Cactus grandiflorus
(Night-blooming cereus)
Botanical name: cereus grandiflorus mill
Family: cactaceae.
Synonym: Selenicereus spinulosus
Distribution: Generally hot and stony places of tropical America, also in gardens in India.
History and authority: Allen’s Encyclop. Mat. Med., Vol. II, 321.
Part used: Flowering stem
Prescribed dose: Tincture (best made from flowers), to third attenuation. Higher in nervous palpitation.
Clincal features:
- It acts chiefly on muscular fibers, hence constriction sensation is felt. The constriction can be prsent in every part of body. The constriction at time gives patient a feeling of Spasmodic pain. This may be the explanation of the famous key note of Cactus- “feeling as if caged”
- The constriction can be felt in heart, chest, bladder, rectum and vagina (spasmodic dysmenorrhoea)
- When this constriction is associated with congestion it may produce heart and head symptoms of cacutus
- Head symtoms: right sided congestive headache, neuralgic in character at times.
- The mental symptoms produced correspond to those found when there are heart affections, sadness, and melancholy.
- Hemorrhage with constrictions, periodicity and spasmodic pains as in epistaxic and hemoptysis
- Cactus is pulseless, panting and prostrated.
- It may be used in Toxic goitre with cardiac symptoms.
Compare with:-
- Aconite: palpitations with fear of death and suffocation (of acute origin)
- Digitalis: heart symptoms because of heart patholgoy, hypertrophies and oedema
- Gelsemium: palpitations in general with occipital headaches and uneasiness
- Kalmia: constricting pains arising out of generalized rheumatism
- Lachesis: Menopausal palpitations with anxiety neurosis.
- Tab: after effects of tobacco chewing
