Pillbearing Spurge

Spasmodic and dyspneic breathing with bronchial irritation.

Overview. Euphorbia hirta, long known in older dispensatories as Euphorbia pilulifera, is a small prostrate, hairy annual weed found throughout tropical and subtropical regions including the southern United States, Africa, and Asia. The whole flowering plant, harvested and dried, was adopted by Eclectic physicians in the nineteenth century as a specific for spasmodic asthma and irritative coughs, and it has a long parallel history in Ayurvedic and other traditional systems as a remedy for asthma, bronchitis, and diarrheal disease. It is a minor but distinctive herb in the modern Western respiratory materia medica.

Clinical Notes. This is a plant most herbalists reach for in bronchospasm with a wheezy, tight-chested quality rather than a simple productive cough. The Eclectics valued it particularly for asthma of recent onset following a cold, and for the harsh, teasing cough seen in chronic bronchitis of older patients, where they combined it with expectorants such as grindelia or lobelia in a syrup base to soften its somewhat bitter, acrid taste.

Action and Therapy. A remedy for spasmodic asthma and coughs of a convulsive character due to recent colds. It is somewhat anodyne as well as antispasmodic and expectorant, and is asserted useful in the irritative, teasing, and paroxysmal coughs of the chronic bronchitis of old persons and consumptives. It is also said to relieve dyspnea of cardiac origin and to be of some use in emphysema. It may be administered in syrup, if desired.

Action, Medical Uses, and Dosage. Euphorbia is emetic, diaphoretic, expectorant, and epispastic. Small doses are expectorant and diaphoretic. Larger doses produce emesis usually without much pain or spasm, nausea or giddiness. Overdoses will produce dangerous hyperemesis, or hypercatharsis, or both, and not infrequently give rise to an unpleasant inflammatory state of the alimentary canal.