Materia medica

SEPIA

SEPIA DIOSCORIDES used the ink from cuttle fish for hair loss.cuttle fish ink has long been used as a pigment in artists paints.medicinally,it was used in…

Dr. Shweta Bairagi · 20 Jun 2011

SEPIADIOSCORIDES used the ink from cuttle fish for hair loss.cuttle fish ink has long been used as a pigment in artists paints.medicinally,it was used in ancient times to treat gonorrhoea and kidney stones.it is an excellent remedy for women complaints.REMEDY PROFILE:Common name cuttlefishSource found mainly in the mediterranean seaParts used PURE pigments in the skin.KEY USESwomen's complaints,especially conditions related to as hormonal imbalance,such as premenstrual syndrome and the menopause.ailments accompanied by exhaustion.Sepia is suited to tall, slim women with narrow pelvis and lax fibers and musclesPHYSICAL SYMPTOMS: Affects venous circulation and female pelvic organs. Uterus prolapse on standing , pressure and bearing down as if everything would protrude from pelvis. Symptoms settle in the back. Faints easily- when kneeling, if hot then cold. Headache - pain over the left eye, better motion, worse fasting, menses. Fever blisters about the lips. Falling of hair. Yellowness of face, yellow saddle across upper part of cheeks.Very vhilly patient.Aversion to bread,fat and rich food,smell of food,meat ,milk,salt food,cigar.DREAMS Amorous,anxious,threats of rape,rats.APPETITE Canine hunger or no appetite.SLEEP Sleepiness in morning.twitching of limbs.CAUSATIONexposure to coldlaundary workalcohaltobaccoafter eatinggoing upstairsafter coituschange of weatherfrom cold airmilkacidsfatsbefore thunderstorm.THE ADAPTABILITY OF SEPIA IS POOR SO NORMAL INPUT BECOMES EVEN ADVERSE DISTURBING,EMOTIONAL,INTELLECTUAL OR PHYSICAL LEVELS.HENCE IN EMOTIONAL LEVEL WE FIND A PATHY,INDIFFERENCE,LISTLESSNESS AND IN PHYSICAL LEVEL WE FIND THAT ALL THE ACTIVITIES ARE SLOW AND SLUGGISH.Stasis comes into mind when studying Sepia; stasis which comes because of some action on the dynamic plane. On the physical level we find Stasis of the uterus, prolapsus of the uterus. Muscles become weak because of the loss of control by the autonomic nervous system. Sense of fullness in the rectum. Constipation without urging. Empty feeling in the stomach, a kind of gnawing hunger. Aversion to food, even the smell. Constant nausea, worse in the morning ( morning sickness during pregnancy).She eats and eats and can't get a full feeling. Sepia has low blood pressure.. In the emotional state we also have the same idea of stasis. Stillness of emotions. Feeling without emotion. Can't be stimulated to have joy or emotion by any stimulus.. One of the strongest features of the Sepia patient is found in the mind, the state of the affections. To a great extent, the remedy seems to abolish the ability to feel natural love, to be affectionate.Doesn't express jealousy directly. Destroys objects the partner lovesSepia will not express jealousy directly. Sepia doesn't say it directly. Instead, it tries to destroy beloved things. Sepia understands very quickly where someone has his weak points. An absence of all joy, inability to realize that things are real; all things seem strange; no affection for the delightful things of life; no joy; life has nothing in it for her. She is worse in company yet dreads to be alone; and when she is in company she is spiteful, in the midst of her dullness of mind she is spiteful; she vents her spite on those she loves best.Immediately finds the weak spot of others, hurts them verballySepia is hard and cutting, sarcastic, penetrating, has no sense of limits of how far it can go. They don't care if they hurt someone. They are highly intelligen t and have a penetrating mind. They can see through people and can remain unattached (pathological detachment). But they are not intentionally malicious. Their detachment makes them very acute observers. If you spend some time with a Sepia person, he or she will detect all your weak points.Sepia is spiteful. Everyone is spiteful, but Sepia will find the point exactly where you feel the pain, and she will hit you there.Sepia will not directly fight or have strong emotions or strong reactions. But it can become angry and irritable easily. It is a striking feature of this remedy that the affections are stilled; all things seem strange; she does not realize; she may even be estranged and turned aside from those she loves. This is on the border land of insanity; it is quite a different state of affairs from that when a woman abused by her husband knows in her rational mind that she does not love him.Sepia is low profile, low key in its expression. The patients will complain that natural emotions that should be there are not there any more. For example, to love your children is a natural emotion, but even that goes away. This situation will come as a result of shocks from traumatic experiences of the emotions. All the time there is an internal pressure. They feel that the internal organs will go out so they feel better sitting cross-legged. With this support the intestines feel better. In this state of Sepia, you can say it is a remedy that is pathologically detached from the ones she loves. There is no real attachment. These feelings of love which connect two people are not there.So love is a natural feeling, but it contains within itself the possibility of pain. So the most dangerous thing you can do is to love with attachment. That entails the possibility of pain to a very great degree. Sepia understands that and she does not do it. She prefers to sit back and look upon a relationship in a detached manner. Eventually she cannot love anymore.Most probably the pathology of Sepia is formed in an individual who has been disappointed. This excitable and sensitive individual came into contact with a certain stress situation, regresses back and collapses into Sepia. It is a collapse of the emotional level, leading to a collapse of all three levels.The idea of collapse. The uterus loses its power of contraction. When a woman has an orgasm, normally there is contraction. Sepia cannot have an orgasm. Sepia has a hysterical diathesis.Breaks out in spells of weeping, is sad one minute, gentle, yielding, and in another she is disagreeable, excitable, obstinate. You do not know what she is going to do next. She says and does strange things, makes errors, no dependence can be placed on her; no mental endurance; no affection for her family; whole Mind weak and disordered, not when there is fever, but it is a chronic manifestation of psora or sycosis.Fear of ghosts; that something unusual will happen; atmosphere full of figures, not seen, but she knows that they are there; departed friends or other forms and very often in accordance with religions belief.Never happy unless annoying some one; relating her grievances; sarcastic; insulting fear of insanity, poverty.Sepia individuals are tired physically, mentally and emotionally. It can be a man who was very active and then becomes less and less active and less and less interested in sex. In women it becomes an aversion to sex. Anything to do with sexual matters makes her feel nauseous.If she is married and goes into a Sepia state, she cannot handle it. The husband wants sex and finally she pretends, and it is a torture. I have treated women who pretended for years that they were enjoying sex when actually they had an aversion to sex. Even a caress disturbs them. If some sexual connotation is put into the caress, they are repulsed. If the caress is fatherly, it is acceptable.Sepia will usually cry during consultation. She has spells of weeping and all her suffering comes to her mind. In that emotional state, the best thing for her is to isolate herself.The skin of the face is sallow and doughy, looks as if the muscles were flabby; you will seldom see Sepia indicated in the face that shows sharp lines of intellect; a person who has been thinking a long time has the lines and sharp angles of a thinking person, of one who possesses will and intellect.The face is generally puffed, often smooth and rounded and marked by an absence of intellectual lines and angles.This patient is anemic, pale lips and ears, pale, sallow face, fingers and hands become shrivelled, sallow, waxy, bloodless..The bowels lose their ability to expel their contents and the patient is always constipated; constipation during pregnancy; slow, difficult stool; stool like sheep dung. Always has a feeling of a lump in the rectum, never able to empty the bowels; though he goes to stool there is always a sensation of a lump remaining in the rectum.Another feature present in most Sepia patients is a gnawing hunger, seldom satisfied; even though he eats plentifully he feels a gnawing, empty, hungry feeling in the stomach, not relieved by eating or relieved only for a moment. This is striking especially when associated with the constipation and the peculiar state of the affections.When these symptoms are associated with prolapsus, Sepia will certainly cure, no matter how bad the prolapsus has been or what kind of displacement there is. It is the result of the state of relaxation of all the internal parts as if they were let down, wants a bandage to hold the parts up or wants to place the hand or napkin on the parts; a funneling sensation, better sitting down and crossing the limbs.Lady Vomits up food and after emptying the stomach of its contents, vomits or eructates a milky fluid; morning vomiting, first of food, then a milky substance. Do not confound this with vomiting of milk. Some medicines vomit milk alone and Sepia does this also.Loss of taste and smell. The smell of cooking food, meat and broth causes nausea. Catarrh of the chest with thick, tenacious, yellow expectoration, accompanied with a violent cough, retching, gagging, violent prolonged retching, vomiting; dry cough and yet there is rattling. Whooping cough; asthmatic cough with retching and loss of urine.The cough is a violent one.Cough during first sleep . Tuberculosis. Quick consumption after a suppressed gonorrhea; if given soon enough it will check.Eruptions of the skin.It has cured zona, and herpetic eruptions of the labia and foreskin. Vesicular eruptions in the axilla, upon the tip-s of the elbows; eruptions that pile up in great crusts on the elbows; thick crusts form upon the joints; eruptions between the fingers; moist eruptions that pour out a watery fluid, or thick, yellow, purulent fluid.Sepia produces the induration that belongs to some forms of eruption like epithelioma; indurations will form on the lips and crack and bleed. The scaly eruption that looks like epithelioma is especially Sepia. It is indicated in lumps and lupoid formation on the skin, where there is infiltration; sometimes healing from the centre to form a ring; this is a typical Sepia condition.The headaches are nervous, bilious, periodic, violent, involving the whole head; congestive.Generally better lying down, keeping perfectly quiet; worse from ordinary motion, but relieved by violent motion, like most Sepia symptoms in general; she can walk off her sufferings. Stasis of the brain, slowness of thought, mind will not work and, mental labor aggravates the headache. The Sepia symptoms are worse in the open air unless combined with continued motion, better from exercise in the open air and worse in the house. The headache is worse from stooping, motion, coughing, going up stairs, jarring, light, turning the head, lying on the back and from thinking, but continued, hard exercise relieves, as does a tight bandage, and the application of heat, though worse in a warm room.There are Sepia headaches that particularly affect the occiput, worse in the morning; great pain through the eyes and temples; relieved by sweat, worse on beginning to move; throbbing felt on stooping, worse on going upstairs.The ears discharge thick, yellow pus; offensive.Dry coryza especially of left nostril, following of large lumps of yellow or green mucus or yellow-green crusts with blood from the nose."Toothache and neuralgia from taking cold.Sensation of a lump in the throat (like Lach.), but the latter is better from swallowing. (The same in worm troubles indicates Cina.) Uneasiness of the collar and corsets like Lach. Worse in the first, sleep like Lach.Sepia brings out many things in connection with the appetites, thirst, eating, drinking and stomach, etc.The Sepia patient is generally conscious of a spoiled stomach, sour and bitter eructations of food, of mucus and bile, sour and bitter vomiting of food and mucus; all-gone, hungry, empty feeling in the stomach sometimes not relieved by eating.At times a gnawing pain, a sinking, a gnawing hunger which is not always relieved by eating. Almost constant nausea, especially in the morning, nausea and eructations and vomiting of milky fluid; when the stomach is empty, vomiting, spitting up, eructations of milky fluid.Aversion to food, to the smell of food cooking, like Colch. and Ars. Acrid, burning eructations; heartburn; rancid eructations, excoriating the throat; pyrosis which is another form of eructation; acrid, sour fluids burning all the way up, causing contraction, tingling, smarting.This is peculiar, for vomiting usually relieves the distress. The Sepia stomach becomes like a leather bag, fill it up and the food comes up just as eaten or at times sour or mixed with bile. Inflammation of the liver, enlargement with jaundice, pain, fullness, distension, distress in the region of the liver.Chronic diarrhea, stools jelly-like, lumpy; alternating diarrhoea and constipation; a great amount of mucus with the stools, whether constipated or diarrheic; hard stool covered with a great quantity of jellylike mucus.In Sepia there is much offensiveness; the odor of the stool is unusual, loose stools horribly offensive, foetid; the sweat is foetid, the urine is foetid."The stool has a putrid, sourish, foetid smell, expelled suddenly and the whole of it at once." There is always a sense of fullness in the rectum after stool; ineffectual straining and sweating in the effort because the patient is weak and exhausted.Sepia has the ineffectual urging like Nux. Soreness of the anus. Expulsion of ascarides. Oozing moisture from the rectum, soreness between the buttocks.Hemorrhoids soon form when the rectum is so packed with feces, and they give additional trouble.There is much urinary trouble; involuntary urination as soon as the child goes to sleep at night.Frequent, constant urging to urinate with milky urine that burns like fire and after standing a while a milky, grayish deposit will form which is hard to wash off the vessel. Bloody urine scanty and suppressed, great pain in the kidneys and bladder with great bearing down; sudden desire with tenesmus as if the uterus would come out. Sudden desire to urinate with cutting like knives and chill all over the body, if unable to pass it, as a lady in company.The Sepia patient aborts at the third month. All sorts of ulcerative conditions, displacements, dragging down and relaxations. Retained Placenta. Sub involution, all the pelvic organs are tired and weak. Metrorrhagia during the climacteric or during pregnancy, especially at the fifth and seventh months.Both male and female have aversion to the opposite sex.A woman who has been normal in her relations with her husband brings forth a child, and then the thought of sexual relations causes nausea and irritability.The menstrual symptoms are of all sorts, no particular derangement characterizes Sepia. Sepia comes in when the woman ought to menstruate when the child ceases to nurse; sometimes the child dies and menses ought to be established but do not appear, and the mother runs down, pines away; Sepia will establish the flow.Gonorrhea after the acute symptoms have subsided. Urine loaded with urates, stains everything red and often excoriates, very foetid, associated with prostatitis.Warts on the genitals; Sepia is useful when these organs have been overused and take on such an appearance. Impotence in the male, loss of sexual feeling in the female.There is a great amount of soreness in the back, the spine aches all the way down. Pressure on the spine reveals sore places, spinal irritation.Aching in the back mostly from the loins to the coccyx, often coming on from sitting, and ameliorated from violent exercise. A peculiar feature is amelioration from hard pressure. The patient commonly puts a book low down on the chair and presses the back against it. Sepia does not seem to get the amelioration from lying upon the back as Natrum mur. does. Stooping aggravates the backache.The sleep is full of dreams and distress; cannot sleep upon the left side because of palpitation of the heart.GENERALITIES: Sensitive to COLD AIR , lack of vital heat. INDIFFERENT TO SEX . UPWARD DIRECTION OF SYMPTOMS . Sensation of 'emptiness', all gone feeling, better by eating . BALL SENSATION in inner parts.MODALITIES: Amelioration: ' Violent motion, warmth, pressure, hot application, crossing or drawing limbs up, cold drinks, bath, evening, eating. Aggravation: Cold, sexual excesses, pregnancy, morning and evening, kneeling and stooping, fasting, 2 - 4 p.m., 3 - 5 p.m., sea, menses, loss of fluids, left side.