Know Your Remedies: Rumex Crispus (Rumx)

Common Names: Curly dock; yellow dock.

General Information

Rumex Crispus is predominantly a remedy for coughs. Those needing it are highly sensitive to cold air with both itchiness and cough triggered by it. Mucous membranes of the nose and throat feel dry, burning or raw while mucous discharges may be profuse.

Ear, Nose, and Throat

• Dry sensation in posterior nose and throat.
• Violent sneezing.
• Thin mucus discharge that gradually toughens into thick, stringy mucus that is hard to expectorate.
• Frequent throat clearing or hawking to remove tough mucus.

Cough

• Caused by tickling in the airways.
• From inhaling cold air.
• From a change in temperature (uncovering or upon entering cold air from a warm room).
• Triggered by touching the throat or larynx.
• Worsens when talking or laughing.

Gastrointestinal Symptoms

• Early morning diarrhea, with or without catarrh.

Skin

• Itching on exposure to cold air after undressing.

Where do I find it?

Rumex Crispus (Rumx.) is available from our online store as a single remedy in liquids or pills, and as part of the following Complex (combination remedy): Cough (Dry).

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 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.

Rumex Crispus (Rumx)

Violent incessant dry cough; worse on inhaling the least cold air; covers the mouth to keep the cold air out, with relief.

Brownish diarrhea, < in morning.

Intense itching of the skin when undressing to go to bed.

* * * * *

There are three localities in which this remedy acts very markedly, viz.: Respiratory organs, bowels and skin.

“Violent, incessant cough, dry and fatiguing, with very little or no expectoration, aggravated by pressure, talking, and especially by inspiring cold air, and at night” (Dunham.)

There is perhaps no remedy under which the sensibility of the mucous membranes of the larynx and trachea become more exalted than this one. The patient must cover up the head in bed in order to protect these membranes from contact with the air, which immediately excites cough.

Several other remedies, like Phosphorus and Spongia, have cough aggravated by breathing cold air, but none so markedly as Rumex. Going from warm room into cool air and vice versa. Bryonia and Natrum carbonicum have the opposite.

The tickling that excites the cough may locate in the throat-pit, supra-sternal fossa, or down behind the sternum to stomach, where is often added a sensation of soreness or rawness. (Caust.). Again we have found it efficacious in cough, with stitching pain through left lung just below left nipple. (Natrum sulph.).

The diarrhea of Rumex is similar to that of Natrum sulph., Sulphur and Podophyllum, in that it occurs in the morning, but it is a brown diarrhea and is apt to be accompanied with, or an accompaniment of, the cough.

On the skin it cures an eruption which is characterized by intense itching when undressing to go to bed. This eruption may be vesicular, like army or prairie itch, or may look like simple urticaria.

Itching on undressing is also found under Natrum sulphuricum and Oleander, but with Natrum this itching is apt to be found in connection with jaundice or malarial symptoms.

If we should get intense itching over the body, which was aggravated by warmth, especially warmth of the bed, we would think of Mercurius solubilis or protoiodide.