Balmony

Sluggish digestion with a coated tongue, bitter taste in the mouth, and worsening after fatty food

Constipation with pale, clay colored stools suggesting deficient bile flow

Painful piles soothed by an ointment made from the fresh leaf

Overview. Chelone glabra is a native North American perennial of wet meadows, stream banks and swamps in eastern and central North America, named for its inflated, turtle head shaped white to pale pink flowers. The bitter aerial parts, gathered in flower, were a staple bitter tonic of the physiomedicalist and Eclectic traditions, used to rouse a sluggish liver and digestion much as European gentians and other bitters were used on the other side of the Atlantic.

Clinical Notes. Balmony belongs to the class of pure bitters: practitioners reached for it when the tongue was coated, appetite poor, and stools pale or infrequent, taking it as this suggested torpid bile flow rather than active inflammation.

Action and Therapy. A useful remedy for gastro-intestinal debility with hepatic torpor or jaundice. Dyspeptic conditions attending convalescence from prostrating fevers are often aided by it, and it should be studied particularly for vague and shifting pain in the region of the ascending colon, attended with persistent uneasiness and sometimes tormina. We have used it for these conditions with satisfaction. The infusion (1/2 ounce to Water, 16 fluidounces) in small doses, is effective, though disagreeably bitter.

Properties and Uses. The leaves are a strong and permanent bitter, with about equal degrees of relaxing and stimulating properties. They expend the greater portion of their influence on the stomach; but also exert a decided action on the gall ducts, and a more moderate one on the whole alvine canal.