DIGITALIS PURPUREA

DIGITALIS PURPUREA

(Foxglove)

Dig.
Used for diseases involving the heart, particularly with a weak, irregular, or slow pulse, and external or internal dropsy. Treats myocardial weakness and dilation, with the primary indication being compensation failure, especially in auricular fibrillation. Notable for slow pulse when lying down, which becomes irregular when sitting up. Effective for auricular flutter and fibrillation after rheumatic fever, heart block, and very slow pulse. Symptoms of organic heart disease include great weakness, faintness, cold skin, irregular breathing, cardiac irritability, and eye issues after tobacco use. Also indicated for jaundice due to liver induration and hypertrophy, often associated with heart disease. Symptoms include a faint, dying feeling, cyanosed face, and cardiac muscular failure with asystole. It stimulates heart muscles, enhances systole force, and prolongs systole. Other signs include exhaustion from minor effort and collapse.

Mind: Despondency, fearfulness, anxiety about the future, dull senses, epigastric shocks, melancholia, lethargy, and a slow pulse.

Head: Vertigo when walking or rising, with cardiac and hepatic issues. Sharp frontal pain extending to the nose after consuming cold water or ice cream. Head heaviness, bluish face, confusion, fullness, noises in the head, cracking sounds during naps, and blue tongue and lips.

Eyes: Blue eyelids, dark spots like flies before the eyes, altered perception of green shades, objects appearing green and yellow, mydriasis, red and swollen lid margins, morning agglutination (blepharitis), retinal detachment, dim vision (amaurosis), irregular pupils, and diplopia.

Stomach: Sweet taste with constant salivation, excessive nausea unrelieved by vomiting, faintness, stomach weakness, burning extending to the esophagus, forehead pain after cold drinks or ice cream, faintness, and vomiting from motion. Discomfort from small food amounts or even sight or smell of food, epigastric tenderness, copious salivation, and neuralgic stomach pain unrelated to food intake.

Abdomen: Pain on the left side, in the descending colon and under false ribs, severe pain, abdominal aorta pulsations, epigastric constriction, enlarged and painful liver (jaundice).

Stool: White, chalk-like, ashy stools, diarrhea during jaundice.

Urinary: Continuous urging, dark, hot, burning urine with sharp pain at the bladder neck, worse at night, suppressed, ammoniacal, turbid, urethritis, phimosis, strangury, fullness after urination, burning, and constriction. Brick-dust sediment.

Male: Nocturnal emissions with genital weakness post-coitus, hydrocele, scrotum like a bladder, gonorrhea, balanitis with prepuce edema, and dropsical genital swelling.

Female: Labor-like pains in the abdomen and back before menses, uterine hemorrhage.

Respiratory: Desire for deep breaths, irregular and difficult breathing, deep sighing, cough with sore chest, sweetish expectoration, senile pneumonia, chest weakness, dyspnea, constant deep breath desire, compressed lung feeling (asthma), chronic bronchitis, passive lung congestion with bloody sputum from failing myocardium, and inability to talk. Hemoptysis with a weak heart.

Heart: Movement causes violent palpitations, sensation of ceasing heartbeat with movement, frequent heart stitches, irregular heart due to mitral disease, slow pulse, cyanosis, pulse inequality, sensation of heart standstill, weak and quick pulse with movement, pericarditis with copious exudation, dilated heart with slow, feeble pulse, hypertrophy with dilation, cardiac failure post-fever, cardiac dropsy.

Extremities: Swelling of feet, easily asleep fingers, cold hands and feet, rheumatic joint pain, shiny white joint swelling, muscular debility, nocturnal finger swelling, red hot wire sensation through legs.

Sleep: Starts from sleep in alarm, fearing falling from a height, continuous sleepiness.

Fever: Sudden heat flushes followed by great nervous weakness.

Skin: Deep red erythema, worse on the back, blue distended veins on lids, ears, lips, and tongue, dropsical, itching, and jaundiced.

Modalities: Worse when sitting erect, after meals, and with music. Better when stomach is empty and in open air.

Relationship: Antidotes: Camph., Serpentaria aristolochia. Incompatible: Chin. Compare: Nerium odorum (resembles Dig. in heart symptoms and acts like strychnia on the spinal cord with upper body spasms, palpitations, and strengthened weak heart), Adon., Crat., Kalm., Spig., Liatris spicata. Compare Digitoxinum for marked yellow vision and nausea worsened by champagne. Nitri spiritus dulcis increases Dig. action. Ichthyotoxinum; Eel serum (resembles vipera venom, indicated for insufficient systole, decompensated valvular disease, irregular pulse due to auricular fibrillation, asystole, frequent irregular pulse, dyspnea, scanty urine, enlarged liver, dyspnea, albuminuria, no edema). Convallaria majalis (heart disease with vertigo and digestive issues). Quinidinum (restores normal rhythm in auricular fibrillation, supplements Dig. action, dosage details provided).

Dose: Third to thirtieth attenuation for homeopathic reaction; physiological dosage for palliation. Tincture from fresh plant, 5-20 drops for cardiac stimulation or 1½% infusion, ½-1 ounce for diuretic action. Tincture may be given on sugar or bread, no liquids for 20 minutes before/after. Powdered leaves, ½-2 grains in capsules. Digitoxinum 1/250 grain. Reduce dose as pulse reaches 80 beats/min and normal rhythm is restored. Cut dose further if urinary output suddenly falls.