Psorinum — Homeopathic Remedy Profile

Psorinum is a nosode, prepared by Hering from the sero-purulent contents of scabies vesicles. It has no botanical or mineral kingdom; its origin is diseased tissue itself. Prescribed in potencies from 30C upward, it meets what H. C. Allen called the psoric constitution: the patient whose reaction fails, whose skin will not clear, whose recovery from acute illness stalls, and around whom hangs a smell no washing removes.

At a Glance

Source and Preparation

He later described a further form as a salt derived from a product of psora. Both are nosodes — remedies made from morbid product rather than from a healthy substance — and both reach the pharmacy only in potentised form. There is no mother tincture of Psorinum in any classical sense, and no herbal register. Every prescription is dynamic. Readers who hear the word "scabies" sometimes ask whether the remedy carries the scabies mite; from 30C upward, nothing material remains, and what acts is the dynamic preparation, prescribed on the totality of the case. Absence of crude substance explains why toxicity does not apply here, though it never explains how the remedy acts.

The Essence of Psorinum

Kent placed Psorinum beside Sulphur in the psoric group and taught that where Sulphur is hot, Psorinum is cold: exceedingly, absurdly cold, wanting the head covered in hot weather, wanting a fur cap in summer, wearing wool it cannot bear next to the skin. Hahnemann's psora, the oldest and deepest of the miasms, describes the ground of chronic disease: the ground of itch, of eruptions that disappear only to return in another form, of recurrences that outlast the strongest palliation. Psorinum is the nosode of that ground.

The organism's central expression is failure of reaction. The patient does not recover — from acute illness, from an eruption suppressed by ointment, from a hemorrhage, from menopause, from a shock the constitution should have absorbed and did not. Well-chosen remedies pass through without effect. Sulphur has been given and given again; nothing moves. Then Psorinum, and the case unlocks. Allen recorded this as the remedy's precise indication: chronic cases in which the simillimum will not act, and in which Sulphur seems indicated but fails.

Around that center gather the other keynotes. A filthy body odor that persists after washing. Offensive discharges from every mucous surface — the otorrhea horribly offensive, the stool with a penetrating putrid odor going through the whole house, the sweat and leucorrhea with the filthy smell. Skin that will not heal, that oozes and crusts, that itches until the patient scratches it raw and then despairs. And the paradoxical sense of well-being before an attack: the migraine patient who feels unusually clear-headed and hungry in the hour before the headache comes down like a hammer.

Clinical Portrait

Mind and Temperament

Confusion of thought. Difficult thinking. A memory that refuses. Vanishing of thoughts after over-lifting. A businessman fears his business will fail while the books show it prosperous. Anxiety attaches to salvation, to fire, to being alone, to becoming insane. Restless during a thunderstorm, and restless for days before the storm arrives. Weeping at night. Constant thoughts of dying. In severe cases the suicidal tendency Murphy records enters: horrid thoughts, hopelessness, despair of recovery, and the peculiar despair that comes from itching skin that will not stop.

At menopause the picture darkens further. Great depression, abdominal complaints "with high degree of ill-humor," a forsaken quality that makes the woman's own life and the lives around her intolerable. Beneath it lies the dependable Psorinum fear: fear of poverty, fear of the future, sense of depletion. The patient feels herself poor while the account books show otherwise.

The children are just as distinct. Sick babies who will not sleep by day or by night, but worry and fret and cry, or reverse the picture entirely — good and playful all day and then screaming through the whole night. Older children are peevish, self-willed to the point of tormenting the household, easily startled, irritable on waking.

Skin

Skin is where Psorinum has always been recognized, and where the potency register first sharpens. Murphy's clinical entries for dermatitis, eczema, psoriasis, scabies and ringworm all describe the constitutional case treated at 30C and above, not a topical or dilute preparation. The picture is unmistakable. Unhealthy skin with an abnormal tendency to eruption. Sebaceous glands secreting excessively. The whole surface dirty, rough, scabby, greasy. Eruptions that break out in the folds. Herpetic eruption on the scalp and around the bends of the joints. Eczema behind the ears with an offensive discharge that excoriates the nape of the neck. Sores refuse to heal. Bruises and scars mark easily and stay.

The itching is what drives the patient to Psorinum. Intolerable, worse from the heat of the bed, worse from wool clothing, worse at night — the classical night itch of scabies, which is the disease from which Hering drew the remedy. Scratching brings blood but not relief. Rubbing the skin raises small vesicles. Patients cannot bear their clothes or their bedcovers. Around the hairline the trouble is worst. When suppressed by ointment the eruption withdraws inward and the case worsens: headache appears, or backache after a suppressed eruption, or asthma, or the mental despair that turns a psoric child into a peevish invalid.

Eruptions typically disappear in summer and return in winter. This seasonal rhythm is a strong confirmation. Where it holds, Psorinum will often clear the case that local applications and even well-selected constitutional remedies have not.

Head

Migraines with visual disturbance beforehand, black spots, blue stars, flickering, the objects trembling and going dark, followed by a hammering pain across the front of the head as if from a heavy blow. Nosebleed relieves. So does eating, and sometimes the arrival of a suppressed menstrual flow. During the attack the patient is very hungry, ravenously so, and if fed the pain eases while blood rushes to the head afterwards.

The scalp itself is a Psorinum territory. Humid eruption, hair matted with the discharge, boils and pustules across the head, dry lusterless hair, tangled hair, and — pathognomonic to the older prescribers — plica polonica, matted felted hair impossible to untangle. Head lice. Spots of white skin with a white lock of hair growing from them. Scurfy eruption in children, dandruff that oozes and crusts.

Respiratory and Allergic

Hay fever returning irregularly every year, or returning with the almanac's precision every August. Watery acrid discharge. Recurring common cold from the slightest draft. Chronic catarrh dropping from the posterior sinuses. Nose sensitive when the air is inhaled.

For asthma the position is characteristic: worse sitting up, better lying down with the arms flung wide, "as if crucified," the same posture Pulsatilla assumes for the same relief. Dyspnea when standing in open air; the patient wants to go home and lie down. In pneumonia the recovery is tedious. In chronic bronchitis the shortness of breath is severe and the cough returns every winter.

Digestion and Nutrition

The Psorinum stomach reveals itself in one of the remedy's most reliable keynotes: sudden gnawing hunger, in the middle of the night, that will not let the patient sleep until they have eaten. Ravenous appetite through the day, and still the patient loses weight. Malnutrition. Low blood sugar. This is the "hungry Psorinum" both Allen and Kent drew, whose canine appetite precedes the headache or the fever, and who feels unusually well in the hour before the attack.

Aversion to pork. Desire for beer, for acids. Belching that tastes and smells like rotten eggs and fills the room. Flatus with the same carrion smell. Stools horribly putrid, dark, watery, gushing, worse at night and towards morning; Murphy notes the odor "penetrating the whole house." Chronic morning diarrhea that is urgent and offensive. In infants the cholera infantum picture; in older children, fetid diarrhea during dentition. In elderly women, hemorrhoids that bleed and burn, anal fissures that crack and bleed.

Female Sphere

Menopause is a Psorinum landmark. Abdominal complaints with ill-humor, great depression, menstrual disorders in the years around the change, dysmenorrhea running into the last periods. Fetid leucorrhea, gushing, lumpy, with violent sacral pain, backache and debility. Ulcers on the labia. Nipples red, breasts swollen and painful, pimples around the nipples that itch and burn. Obstinate vomiting during pregnancy. After a miscarriage the flow starts again the moment the woman gets on her feet.

Male Sphere

Offensive genitals. Chronic gonorrhea with a painless yellow-staining discharge from the urethra. Impotency; absence of erections with flabby torpid parts, or the opposite, an uncontrollable sexual desire. Hydrocele. Discharge of prostatic fluid before urination. The pattern here matches the pattern elsewhere: offensiveness, and either torpor or over-excitation with little in between.

Sleep

Sleeplessness from the itching. Sleeplessness from congestion of blood to the head. Sleep broken after midnight. In the morning the patient lies in exactly the position in which they fell asleep. Dreams of robbers, of danger, of traveling, and the dreams continue after waking so that the thought cannot be shaken.

Modalities

Worse:

• Cold, open air, the least draft
• Change of weather, storms, and days before a thunderstorm
• Evening, before midnight, night, morning on waking
• Heat of bed, wool clothing next to skin
• Exertion in the sun, walking, moving, washing
• Pressure, rubbing, scratching, contact of own limbs, bandage
• Suppression of any eruption or discharge
• Fasting; the middle of the night when unfed
• Summer for the diarrhea and the itching; winter for the cough and cold

Better:

• Heat, warm clothing, a covered head, a fur cap in summer if it will be tolerated
• Hard pressure, rest, being indoors
• Lying quietly with the head low
• Eating, though a rush of blood to the head follows the meal
• Profuse sweating, which improves everything
• Nosebleed; coffee

Relationships

Sulphur stands closest. Both are psoric; both cover chronic skin and offensive states. Where they part is the temperature. Sulphur is hot, throws off the covers, cannot bear an over-warm bed. Psorinum is cold to the point of eccentricity, dresses through July. When Sulphur is clearly indicated and does not act, Psorinum is the next thought.

Silica shares the fetid foot sweat. Graphites and Mezereum share the seborrheic dermatitis picture, the scabbing and pus. For the belching like rotten eggs, Arnica, China and Carbo Veg belong in the differential. Alumina shares the scratch-until-it-bleeds behavior. Cina belongs beside Psorinum where worms irritate the colon of a peevish child.

Psorinum antidotes chronic effects of suppression when the well-chosen remedy has already been tried and has palliated or failed. Allen and Clarke both used it as an intercurrent for exactly that purpose. Its role is rarely to open a case; more often it clears the ground so that the constitutional remedy can act.

Clinical Uses

Chronic Eczema and Psoriasis with a History of Suppression

The case that has resisted Sulphur, Graphites and the well-indicated constitutional. The eruption vanished under cortisone or the old zinc ointment years ago, and the child has had asthma or the adult a chronic headache ever since. Skin greasy, scurfy, worse at night, worse from wool, worse in winter and gone in summer. Intolerable itching. 200C, single dose, and wait; Psorinum acts slowly, and the reaction may take days.

Chronic Bronchitis and Hay Fever in the Cold-Sensitive Patient

The patient who catches cold from the least draft, whose hay fever returns every August without fail, whose bronchitis lingers into spring. Sensitive to open air on the head. Fur cap in summer. 30C daily for a few days is the usual introduction; 200C for the deeper case.

The Non-Recovering Convalescent

After influenza, after pneumonia, after any acute illness with prostration — the debility that will not resolve. Feels sick all over. Feels good and bad by turns. Has lost weight and cannot regain it, has lost the hair, has lost the will. Well-chosen remedies fail. Psorinum in 200C restores the reactive capacity, and afterwards the constitutional remedy will finally act.

Menopausal Depression with Abdominal Complaint

The woman whose depression at menopause has a filthy, hopeless, forsaken quality; whose leucorrhea is fetid and gushing; whose backache is severe and whose sleep is broken by night sweats. 30C daily or 200C weekly, watching for the shift in mood before pursuing the physical.

Obstinate Bedwetting Aggravated at the Full Moon

Murphy records this specific: obstinate bedwetting, worse at the full moon. The child is often pale, scrofulous, sickly, with the disagreeable smell about the body that Psorinum patients characteristically carry. 200C, single dose, and the pattern breaks over a few cycles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Psorinum safe? It comes from scabies. Psorinum is prescribed at 30C and above. At that potency no material trace of the original preparation remains, and the remedy acts dynamically. High potencies are practitioner territory rather than home-prescriber territory, but the safety concern that attaches to the crude source does not attach to the classical prescription. Dose-based data from herbal or crude sources belong to a different register altogether.

What potency should be used? 30C serves for shorter cases and self-limited conditions. 200C and higher are the constitutional potencies, especially where the case has failed to react to a well-chosen remedy. In that non-reactive case a single dose in high potency is more useful than repetition; Allen preferred Psorinum as an intercurrent, given once, with the ground remedy resumed afterwards.

How is Psorinum different from Sulphur? Both cover psora, both cover chronic skin, both figure in the offensive constitution. Sulphur is hot: throws off the covers, hates a warm bed for its own reason, dirty by neglect. Psorinum is cold: wants the head covered in summer, is dirty despite washing, is despairing where Sulphur is philosophical. Psorinum is the remedy for the Sulphur case in which Sulphur has been given and has done nothing.

When does Psorinum act as an intercurrent? When a well-chosen remedy palliates and stops, or fails to act at all, and the case is clearly psoric — chronic, itching, offensive, with a history of suppression or of scrofula in the family. Clarke used it in exactly this way, and reported that Psorinum sometimes develops its own symptoms in patients whom it has benefited. A woman he treated with 30C reported afterwards a sensation "as if something in the head were being screwed up and drawn," and a patient given 500C complained that the remedy itself carried a "filthy taste." These were prover-like reactions in cured patients rather than adverse effects, and they belong to the record because they help identify the remedy's field of action from the inside.

References

• Hahnemann, S. The Chronic Diseases: Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure. Trans. L. H. Tafel. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel, 1896.
• Hering, C. The Guiding Symptoms of Our Materia Medica, Vol. VIII. Philadelphia: American Homoeopathic Publishing Society, 1891.
• Allen, H. C. The Materia Medica of the Nosodes with Provings of the X-Ray. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel, 1910.
• Clarke, J. H. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, Vol. III. London: Homoeopathic Publishing Company, 1902.
• Kent, J. T. Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel, 1905.
• Murphy, R. Nature's Materia Medica. Blacksburg, VA: Lotus Health Institute.