A very wise old teacher of medicine once said: “Ninety per cent of all disease would recover spontaneously if nothing is done by the physician or attendants to prevent.” If this dictum were limited to acute disease it might read ninety-nine per cent.
The Public Health Service states that ninety per cent of disease is unnecessary, preventable, and the recent survey ordered by Ex-President Hoover placed the cost of medical care with all its attendant outlay and loss of time, at fifteen billions of dollars. If ninety per cent of this outlay is preventable it must give us pause in these times of deficits to consider how much money we are wasting. If the loss were limited to actual outlay, even this could be borne with equanimity, but what of those who are not hospitalized, or even attended in their homes? Are they delivering the utmost of their ability in creative work? Are they accomplishing as much for their families or the nation at large as would be the case were they one hundred per cent well?.
One is not well one moment and sick the next, but a gradual upbuilding of disease causes may culminate suddenly in patent illness. Disease is the result of many years of partial function, a gradual accumulation in the body of its own acid end- products of both digestion and metabolism, or, in other words, excretion is not equal to intake.
Now how dies a body functioning below the normal level, sick, inefficient, recover to the previous normal?.
If it is true that ninety per cent of disease would recover spontaneously if nothing is done to interfere, then we can not escape the conclusion that the process of recovery is inherent in the body. We must conclude that recovery does not depend on the remedies given, but on the bodys ability to eliminate the accumulations that have interfered with function and restore this to the normal. It is unthinkable that function can region the former normal after illness unless the causes that produced the cataclysm that we call disease have been discontinued, for, obviously, a continuance of the cause will insure a continuance of the manifestation of this cause.
Recovery, then, presupposes a discontinuance of he exciting causes, whatever these have been. To obliterate a symptom complex is not to insure recovery in any sense of the word, for the continuance of the cause is bound to again produce the same or some other manifestation of disrepair and lowered function.
We are all familiar with the repair processes of the external parts of of the body, as abrasions, cuts, wounds, loss of nails or hair, and fully except that the body is able to repair these evidence of dysfunction easily and completely, yet we do not seem to apply this same knowledge to the internal parts. What we see on the surface if merely evidence of what goes on inside, and it is no more certain that the internal repairs cannot be made without discontinuance of the causes of disrepair than that the finger nail will fail to grow if we continually hit it with a hammer, and no less true, for they are identical conditions.
When we are acutely ill nature does the best she can to discontinue the causes of our illness. She takes away our appetite, and if this is not sufficient, she often adds nausea and vomiting, to make certain that we can no longer pollute the body with debris that is embarrassing to its perfect function. Often in severe colds and influenza even the taste is gone, so that all food is tasteless, or has a perverted and highly disagreeable taste.
If it were possible to continue the food causes of disease without diminution during illness then are would be no recoveries, but a continual deepening of both causes and manifestation.
In the face of this statement, what are we to do with those who feed during illness, and boast that they never lower the intake during typhoid or pneumonia or other severe illness?.
When we so balk nature in her attempt to stop the intake till elimination has measurably caught up, we compel her to use other methods, so she inhibits the power to digest foods or even to absorb the results of digestion.
Thus all those cases that recover from acute illness without interruption of he intake of food do so in spite of this, and never because of it.
Nature is striving continually to bring the human model back of perfection, and for growth does not cease when full stature is attained, as we naively think, for every day we die call by cell, and the process of repair is merely a continuance of the principle of growth. The internal organs we have this year are not the ones we have a few years ago; in fact, some of the cells, as those of the blood stream, have an extremely short life cycle, the red cell, the erythrocyte, having a complete cycle of life that lasts but a very few weeks; and the blood stream we have today is not that of a few weeks ago.
Our patients present themselves with a definite symptom complex, and we go into a huddle with these, aided by repertories and materia medica, and attempt to find a suitable and usually exact similimum for this complex.
We perhaps succeed, and lo! the symptoms are no more, our patient is gratified, and great is our reputation. Yet, have we done any constructive good in obliterating these symptoms?.
Annoying symptoms have disappeared permanently in many cases, with great relief and often noticeable improvement in general health; yet, if we follow this case through life we will find other and other complexes developing, with, too often, the development of chronic organic disease in the end. Why is this? Simply because the body continues to be fouled by the same percentage of unexcreted waste, debris, acid-auto-toxicosis, that must find expression in many efforts of the body to clean house by the familiar crises that we mistakenly call disease.
If we could only realize that each crisis is merely an acute effort of the body to clean house, we would not waste to much time a search for a similimum for the symptoms but would assist in the house-cleaning process, inhibit the intake of acid-forming material, even to the point of total deletion of all intake for a time, and we would be rewarded by a disappearance of the symptoms without study for, symptoms are a record of the bodys struggle to keep clean inside.
Were this not easily demonstrable, then it would be a rash statement to make, that the body puts out symptoms merely as an indication of its effort to clean house.
The law of similars does work, as the writer has had ample opportunity to observe during forty-three years of general and specialized practice through both the general field and that of the sanatorium. But during the early years of his practice, when he was depending on the Hahnemannian idea, he was gratified by the exactness of the prescription many, many times, only to find some other manifestation of disrepair showing in other and varied forms, and was at a loss to account for this fact. Even though his education was of the allopathic variety, with surgery as his main objective, yet he learned in the first few months of practice that to put into the human body various chemicals and minerals which were not integral to it, was taking a long chance on the ability of this most wonderful machine to eliminate these extraneous substances, and he shrank from the material doses, and in an intensive study of homoeopathy he found the principles applicable to all sorts of cases without fear of harm, and with what he then thought splendid results.
Now, after twenty-seven years of strict application of the principles of nutritional correction he would not think of taking time to look up remedies, unless some very annoying symptom of long duration were becoming intolerable, when the chronic nature of the complaint might make recovery too tedious.
In acute troubles it is so easy and so quick of application, and its results are so completely satisfying, that he looks first to a detergent purge of simple salines, followed by thorough emptying of the colon and complete inhibition of all nourishment. These measures so quickly allay fever, bring relief from pain or other discomforts,and so rapidly initiate recovery, that he has not in several years found in necessary to administer any similimum.
Pneumonias are cut to forty-eight hours, as a rule, especially if free perspiration also can be induced. Typhoid fevers seldom showed temperature after the end of the second week, and were usually at work in another week, even if of the nervous type. Asthmatic attacks attacks usually disappeared in a night, unless of years standing.
Acute appendicitis does not admit of the purge, as colonic stasis is present, but the thorough emptying to the colon by means of repeated enemata, the application of the ice bag, entire rest of the digestive tract, with rest in bed, has seldom failed to shorten the attack to a few minutes or seldom longer than an hour, with the victim at work the next day. Perforations, if walled off, follow the same course, but require forty-eight or more hours for drainage through the colon, and in not one case of any type or degree of appendicitis has there been death or surgical intervention during these twenty-seven years. The indications are plain: Stop all intake of trouble-making material, empty the colon, and wait, thus giving nature time to repair the damage done.
