Know Your Remedies: Coffea Cruda (Coff.)

Common Names: Raw coffee bean.

General Information

The person needing Coffea Cruda (Coff.) is nervous, excitable, quick to act, and mentally and physically overstimulated. They have increased sensitivity to touch and pain, and increased sensitivity of the special senses so that vision, hearing, smell and taste feel sharper and more acute. Eating, drinking and thinking are rapid and ailments such as neuralgia are triggered by joy, surprises and heightened emotion. Those needing Coffea may also dislike open air, or find that symptoms worsen in open air. Drinking coffee can increase nervousness or aggravate physical symptoms. Children needing Coffea suit the above profile and are physically restless or hyperactive.

Mental-Emotional Symptoms

• Sentimental and easily dominated.
• Mental overactivity – quick, restless or excitable thoughts.
• Joyful – sometimes to ecstatic states. Weeping from joy.
• Witty.
• Despair from pain.

Head

• Headache – like a nail in the side of the head.

Dental

• Toothache which is relieved by holding ice-cold water in mouth.

Chest

• Palpitations with excitement.

Limbs

• Sciatic pain or other types of neuralgia – worsened by open air or heightened emotions.

Female

• Complaints of menopause – flushing, palpitations, faintness, sleeplessness.

Sleep

• Sleeplessness from racing and active thoughts.
• Waking from the slightest noise.

Where do I find it?

Coffea Cruda (Coff.) is available from our online store as a single remedy in either pills or liquid, and as part of the following Complexes (combination remedies): Insomnia from Overactive Mind; Sensitive Teeth; Toothache.

Important

While above self-limiting or acute complaints are suitable for home treatment also contact your healthcare provider during emergency situations or if symptoms worsen or fail to improve. Chronic or persistent complaints, which may or may not be mentioned above, require a different treatment and dosage protocol so are best managed by a qualified homeopath for good results.

Dosage Instructions (suitable for babies to adults)

For the home treatment of acute and self-limiting complaints take one pill or five drops of the remedy every 1 minute to 4 hours (1 minute for intense or emergency symptoms (plus seek emergency help), 4 hours for milder ones). Once an improvement is noticed, stop dosing and repeat the remedy only if symptoms return. If there is no improvement at all by three doses, choose a different remedy or seek professional guidance.

Note: Chronic symptoms or complaints require a course of professional treatment by a qualified homeopath to manage the changes in potencies and remedies that may be required.

More Information

Guidelines on which potency to use

From Past Masters

Homeopathy is a 200-year system of medicine. Early medical homeopaths recorded initial provings, remedy relationships, and their early experiences with each remedy in great detail.

These writings were then shared with others to advance homeopathic knowledge and practice.

Today, these same writings give a fascinating insight into the symptoms and clinical conditions for which each remedy was used.

The following extract, with minor editing, is one example.

Leaders In Homoeopathic Therapeutics by E. B. NASH M.D.

Coffea Cruda (Coff.)

All senses more acute; reads fine print easier; smell, taste and touch acute; unusual activity of mind and body; full of ideas, quick to act, no sleep on this account etc.

Affections from sudden surprises, especially joyful surprises; very emotional.

Pains insupportable, drive to despair; exasperation, tears, tossing about in agony; great sleeplessness.

Headache, from over-mental exertion, thinking, talking; one-sided, as from a nail driven into the brain (Ign., Nux); as if the brain were torn or dashed to pieces; < in open air.

Jerking toothache; relieved by holding ice water in the mouth; returns when water becomes warm.

* * * * *

Coffea cruda, like Chamomilla, acts strongly upon the nervous system. Indeed in nervous troubles, where the patient has not been addicted to the coffee habit, it often takes precedence.

If on the other hand he is a coffee drinker, Chamomilla is the remedy.

Doctor Teste, of Paris, used to say that coffee was responsible for a large proportion of the neuralgias of France. The Coffea patient is a subject of very great general exalted sensibility.

See Hering’s characteristic cards. “All the senses more acute, reads fine print easier, smell, taste and touch acute, particularly also in increased perception of slight passive motions.” “Unusual activity of mind and body.” “Full of ideas, quick to act, no sleep on this account.” “Lively fancies, full of plans for the future.” These symptoms portray, as plainly as words can, the nervous conditions calling for this remedy.

It makes one think of Chamomilla, but the mind of Chamomilla is not there. On the other hand, it makes one think of Aconite, but the fear of death is not there. Hering used to recommend Aconite and Coffea in alternation in painful inflammatory affections, where the fever symptoms of the former and also the nervous sensibility of the latter were present, and I know of no two remedies that alternate better, though I never do it, since I learned to closely individualize.

Coffea is especially adapted to mental shocks, such as sudden surprises, especially joyful surprises, excessive laughter and playing, disappointed love, noises, strong smells, etc. It is also adapted to variable moods; first crying then laughing, then crying again.

Coffea also vies with Chamomilla and Aconite as a pain remedy. “Pains. insupportable, drive to despair.” “Exasperation, tears, tossing about in great anguish.” Here again we would not give Coffea in an habitual coffee drinker, but Chamomilla rather.

The particular localities where these pains mostly occur are in the head, where the pain is generally one-sided, feeling “as though a nail were driven into the head.” Ignatia has a similar headache, and it generally occurs in hysterical subjects. Then choice may have to be made between these two remedies.

Prosopalgia, which is often traceable to bad teeth, and Coffea has a very peculiar toothache, in the fact that the tooth is easy as long as he holds cold water upon it. Remember Chamomilla toothache is often caused by taking, warm things into the mouth, but is not relieved by taking cold things like Coffea.

Dysmenorrhœa, with excessively painful colic. If there are large black clots and Coffea does not relieve, follow with Chamomilla.

Pains threatening abortion, or after-pains, or very severe unbearable labor pains are often relieved by this remedy. In short, for pains anywhere, which seem intolerable, and there are no other especially leading symptoms, Coffea is to be remembered.

The same over-excitability, so characteristic of this drug, causes great sleeplessness, and Coffea has won to itself great credit as a sleep remedy. In my experience and observation, it works best here in the 200th potency. And there is no more beautiful verification of the truth of Similia than just here, for it causes great sleeplessness in many people when taken in large quantities.

Cough and sleeplessness after measles (a very common occurrence) is wonderfully relieved by it, and it is sleep, not narcosis, and never injures or sickens the patient like the stupor of the opium preparations.