Individual Drugs. ABIES (Tsuga canadensis). - Southwest School of ...

with pedal edema; mitral and tricuspid regurgitation, with rapid and
weak heart action, low arterial tension, difficult breathing, cough, and
tendency to cyanosis.
Action.—Apocynum acts powerfully upon the heart, slowing its action
and raising arterial tension. The cardiac muscle appears to be directly
stimulated by it as are probably the arterial coats. Contraction of the
renal arteries also takes place, so that while less blood passes at a time
through the kidneys, the act of filtration is more perfect and marked
diuresis results. Though long known that diuresis was one of its most
prominent results, the knowledge that this is due to the better cardiac
pressure and arterial tonus, rather than to the increased intrinsic
secreting power of the renal glomeruli, is the result of pharmacologic
investigation in recent years, particularly the work of Horatio C. Wood,
Jr. The general effects upon man of full doses of apocynum are nausea,
and sometimes vomiting and purging, succeeded by copious sweating.
The pulse is then depressed, and in some a disposition to drowsiness is
observed until relieved by vomiting. The powdered drug causes
sneezing. The small doses employed in Eclectic therapeutics seldom
occasion any of the above-named symptoms save that of severe watery
purging, which may occur suddenly, when the drug has been
administered persistently for several weeks.
Therapy.—No remedy in the Eclectic materia medica acts with greater
certainty than does apocynum. In former times it was employed in
heroic doses chiefly for its hydragogue cathartic and diuretic effects.
Early in the last century it was employed by the botanic practitioners
for the relief of dropsy. Later the Eclectic school developed its specific
uses in dropsy and affections of the heart and circulation. Like many
similar drugs, the powder was employed as a sternutatory in the days
when it was believed that such effects as the increasing of the nasal
discharges was the best way to relieve headaches and certain catarrhal
affections. Again, it was recommended in diaphoretic doses, for the
relief of intermittent and remittent fevers, and in pneumonic
involvements, conditions in which it is now seldom or never thought
of. It is rarely employed nowadays as a cathartic, and then only in
dropsical conditions, as other hydragogues have been similarly used.
Such is the use of it advocated by the authors of the regular school of
medicine, by those who use it at all; and from such a use arises the
criticisms frequently indulged in in condemnation of the drug.
Eclectics do not use it in this manner. Specific medication has
Felter’s Materia Medica - (A) - Page 28