Know Your Remedies: Silicea Terra (Sil.)

Common Names: Flint; silica.

General Information

Silicea Terra (Sil.) is a remedy for weakness and lack of resilience of both the physical and mental-emotional areas. Those needing it lack confidence and suffer from anticipation anxiety. They are prone to recurrent infections in which glands may swell. They are thirsty, tire easily, and are prone to constipation with a receding (“bashful”) stool. While the person is generally chilly, perspiration may be excessive on hands and feet, or scalp (especially in sleep) and smell sour. If sweat is suppressed, especially on the feet, other health complaints follow.  Infants needing Silica may “fail to thrive” and develop slowly throughout childhood. Physical problems arise with bone, hair, nails, teeth formation due to poor metabolism.

Eye Problems

• Infected tear duct.
• Blocked tear duct of the newborn.

Skin Problems

• Sweat on the scalp, especially during sleep.
• Offensive sweat on the feet which may excoriate feet and rot the socks.
• Acne that leaves pitted skin.
• Abscesses and boils.
• Bartholin’s cyst.

Nail Problems

• Ingrown toenails.
• White spots on nails, or weak, distorted nails.

Sinusitis

• Sinusitis that occurs with Meniere’s syndrome.
• Dry nasal obstruction.

Ear Problems

• Acute and chronic ear infections (otitis media).

Gastrointestinal (Digestive) Problems

• Infants are unable to tolerate milk, even breast milk.

Dental Problems

• Prone to infections or abscesses of the gum.

Bone & Joint Problems

• Spinal defects and curvatures (scoliosis, lordosis and kyphosis).
• Bunions

Breastfeeding Problems

• Mastitis

For Pets

• Tendency to infections such as abscesses or mastitis.
• Failure to thrive – runt of the litter.

Where do I find it?

Silicea Terra (Sil.) is available from our online store as a single remedy, and as part of the following Complexes (combination remedies): Conjunctivitis; Earache; Foot Sweat; Gum Abscess; Joints – Stiff; Mastitis; Receding Gums; Sinus Pain; Teething; Tear Duct.

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.

Silicea Terra (Sil.)

Weak, puny children; not from want of nourishment taken, but defective assimilation.

Inflammations tending to end suppuration or refusing to heal; becoming chronic.

Coldness, lack of vital warmth, even when taking exercise; must be wrapped up, especially the head, which >.

Suppressed sweat, especially of feet, which is profuse and offensive.

Weak, nervous, easily irritated, faint-hearted; yielding, giving up disposition, “grit all gone.” Constipation; stool protrudes and then slips back again, again and again; week expulsive power.

Modalities: < from cold or draft, motion, open air, at new moon; > in warm room, wrapping up head; magnetism and electricity.

Scrofulous, rachitic children with large heads; open fontanelles and sutures; much sweating about the head, which must be kept warm by external covering; large bellies; weak ankles, slow in learning to walk.

Diseases, caused by suppressed foot sweat; exposing the head or back to any slight draft of air; from vaccination (Thuja); dust complaints of stone cutters, with total loss of strength.

Vertigo; spinal headache ascending from nape of neck to head, as if one would fall forward; worse looking upward.

Unhealthy skin; every little injury suppurates.

Promotes expulsion of foreign bodies from the tissues, fish bones, needles, bone splinters.

* * * * *

Silicea is another of our invaluable constitutional remedies, and also one which is of little or no use except as developed by Hahnemann’s process of potentization.

Like Calcarea, it is especially useful in sweaty-headed children (Sanicula) with defective assimilation. It is not in the fat, torpid, obese patients, over-nourished in one part and insufficiently so in another, like Calcarea that Silicea is indicated, but in the over-sensitive, imperfectly nourished (generally), not from want of food, but from imperfect assimilation.

The Silicea child is not larger than natural anywhere except in its “big belly,” which is due to diseased mesentery. Its limbs are shrunken, its eyes sunken and its face pinched and old looking. It does not increase in size or strength, learns to walk late; in short, if not actually sick in bed, everything seems to have come to a standstill so far as growth or development is concerned.

Now if this state of things continues the bowels become very constipated, and a peculiar constipation it is, too. The little fellow strains and strains, the stool partly protruding and then slipping back (Sanicula and Thuja), as though the general weakness of the patient affected the expulsive power of the rectum, or else the bowels become very persistently loose, especially during dentition or the hot weather of summer.

The stools are changeable, but Pulsatilla does no good, almost every kind and color of loose stool appearing. The child takes nourishment enough, but, whether vomited or retained, goes on emaciating and growing weaker and weaker until it dies of inanition, unless Silicea checks this process.

Many such cases have I saved with this remedy and made them healthy children. I have always used the 30th and upwards, hence cannot speak of the lower preparations. (Silicea also has constipation < before and during menstruation).

Silicea ranks among the first of our remedies for inflammations ending in suppuration. It seems to make no particular difference whether the suppuration takes place in the soft or hard parts, for it is equally efficacious in glandular or bony ulcerations. I

t seems to come in at a later stage than Hepar sulph. or Calcarea sulphide which expedite the discharge of pus already formed, while Silicea comes in for healing after the discharge has taken place.

Cellular tissues with deep-seated suppurations, including tendons and ligaments, also come within the range of its healing powers. In these cases the constitution of the patient has an important bearing in the selection of this remedy.

The Silicea subject is weakly, with fine skin, pale face, lax muscles. Even the mind and nervous symptoms come into the general picture of “weakness.” He is nervous and irritable, weak, faint-hearted, yielding, giving-up disposition, “grit all gone.” (Pulsatilla).

In such a case Silicea is grand. I hate to use the term, but as the old school would say, “it builds them up,” and so it seems, for under its action the patients spirits rise, hope revives, the weakness and depression give way to a feeling of returning strength and health.

It makes no difference whether the ulcerations are in the tissues already named, in the lungs, intestinal tract, or mammae, or elsewhere, the effect is the same, and the improvement in the local affection generally follows the general constitutional improvement.

This condition of weakness seems to attack the general nervous system, affecting the spine, and so we get those cerebro-spinal headaches, or headaches beginning in the nape of the neck and running forward over the head to the eyes, for which Silicea is so useful.

Vertigo also ascends from the nape to head, < looking up. (Pulsatilla).

There seems to be lack of nerve power to resist outward depressing influences. He is cold, or, as Hering puts it, there is “want of vital warmth, even when taking exercise.” He is sensitive to cold air, takes cold very easily, especially when uncovering the head or feet. On the contrary, he is relieved by “wrapping up the head” (Magnesia mur.), or, in other words, supplying artificially the warmth that he lacks naturally.

I have several times found a Silicea child suffering from epileptiform spasms which were always worse at new moon. A few doses of Silicea 200th set them all right.

Silicea subjects are often afflicted with offensive foot-sweats (Sanicula, Psorinum, Graphites), which are easily suppressed by getting the feet cold. Such suppression must be remedied, the sweat restored and cured by proper medication or serious results often follow, such as convulsions and other spinal troubles, even locomotor ataxia. Silicea is the remedy to restore and cure such sweats by correcting the conditions upon which the sweats depend. (Baryta carb., Graphites, Psorinum, Sanicula).

The Silicea patient desires to be magnetized and is relieved thereby (Phosphorus).

This is one of the remedies of which, like Sepia, Lachesis, Lycopodium and others, the old school knows little or nothing, because their chief virtues are only developed in potencies above the 12th.

Silicea is the chronic of Pulsatilla.