Some Important Hints on Treatment.
As I have stated previously, the homoeopathic doctor and the wise lay practitioner is not much concerned with the name of the disease or disorder of which the patient complains, but with the causation of the trouble. The causation of the trouble is all important.
A nervous girl can be given bromide or luminal or some other sedative, but the sedative, however carefully chose, will be of little avail if the girls nervousness is due to grossly faulty menstruation, to self-reproaches or to0 the fact the she dances half the night and embraces herself up with cocktails, strong tea and coffee, and innumerable cigarettes.
It is useless to give reducing medicines to the obese if they eat too much or eat the wrong food. I remember a woman telling me, with tears in her eyes, that she was getting stouter and stouter although she ate so very little. I asked her: ” What do you have for breakfast ?” She sobbed, and said: ” A dry roll. ” ” What do you have for luncheon ?” She wept, and told me: “Another dry roll.” Ten I asked her what she took in the way of liquid. She took in bed two large cups of tea with plenty of milk and four or five lumps of sugar in each cup.
She took another two large cups of tea with her breakfast, another two at eleven o clock, another two with her second dry roll at luncheon. Altogether she had twelve to fifteen cups of tea with an incredible quantity of milk and a pound of sugar. I then asked her what she took between meals. It came out that she took large and expensive ices in the course of the morning, rich chocolates, etc. She had been given thyroid by her doctor, but naturally that medicine had only upset her heart.
There are some only common causes of ill-health and disease which are only too frequently disregarded by prescribers. One of the most common causes of health trouble lies in chronic constipation, which is almost universal among the civilized. The average doctor disregards this factor. If appealed to, he orders his favourite laxative. Constipation is not a triviality but is an extremely serious matter. Doctors do not take much notice of it because most doctors are themselves constipated, and therefore pooh-pooh the complaints of their patients with regard to this matter.
Constipation leads only too frequently to autointoxication, to self-poisoning. The bowel swarms with disease products, with the organisms of putrefaction cannot always be detoxicated by the body. If the trouble is very acute, the defensive mechanism breaks down, the organisms of putrefaction enter by way of the bowel finally into the blood stream and poison the whole system. The resistance of the bowel wall is considerable, but laxative and purgative are true bowel irritants. They weaken the bowel wall, and further weakening takes place if unsuitable food is eaten which weakness the power of repair.
Everyone knows some of the consequences of constipation, because the manufacturers of laxatives tell us in their advertisements that constipation leads to degeneration of the skin, a poor colour, anaemia, jaundice, pimples and diseases and disorders, malfunctioning of the liver, deep depression, pyorrhoea and forth and so on. It cannot be doubted that numerous diseases and disorders are entirely due to constipation, and it stands to reason that every disease and disorder know to medical science is bound to be greatly aggravated if the patients blood is thoroughly fouled by organisms of putrefaction.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, stated 2,300 years ago, that insanity was frequently due to constipation, and that insane patients could be cured by vigorous laxatives. The most important section in mental hospitals is that containing those individuals who suffer from melancholia. Melancholia is almost invariably due to chronic constipation and auto-intoxication. The odour in the wards of the mental hospitals tells its own tale. When the brain cells have been destroyed by the organisms of putrefaction, then a cure is hopeless or almost hopeless, at least to the orthodox medical practitioners.
One can cure innumerable diseases and greatly relieve patients by correcting the faulty condition of the bowel. Cancer patients suffer almost invariable from bowel poisoning. As soon as the bowel is regulated patients of every kind, including cancer patients, feel greatly relieved. They become cheerful, their jaundice or pallor disappears, they become merry, gain weight, and are full of hope.
Many skin diseases can be cured by bowel regulation. In cases of inflammation of the bladder. auto-intoxication from the bowel is responsible in the great majority of cases. Instead of washing out the bladder, an idiotic procedure favoured by doctors and bladder specialists, the patient should be put on a lacto- vegetarian diet, and his chronic bladder inflammation will disappear rapidly, especially if he is given plenty of liquid.
Patients suffering from tuberculosis, diabetes, diseases of the kidneys and liver, etc., respond splendidly as soon as their bowel is put into order. In practically all cases improvement takes place when bowel foulness is eliminated. This is after all, only logical.
I have mentioned in the foregoing that people who suffer from inflammation of the bladder should be put on a lacto-vegetarian diet. I give a lacto-vegetarian diet not merely to those who suffer from bladder trouble, but to all patients, not because I am a vegetarian myself but because I wish to eliminate the organisms of putrefaction by starving them out of existence.
The orthodox doctor frequently prescribes some horrible drug, especially drugs derived from carbolic acid, which we are told, detoxicate the bowel. these powerful drugs are no doubt very excellent antiseptics and they will detoxicate the bowel contents if they are poured over a foul motion contained in a vessel.
Unfortunately these drugs act very differently when they are taken by the mouth. The body possesses the most wonderful chemical laboratories. Dangerous substances are chemically altered so as to make them innocuous. Many of the antiseptics which people faithfully swallow because they are supposed to cleanse the bowel, are totally altered in composition by the time they enter the bowel.
Consequently, they do not fulfil the purpose for which they are given, but only embarrass the body by forcing it to alter the composition of the these dangerous drugs. The idea that one can detoxicate the bowel contents by swallowing some nauseous drug is a delusion.
The only way which I know consists, not in allowing the patient to eat putrefactive foods and then trying to prevent putrefaction by giving him yeast and derivatives of carbolic acid, etc., but the only way which is reliable, as I have proved during many years, consists in placing the patient on a lacto-vegetarian diet. Then the organisms of putrefaction which swarm in the bowel in untold millions are starved out of existence.
The bowel flora becomes completely changed, and there is no need for giving the patient horrible drugs such as carbolic acid derivatives disguised and made palatable in some way or other.
Those who wish to treat constipation should deal, of course. with the cause. The cure of constipation is not found in the use of certain pills and salts but in correct dietary. The civilized take daily doses of opening medicine, but we do not give such doses to our domestic animals, to horses, cattle, sheep and pigs, nor are primitive races dependent on the chemists shop for the daily evacuation.
We take it as a matter of course that all animals have freely working bowels and that all human beings are constipated. The thing is, of course, absurd. Constipation is due in about 95 per cent. of the cases to a faulty diet.
Primitive races and animals live on natural food in the most natural condition. The civilized live on refined and over- refined food from which the most important food elements have been abstracted. The abstracted portions are those which ensure health and strength and bowel normality. In the olden days, when people lived on coarse wholemeal bread,on porridge made of entire wheat, barley or oats, on entire sugar, etc., constipation and the diseases of constipation are little known.
Now constipation and the diseases of constipation are universal. Animal have normally working bowels. They empty their bowels several times a day exactly as do normal babies. When babies grow up they are taught that they should have only one motion a day, and constipation is artificially created in them. Growing children and adults are taught that it is unbecoming to retire for an evacuation, and they suppress their natural needs. In addition we discard all the food which promote bowel activity and live on those which impede bowel action.
Florence Nightingale pointed out about a century that innumerable people can overcome their chronic constipation merely by replacing white bread by wholemeal bread. Major-General Sir Robert MacCarrison, the eminent food investigator and dietician, has fed thousands of animals on the refined diet of civilization, and he has produced in them chronic constipation and auto- intoxication, appendicitis, colitis, gastric and duodenal ulcer, goitre, skin disease, etc. We should live on foods rich in mineral elements and vitamins not only in order to have a regularly working bowel, but in order to have healthy strong teeth, good eyesight, good bones and muscles, etc.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.