Antimonium tartaricum

-SUDARSHAN SR ,NON MALARIAL FEVERS
 A sheet anchor in pulmonary febrile affections.
 KENT: “The face is pale and sickly; the nose is drawn and sunken; the eyes are sunken and there are dark rings around the eyes……..The face is covered with a cold sweat and is cold and pale.”
 Coarse rattling and bubblings in the chest.”
 ”The condition is one in which the chest is steadily filling up with mucus and at fist he may be able to throw it out; but finally he is suffocating from the filling up of mucus and the inability of the chest and lungs to throw it out.”
 ”Ant-tart. Has weakness and lack of reaction.”
 ”The child when sick doesn’t want to be touched or looked at or talked to. Wants to be let alone. The infant is always keeping up a pitiful whining and moaning.”
 ”In most cases, this remedy is thirstless.”
 ”Violent retching. Gagging and retching and straining to vomit.”
 ALLEN:
 ”Craving desire for apples, acids.”
 ”Tongue, characteristic, red edges, or red and white in alternate streaks; papillae red and raised as in scarlatina; tongue bright red and dry in the centre, covered with a thick, white pasty fur.”
 In spring and autumn, especially with children, fevers are prone to take on a remitting type, attended with nausea, vomiting and drowsiness. Gastric symptoms are very pronounced as in ant-crud. Nausea and vomiting may be present; if so, it is very prostrating. Weakness and exhaustion, with great depression of spirits.”
 ”In some epidemics occurring in winter and early spring it often amounts to the genus epidemicus; especially when gastric and typhoid fevers predominate, or when every fever is inclined to become remittent or typhoid.”
 Causation: Rheumatic exposure, living or working in cellars or basements, underground habitation or employment.
 BOGER:  “The Ant-tart. Child won’t have many smiles for you, but shrinks petulantly away and drowses off indifferent to the world. If you are mistakenly persistent he becomes angry and quickly breaks out in sweat, for he is much relaxed. The face has a peculiar dusky tinge, and there is often a fine rattle within the chest, all of which has led to its large use in capillary bronchitis where it has won numberless laurels.”
 POTENCY:  “The potency should be very high, and the dose but rarely repeated. In capillary bronchitis, a single dose of Ant-tart. CM with plenty  of fresh air, is about all that is necessary. (Boger).
 The lower potencies are said to sometimes aggravate. The 6th and 30th potencies seem to be most frequently used.
 RELATIONSHIP:
 Compare: Ipec. (Coarse rattling with great expulsive power of lungs, clean tongue, is not so drowsy)
 Kali-sulph (rattling in chest without weakness)
 Ammc. (catarrh of chest in old people, worse in winter, but with yellow expectoration).
 Ant-crud. (is very similar, but lacks the copious flow of mucus, is not so desperate).
 Complementary: Ipec.
 Followed well by:  Camph. Carb-v., Ipec., Sil., Sulph.
 Antidoted by: China, Merc., Op., Puls., Rhus-t.