THE present age is frequently described as a nervous age. Nerve weakness, called neurasthenia, is extremely common. In many books and articles we have been told that it is due to the rush and pressure of modern life. I am afraid I cannot agree with that view. Neurasthenia is found not only among men in the city who deal in large amount, where fortunes are made and lost every day. The trouble is extremely frequent among seamstresses who live in quiet byways, far from the rush and turmoil of life. Neurasthenia, like many other diseases, is due very largely to faulty nutrition. Unfortunately this has not been adequately recognized by the medical profession.
Patients frequently consult me and tell me that they have visited doctors and distinguished specialists, who have examined them carefully and who at the end of the examination have told the patient: ” There is nothing organically wrong with you. It is only nerves.” Many patients are foolish enough to be satisfied with that extraordinary stupid explanation. Nerve troubles are as curable as organ troubles, and perhaps more easily curable, but nervous patients cannot be cured by doping them with poisonous sedatives such as bromide and luminal.
Unfortunately many distinguished nerve specialists are principally dope vendors. They do not make the slightest attempt to cure the nerve cases which come to them. They keep them quiet with poisonous sedatives, and occasionally tell the anxious relatives that nothing else can be done for them.
I have had a very large number of nerve cases, and most to them have to come to me when general practitioners and distinguished specialists have failed. It is, of course, quite impossible to treat all nerve cases alike. In every case the most careful investigation must be made in order to discover the cause of the trouble.
Neurasthenia, like hysteria, appears in innumerable forms. There are people who are afraid to go into crowds, afraid to go into shops and afraid to go into the city, afraid to travel in a convenience, afraid to go along the street because the houses might fall on them. there are other who feel too weak to move, too weak to concentrate, who read mechanically and cannot make out the meaning of the simple phrases which they have read. There are people who have lost their memory, people who can no longer sign their name or add a few figures. There are people who can cannot sit still, and others who sit still for hours staring in to space.
There are nerve cases who sleep almost day and night, and others who cannot sleep at all. There are those who have visions and hallucinations, who believe that they have committed crimes, who are afraid of being pursued. There are nerve patients whose digestion has gone to pieces. Gas comes up from the stomach unceasingly with terrific noise, and there are nerve cases who eat voraciously and yet remain thin and lose weight. The types of nerve sufferers are past counting, and therefore past describing.
It is a good rule that no medicinal treatment should be given until common-sense faults and commonplace matters have been put right, but before dealing with this it is necessary to enquire very carefully into the history of the patient and into his inheritance. In some cases nerve weakness is due to the faults or disorders of the parents.
Careful and tactful enquiry will often elicit that there is a syphilitic, tubercular or other taint, or that the balance of the patient was upset by injury to the brain owing to a fall, possibly in babyhood, to injury at birth by the forceps, to a fright, such as a fire or an explosion, when the patient was quite small, etc. The nervous system is very frequently deeply injured by vaccinial poisoning, of which the orthodox profession knows nothing, or by the diseases of childhood.
I never consider the diseases of childhood if the attacks were small, unless the disease was more or less suppressed. If there is reason to believe that inherited syphilis, tuberculosis, etc., or measles, scarlatina, and so forth in childhood is at the bottom of the trouble, then we must tentatively treat the patient with the indicated antidote, such as Syphilinum, Tuberculinum of Bacillinum, Morbillinum, Scarlatinum, etc. However, as I stated before, common-sense matters must have precedence before the study of the various disease factors.
Sir Robert McCarrison and other eminent students of nutrition have shown that animals which are faultily fed suffer not only physically, but that their nervous system and their brain are grievously affected. If one puts a cage full of rats or other laboratory animals on a restaurant diet with white bread, white sugar, over-cooked vegetables, strong tea, etc., the animals suffer not only from numerous nutritional diseases found in civilized men, such as appendicitis, colitis, gastric and duodenal ulcer, etc., but they suffer also from nerve diseases and eventually from insanity. Animals fed on devitaminized diet becomes frantic.
They rush about, aware of the deficiency of their food, and in their despair they eat their own dung and lap their own urine, which happens to be rich in vitamins. Therefore it is customary among dietetic researches who wish to study the effect of vitamins starvation, to keep these unfortunate animals in cages, the floor of which consists of write netting. The object is to prevent these wretched animals from eating their own dung and lapping their own urine. Vitamin starved animals show every sign of all health.
They lose weight, look miserable, get skin disease, have inflamed eyes, they become bad tempered, they fight among themselves and show every sign of incipient insanity. They suffer from neurasthenia in every form.
In every case of nerve weakness we must carefully enquire not only into the occupation of the patient, his inheritance, etc., but also carefully study the patients diet. In most cases it will be found that the diet is a highly artificial one, that the patient lives principally on refined foods from which the essential elements have been abstracted, with a view to making the food more attractive to the eye, more easy to chew, etc.
The first necessity consists in placing the patient on a diet of natural food in its most natural condition. It is not necessary to study the text books of scientific nutrition, of which I have a very low opinion., and it is certainly not necessary to order a diet based on calories. Diet is not a question of theory but a question of common sense.
The patient should be given a diet composed of wholemeal bread, an abundance of bran, fresh butter, superlatively weak China tea, milk and milky foods if he is thin, an abundance of raw fruit, salading, vegetables, fresh eggs, cheese, and putrefactive foods such as flesh, fish, and fowl and everything made of them should be strictly forbidden. Of course, the patient should be given an adequate amount of liquid in the form of lemon water, plain water, water with orange juice, water in which vegetables have been boiled, extremely weak China tea, etc.
Alcohol is useful for weak patients. It helps them digest their food, it is a tonic and an internal disinfectant. Alcohol is the only food disinfectant. A foul wound can be disinfected with wine or with diluted whisky, or with plain diluted alcohol. The Greeks and Romans washed their wounds with wine, and so did many of the nations of antiquity. Of course, alcohol is not advisable for those who take too much alcohol.
In some cases neurasthenics owe their trouble to habitual consumption of very strong tea, strong coffee, alcohol, and overheating foods which act as stimulants for a time, and temporary stimulation is followed by a disastrous reaction which causes the patient to take still more alcohol, still more tobacco, still more meat, etc. Consumers of these heating and irritating foods and drinks frequently take enormous quantities of spices and condiments to whip up their flagging energies and their flagging digestion. It is, of course, not easy to change the diet of these patients. At least temporarily their digestion must be supported.
Patients who are used to over-consumption of meat, alcohol, spices and condiments, etc., are greatly benefited by Nux vomica, which I usually give in the 3x potency with excellent results. If there is at the same time much acidity, vegetable charcoal is very helpful. The orthodox doctor prescribes vegetable charcoal in enormous quantities. The most palatable form consists of charcoal biscuits, and there are patients who eat charcoal biscuits all day long. Their tongues are as black as ink.
Charcoal in large quantities is extremely dangerous. It frequently produces stones in the bowel. I have seen cases of diverticulitis apparently caused by vegetable charcoal taken in large quantities. In such patients pouches are formed along the bowel wall which are filled with black stones as large as marbles, consisting of vegetable charcoal.
In giving a diet sheet to nerve cases one must aim at eliminating anaemia, feeding up the patients who are too thin, reducing the weight of patients who are too stout, and thinning the blood of the plethoric. The thin and underfed should be given milky foods rather than milk, because milk taken neat is apt to clot in the stomach and to produce indigestion and constipation. I prescribe, as a rule, weak china tea half milk, and all kinds of milky foods for the thin, and in a few weeks they are in much better condition. The anaemic should be given dark vegetables, dark fruit, black treacle and other foods rich in iron.
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.