Lithium Carbonicum – Lithium Carbonate

The attenuations are prepared from Lithium carbonate Li ₂CO₃, MW: 73.9.

The trituration and liquid potencies prepared from Lithium carbonate have a prominent action on the motor system, on bones, joints and muscles. Characteristic symptoms include lassitude, lack of energy and a feeling of weakness, associated with lameness and stiffness of all the limbs, the lithium salts acting particularly on gouty and rheumatic illnesses. Gouty complaints in the feet and the sacrum, linked with anxiety and restlessness, disturb the sleep.

Just as in the joints of the feet, so also in those of the hands and fingers there are stabbing and throbbing pains; pains also occur in the shoulders, sacrum and loins. The rheumatic complaints are often also coupled with heart complaints; in many cases this is caused by the taking of the usual pain-killing tablets, resulting in the un- loading of homotoxins onto the endocardium, signifying a progressive vicariation.

There is characteristic redness and swelling of the toe and finger joints, as in an acute attack of gout, catarrh often being found in the digestive tract also, with dis- tension, foetid diarrhoea at night and stabbing pains in the region of the anus and the perineum. Pressing pains in the bladder with dark-coloured urine possibly contain- ing significant deposits of mucus are also characteristic of Lithium Carbonicum.

Also typical of Lithium Carbonicum is the occurrence of violent cardiac pain on bending the trunk and during urination or menses. (Nash)

As a leading symptom, Mezger also mentions the frequent urination with burning in the urethra, cloudy urine with much mucus and reddish-brown sediment, and also the amelioration from eating (in head and stomach) and from urination (cardiac pain).

Stauffer refers additionally to the eye symptoms of Lithium Carbonicum, i.e. hemianopia from affections of the right-hand side of the retina. He also mentions that salicylates, such as e.g. Lithium Salicylicum – but also Lithium Benzoicum and others – and likewise mineral spring water containing Lithium, are more or less typ- ical remedies for various gouty affections, Lithium Benzoicum being particularly ef-

fective for acrid, cloudy urine, and also for subacute rheumatism and tophi, and for trigeminal neuralgia, if the corresponding urinary conditions are present. Stauffer also mentions that gouty patients must observe the strictest abstinence from alcohol. If we now sum up the main symptoms of Lithium Carbonicum, we have the fol-

lowing typical remedy-picture:

1. Gouty and rheumatic conditions. Acute attack of gout affecting the small joints of toes and hands.
2. Gouty and rheumatic conditions also of the large joints, especially of the hips and the shoulder girdle, and also of the knee joint.
3. Heart pains with a gouty or rheumatic basis, worse on bending the trunk, better from urination.
4. Tenesmus of the bladder with cloudy, mucous, brown sediment. (Pyelitis with uric acid stone formation).
5. General catarrhs of the alimentary canal (and the nose). Foetid diarrhoea at night.
6. Dimness of vision. Hemianopia (right side) from retinopathy, with irritation of the conjunctiva.

The German Monograph-Preparation Commission for the Homoeopathic Field of Therapy has, under the Preparation Monograph for Lithium carbonicum, published the following indication(s) in the German Bundesanzeiger (German Federal Gazette) for lithium carbonicum: gout; renal diseases associated with increased uric-acid levels in the blood; rheumatic diseases.