Skin, Hair and the Two Salts That Rebuild Them: Calcarea Fluorica and Silicea

The skin is the largest organ of the body, and the hair is its most visible testimony. When the skin loses its tone, cracks and sags, when the hair thins and the nails flake, the modern response is a shelf of creams and cosmetics — applied from the outside, to a deficiency that the biochemic tradition locates on the inside. The twelve tissue salts are the inorganic constituents of the blood and tissues; and two of them, in Schüssler’s system, preside over the very architecture of the integument: Calcarea Fluorica, the salt of elastic fibre, and Silicea, the salt of the hair, nails and cleansing.

The Skin and Hair in the Biochemic Doctrine

Schüssler’s pathology is a pathology of deficiency. Every tissue has its characteristic inorganic salt; when the supply of that salt falls below the physiological standard, the tissue can no longer perform its work — and the symptom appears. For the connective tissue, the elastic fibres and the skin, the governing salts are precisely these two. One supplies elasticity — the quality that lets tissue stretch and return. The other supplies structure and elimination — the quality that builds the keratin of hair and nails, and drives the purulent processes of the skin to completion. Between them they cover the great majority of the chronic skin and hair complaints that bring the patient to the consulting room.

Calcarea Fluorica (No. 1) — the salt of elasticity

Schüssler’s first tissue salt is the fluoride of lime — the mineral of the enamel of the teeth, the connective tissue and the elastic fibre of all muscular tissue. Carey’s materia medica opens the subject with characteristic directness:

“The fluoride of lime is found in the enamel of teeth, connective tissue and the elastic fibre of all muscular tissue. A lack of elastic fibre in muscular tissue causes falling of the womb, varicose veins and a general ‘sagging-down feeling.’ Swellings of stony hardness are due to a lack of this salt.”

The mechanism, in Carey’s account, is constructive: the molecules of the fluoride of lime unite with albumen and create elastic fibre — the body is not merely soothed, it is rebuilt. His clinical note on potency is important for the practitioner: “I have had the best results with high potencies, from the sixth up.”

The indications of Calcarea Fluorica in the skin and its appendages are precise:

• Chapped and cracked skin — the dry, fissured hands and lips; Carey’s repertory notes the “chaps or cracks of the lips” among its characteristic indications.
• Loss of elasticity and tone — the sagging, loose-feeling tissues; the skin that has lost its spring.
• Stony hard swellings — indurations and hard lumps, the tissue having lost the elastic fibre that should keep it supple; in the tradition these are among the salt’s most remarkable successes, Carey recording “the wonders I have wrought with this tissue cell-salt in cases of hard lumps in the female breast, or in swellings of stony hardness.”
• Varicose veins — the classical expression of a failure of elastic tissue in the vessel walls.
• Chronic catarrh of the head — the stuffy cold and bronchial catarrh with tiny yellow lumps of mucus coughed up with difficulty, in which the loss of tone affects the mucous membranes themselves.

It is, in a word, the salt of tone — the remedy when the tissues have lost their resilience.

Silicea (No. 11) — the salt of structure and cleansing

Schüssler’s eleventh tissue salt is silica — the mineral of quartz, found in the body where the structures are hardest and most enduring. Carey’s materia medica states its distribution precisely: “It is a constituent of common quartz, and found in the hair, nails, skin, periosteum, neurilemma (nerve sheath), and a trace in the bone tissue.”

Silicea has two great offices in the biochemic system. The first is structure: it is the salt of the keratin tissues — the hair and the nails — and of the connective tissue that conducts the nervous impulse. The second is cleansing. Carey’s account of its action in suppuration is among the most vivid passages in the materia medica:

“This salt is indicated in all suppurative processes until the infiltrated parts have fully discharged the heteroplasm or accumulation of decaying organic matter… When silica is present in proper quantities, the process of suppuration is carried on in a normal manner. When a deficiency of silica occurs, suppuration is retarded.”

The indications of Silicea for skin, hair and nails:

• Falling hair — the repertory records “eruptions and nodules on the scalp; falling out of hair” among its head indications.
• Brittle, splitting nails and weak hair — the classical Silicea constitutional picture: weak, poorly keratinized appendages.
• Boils, pustules and slow suppuration — the painful, slow-coming boils that will not “point”; the carbuncles that Carey traced to a lack of silica rather than to the bacillus that bears their name.
• Slow-healing wounds and old scars — the skin that cannot complete its repair.
• Sore, sensitive scalp — the scalp that is tender to the touch, with painful pustules.

In the constitutional picture, Silicea is the salt of the thin, nervous, easily-exhausted subject with weak hair and nails — the “sandstone” constitution, as the old texts call it, which needs the flint of its own name.

The Two-Salt Protocol

The two salts work together as a pair, and the biochemic practice uses them accordingly. Calcarea Fluorica supplies the elastic framework — the tone of the skin, the resilience of the connective tissue, the strength of the vessel walls. Silicea supplies the structure and the cleansing — the keratin of the hair and nails, and the completion of the skin’s eliminating work. Where the complaint is one of loss of tone — cracked skin, sagging, varicosities — the leading remedy is Calcarea Fluorica, in the higher potencies (6X to 12X) that Carey found most effective. Where the complaint is one of weakness and stagnation — thinning hair, brittle nails, stubborn boils — the leading remedy is Silicea, in the classical 6X trituration.

The classical dose is one tablet three times daily, allowed to dissolve under the tongue, continued for a course of weeks or months — the repair of the skin and its appendages is constitutional work, and the biochemic physician expects it to take its time. The two salts may be taken in alternation when the picture is mixed, one after the other at a single sitting; and the classical complements — Kalium Sulphuricum for the scaly, peeling skin, Natrum Muriaticum for the dry, devitalized skin — are added when their characteristic symptoms appear.

What the Record Shows: Schüssler and Carey on the Two Salts

The clinical record of the tradition is a record of case notes, and both salts have their documented successes. In the section on mechanical injuries, Carey records Calcarea Fluorica in suppuration following injuries; in the children’s cases, Silicea is recorded in hydrocele of children and in intermittent fever from suppressed foot-sweats — the latter, in the doctrine, the fever that follows when the eliminating work of the skin has been interrupted. The constitutional applications are wider still: Silicea in the old texts is the remedy of the scrofulous and strumous child — thin, pale, weak-haired, prone to glandular swelling — and Calcarea Fluorica the remedy of the relaxed, sagging, hard-lumped tissue of later life.

The physiological grounding is again coherent with modern biochemistry. Fluoride of lime is a real constituent of the enamel of teeth and of the elastic tissues — the physiology of elasticity is a physiology of calcium and fluorine in the connective matrix. Silica is a real trace element of the connective tissue, the hair and the nails — the biochemistry of keratin depends on the trace minerals, and silicon has been recognized in the literature of nutrition as a constituent of the integument. The system does not invent its chemistry; it maps its salts to functions that chemistry already recognizes, and prescribes the mineral whose deficiency the symptom picture reveals.

References

1. Schüssler WH. An Abridged Therapy: Manual for the Biochemical Treatment of Disease. 25th ed. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel; 1898.
2. Carey GW. The Biochemic System of Medicine: Comprising the Theory, Pathological Action, Therapeutical Application, Materia Medica and Repertory of Schüssler’s Twelve Tissue Remedies. St. Louis: F. August Luyties; 1894 (copyright 1893).
3. Carey GW. The Chemistry of Human Life. 1919.
4. Boericke W, Dewey WA. The Twelve Tissue Remedies of Schüssler. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel; 1910.
5. Chapman JB, Perry EL. The Biochemic Handbook: What They Are, What They Will Do, How to Use Them. Exeter: New Era Laboratories; 1959.
6. Clarke JH. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. London: Homeopathic Publishing Company; 1900.
7. Dewey WA. Practical Homeopathic Therapeutics. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Boericke & Tafel; 1922.
8. Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS). Tissue salt monographs.
9. United States Congress. Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Pub. L. No. 75-717, 52 Stat. 1040; 1938.

Resources

For the reader who wishes to study the primary texts and the remedies:

• The Biochemic System of Medicine — Dr. George W. Carey. The complete theory, materia medica and repertory, with the full entries on both salts. Buy on Amazon →
• An Abridged Therapy — Dr. W. H. Schüssler. The founding text of the biochemic system. Buy on Amazon →
• The Twelve Tissue Remedies of Schuessler — W. Boericke & W. A. Dewey. A classical materia-medica reference to the twelve tissue remedies. Buy on Amazon →
• Calcarea Fluorica 12X — Buy →
• Silicea 12X — Buy →