discharge from the urethra and bladder, no rest day or night, Cantharis comes in, it is capable of finishing the case in a few days. Such a patient must be in excellent health, which is not generally the case. They are drinking men and smokers. Tobacco is one of the most troublesome things you will run across, many cases will not recover promptly if they are tobacco users and great smokers, wine drinkers or convivial men, they run around a good deal and are high livers and with such you have a slow case on hand.

With the system so broken down from high living, you may not get a decided curative action until you have forced him to abandon his way of living. Put him on light diet, diminish his smoking, get rid entirely of the drinking, and put him on a perfectly bland living. This is the first thing. If he is a man of family we have to contend with great mental distress, and not less so if a woman. So it may well be said, that usually the sycotic miasm is a troublesome one to l)begin with and one that will bother the young physician.

You cannot substitute the right method for a wrong one, which will make him a cripple for life.

The suppression of the disease, as usually tried, cannot be thought of by the sincere and earnest homoeopath.

If he wants it checked suddenly, let him go somewhere else, but warn him what will take place, and that he will have untold disease and suffering.