How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
Chapter Two
The Nature and Cause of Disease
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Toxemia. [1] "Toxemia is the basic cause of
all so-called diseases. In the process of tissue-building (metabolism), there
is cell-building (anabolism) and cell destruction (catabolism). The broken-down
tissue is toxic. In the healthy body (when nerve energy is normal), this toxic
material is eliminated from the blood as fast as it is evolved. But when nerve
energy is dissipated from any cause (such as physical or mental excitement or
bad habits) the body becomes weakened or enervated. When the body is enervated,
elimination is checked. This, in turn, results in a retention of toxins in the
blood--the condition which we speak of as toxemia. This state produces a crisis
which is nothing more than heroic or extraordinary efforts by the body to eliminate
waste or toxin from the blood. It is this crisis which we term disease. Such
accumulation of toxin when once established, will continue until nerve energy
has been restored to normal by removing the cause. So-called disease is nature's
effort to eliminate toxin from the blood. All so-called diseases are crises
of toxemia." John H. Tilden, M.D., Toxemia Explained. [2] Toxins
are divided into two groups; namely exogenous, those formed in the alimentary
canal from fermentation and decomposition following imperfect or faulty digestion.
If the fermentation is of vegetables or fruit, the toxins are irritating, stimulating
and enervating, but not so dangerous or destructive to organic life as putrefaction,
which is a fermentation set up in nitrogenous matter--protein-bearing foods,
but particularly animal foods. Endogenous toxins are autogenerated. They are
the waste products of metabolism. Dr. John. H. Tllden, Impaired Health: Its
Cause and Cure, 1921.
Experts then proffer answers. "Because there are too
many cars," says the Get A Horse Society. The auto makers suggest it is because
there are uncoordinated traffic lights and because almost all the businesses send
their employees home at the same time. Easy to fix! And no reason whatsoever to limit
the number of cars. The asphalt industry suggests it is because the size and amount
of roads is inadequate.
What do we do then? Tax cars severely until few can afford
them? Legislate opening and closing hours of businesses to stagger to'ing and fro'ing?
Hire a smarter municipal highway engineer to synchronize the traffic lights? Build
larger and more efficient streets? Demand that auto companies make cars smaller so
more can fit the existing roads? Tax gasoline prohibitively, pass out and give away
free bicycles in virtually unlimited quantities while simultaneously building mass
rail systems? What? Which?
When we settle on a solution we have simultaneously chosen
what we consider the real, underlying cause of the problem. If our chosen reason
was the real reason. then our solution results in a real cure. If we picked wrongly,
our attempt at solution may result in no cure, or create a worse situation than we
had before.
The American Medical Association style of medicine (a philosophy
I will henceforth call allopathic) has a model that explains the causes of illness.
It suggests that anyone who is sick is a victim. Either they were attacked by a "bad"
organism--virus, bacteria, yeast, pollen, cancer cell, etc.--or they have a "bad"
organ--liver, kidney, gall bladder, even brain. Or, the victim may also have been
cursed by bad genes. In any case, the cause of the disease is not the person and
the person is neither responsible for creating their own complaint nor is the victim
capable of making it go away. This institutionalized irresponsibility seems useful
for both parties to the illness, doctor and patient. The patient is not required
to do anything about their complaint except pay (a lot) and obediently follow the
instructions of the doctor, submitting unquestioningly to their drugs and surgeries.
The physician then acquires a role of being considered vital to the survival of others
and thus obtains great status, prestige, authority, and financial remuneration.
Perhaps because the sick person is seen to have been victimized,
and it is logically impossible to consider a victimizer as anything but something
evil, the physician's cure is often violent, confrontational. Powerful poisons are
used to rejigger body chemistry or to arrest the multiplication of disease bacteria
or to suppress symptoms; if it is possible to sustain life without them, "bad,"
poorly-functioning organs are cut out.
I've had a lot of trouble with the medical profession. Over
the years doctors have made attempts to put me in jail and keep me in fear. But they
never stopped me. When I've had a client die there has been an almost inevitable
coroner's investigation, complete with detectives and the sheriff. Fortunately, I
practice in rural Oregon, where the local people have a deeply-held belief in individual
liberty and where the authorities know they would have had a very hard time finding
a jury to convict me. Had I chosen to practice with a high profile and had I located
Great Oaks School of Health in a major market area where the physicians were able
to charge top dollar, I probably would have spent years behind bars as did other
heroes of my profession such as Linda Hazzard and Royal Lee.
So I have acquired an uncomplimentary attitude about medical
doctors, a viewpoint I am going to share with you ungently, despite the fact that
doing so will alienate some of my readers. But I do so because most Americans are
entirely enthralled by doctors, and this doctor-god worship kills a lot of them.
However, before I get started on the medicos, let me state
that one area exists where I do have fundamental admiration for allopathic medicine.
This is its handling of trauma. I agree that a body can become the genuine victim
of fast moving bullets. It can be innocently cut, smashed, burned, crushed and broken.
Trauma are not diseases and modern medicine has become quite skilled at putting traumatized
bodies back together. Genetic abnormality may be another undesirable physical condition
that is beyond the purview of natural medicine. However, the expression of contra-survival
genetics can often be controlled by nutrition. And the expression of poor genetics
often results from poor nutrition, and thus is similar to a degenerative disease
condition, and thus is well within the scope of natural medicine.
Today's suffering American public is firmly in the AMA's
grip. People have been effectively prevented from learning much about medical alternatives,
have been virtually brainwashed by clever media management that portrays other medical
models as dangerous and/or ineffective. Legislation influenced by the allopathic
doctors' union, the American Medical Association, severely limits or prohibits the
practice of holistic health. People are repeatedly directed by those with authority
to an allopathic doctor whenever they have a health problem, question or confusion.
Other types of healers are considered to be at best harmless as long as they confine
themselves to minor complaints; at worst, when naturopaths, hygienists, or homeopaths
seek to treat serious disease conditions they are called quacks, accused of unlicensed
practice of medicine and if they persist or develop a broad, successful, high-profile
and (this is the very worst) profitable practice, they are frequently jailed.
Even licensed MDs are crushed by the authorities if they
offer non-standard treatments. So when anyone seeks an alternative health approach
it is usually because their complaint has already failed to vanish after consulting
a whole series of allopathic doctors. This highly unfortunate kind of sufferer not
only has a degenerative condition to rectify, they may have been further damaged
by harsh medical treatments and additionally, they have a considerable amount of
brainwashing to overcome.
The AMA has succeeded at making their influence over information
and media so pervasive that most people do not even realize that the doctors' union
is the source of their medical outlook. Whenever an American complains of some malady,
a concerned and honestly caring friend will demand to know have they yet consulted
a medical doctor. Failure to do so on one's own behalf is considered highly irresponsible.
Concerned relatives of seriously ill adults who decline standard medical therapy
may, with a great show of self-righteousness, have the sick person judged mentally
incompetent so that treatment can be forced upon them. When a parent fails to seek
standard medical treatment for their child, the adult may well be found guilty of
criminal negligence, raising the interesting issue of who "owns" the child,
the parents or the State.
It is perfectly acceptable to die while under conventional
medical care. Happens all the time, in fact. But holistic alternatives are represented
as stupidly risky, especially for serious conditions such as cancer. People with
cancer see no choice but to do chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery because
this is the current allopathic medical approach. On some level people may know that
these remedies are highly dangerous but they have been told by their attending oncologist
that violent therapies are their only hope of survival, however poor that may be.
If a cancer victim doesn't proceed immediately with such treatment their official
prognosis becomes worse by the hour. Such scare tactics are common amongst the medical
profession, and they leave the recipient so terrified that they meekly and obediently
give up all self-determinism, sign the liability waiver, and submit, no questions
asked. Many then die after suffering intensely from the therapy, long before the
so-called disease could have actually caused their demise. I will later offer alternative
and frequently successful (but not guaranteed) approaches to treating cancer that
do not require the earliest-possible detection, surgery or poisons.
If holistic practitioners were to apply painful treatments
like allopaths use, ones with such poor statistical outcomes like allopaths use,
there would most certainly be witch hunts and all such irresponsible, greedy quacks
would be safely imprisoned. I find it highly ironic that for at least the past twenty
five hundred years the basic principle of good medicine has been that the treatment
must first do no harm. This is such an obvious truism that even the AMA doctors pledge
to do the same thing when they take the Hippocratic Oath. Yet virtually every action
taken by the allopath is a conscious compromise between the potential harm of the
therapy and its potential benefit.
In absolute contrast, if a person dies while on a natural
hygiene program, they died because their end was inevitable no matter what therapy
was attempted. Almost certainly receiving hygienic therapy contributed to making
their last days far more comfortable and relatively freer of pain without using opiates.
I have personally taken on clients sent home to die after they had suffered everything
the doctors could do to them, told they had only a few days, weeks, or months to
live. Some of these clients survived as a result of hygienic programs even at that
late date. And some didn't. The amazing thing was that any of them survived at all,
because the best time to begin a hygienic program is as early in the degenerative
process as possible, not after the body has been drastically weakened by invasive
and toxic treatments. Later on, I'll tell you about some of these cases.
Something I consider especially ironic is that when the patient
of a medical doctor dies, it is inevitably thought that the blessed doctor did all
that could be done; rarely is any blame laid. If the physician was especially careless
or stupid, their fault can only result in a civil suit, covered by malpractice insurance.
But let a holistic practitioner treat a sick person and have that person follow any
of their suggestions or take any natural remedies and have that person die or worsen
and it instantly becomes the natural doctor's fault. Great blame is placed and the
practitioner faces inquests, grand juries, manslaughter charges, jail time and civil
suits that can't be insured against.
Allopathic medicine rarely makes a connection between the
real causes of a degenerative or infectious disease and its cure. The causes are
usually considered mysterious: we don't know why the pancreas is acting up, etc.
The sick are sympathized with as victims who did nothing to contribute to their condition.
The cure is a highly technical battle against the illness, whose weapons are defined
in Latin and far beyond the understanding of a layperson.
Hygienic medicine presents an opposite view. To the naturopath,
illness is not a perplexing and mysterious occurrence over which you have no control
or understanding. The causes of disease are clear and simple, the sick person is
rarely a victim of circumstance and the cure is obvious and within the competence
of a moderately intelligent sick person themselves to understand and help administer.
In natural medicine, disease is a part of living that you are responsible for, and
quite capable of handling.
Asserting that the sick are pitiable victims is financially
beneficial to doctors. It makes medical intervention seem a vital necessity for every
ache and pain. It makes the sick become dependent. I'm not implying that most doctors
knowingly are conniving extortionists. Actually most medical doctors are genuinely
well-intentioned. I've also noticed that most medical doctors are at heart very timid
individuals who consider that possession of a MD degree and license proves that they
are very important, proves them to be highly intelligent, even makes them fully qualified
to pontificate on many subjects not related to medicine at all.
Doctors obtain an enormous sense of self-importance at medical
school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of any free spirit
unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or more years. Anyone incapable
of absorbing and regurgitating huge amounts of rote information; anyone with a disrespectful
or irreverent attitude toward the senior doctor-gods who arrogantly serve as med
school professors, anyone like this was eliminated with especial rapidity. When the
thoroughly submissive, homogenized survivors are finally licensed, they assume the
status of junior doctor-gods.
But becoming an official medical deity doesn't permit one
to create their own methods. No no, the AMA's professional oversight and control
system makes continued possession of the license to practice (and the high income
that usually comes with it) entirely dependent on continued conformity to what is
defined by the AMA as "correct practice." Any doctor who innovates beyond
strict limits or uses non-standard treatments is in real danger of losing their livelihood
and status.
Not only are licensed graduates of AMA-sanctioned medical
schools kept on a very tight leash, doctors of other persuasions who use other methods
to heal the sick or help them heal themselves are persecuted and prosecuted. Extension
of the AMA's control through regulatory law and police power is justified in the
name of preventing quackery and making sure the ignorant and gullible public receives
only scientifically proven effective medical care.
Those on the other side of the fence view the AMA's oppression
as an effective way to make sure the public has no real choices but to use union
doctors, pay their high fees and suffer greatly by misunderstanding of the true cause
of disease and its proper cure. If there are any actual villains responsible for
this suppressive tragedy some of them are to be found in the inner core of the AMA,
officials who may perhaps fully and consciously comprehend the suppressive system
they promulgate.
Hygienists usually inform the patient quite clearly and directly
that the practitioner has no ability to heal them or cure their condition and that
no doctor of any type actually is able to heal. Only the body can heal itself, something
it is eager and usually very able to do if only given the chance. One pithy old saying
among hygienists goes, "if the body can't heal itself, nothing can heal it."
The primary job of the hygienic practitioner is to reeducate the patient by conducting
them through their first natural healing process. If this is done well the sick person
learns how to get out of their own body's way and permit its native healing power
to manifest. Unless later the victim of severe traumatic injury, never again will
that person need obscenely expensive medical procedures. Hygienists rarely make six
figure incomes from regular, repeat business.
This aspect of hygienic medicine makes it different than
almost all the others, even most other holistic methods. Hygiene is the only system
that does not interpose the assumed healing power of a doctor between the patient
and wellness. When I was younger and less experienced I thought that the main reason
traditional medical practice did not stress the body's own healing power and represented
the doctor as a necessary intervention was for profit. But after practicing for over
twenty years I now understand that the last thing most people want to hear is that
their own habits, especially their eating patterns and food choices, are responsible
for their disease and that their cure is to only be accomplished through dietary
reform, which means unremittingly applied self-discipline.
One of the hardest things to ask of a person is to change
a habit. The reason that AMA doctors have most of the patients is they're giving
the patients exactly what they want, which is to be allowed to continue in their
unconscious irresponsibility.
The Cause Of Disease
Ever since natural medicine arose in opposition to the violence
of so-called scientific medicine, every book on the subject of hygiene, once it gets
past its obligatory introductions and warm ups, must address The Cause of Disease.
This is a required step because we see the cause of disease and its consequent cure
in a very different manner than the allopath. Instead of many causes, we see one
basic reason why. Instead of many unrelated cures, we have basically one approach
to fix all ills that can be fixed.
A beautiful fifty cent word that means a system for explaining
something is paradigm, pronounced para-dime. I am fond of this word because it admits
the possibility of many differing yet equally true explanations for the same reality.
Of all available paradigms, Natural Hygiene suits me best and has been the one I've
used for most of my career.
The Natural Hygienist's paradigm for the cause of both degenerative
and infectious disease is called the Theory of Toxemia, or "self-poisoning."
Before explaining this theory it will help many readers if
I digress a brief moment about the nature and validity of alternative paradigms.
Not too many decades ago, scientists thought that reality was a singular, real, perpetual--that
Natural Law existed much as a tree or a rock existed. In physics, for example, the
mechanics of Newton were considered capital "T" True, the only possible
paradigm. Any other view, not being True, was False. There was capital "N"
natural capital "L" law.
More recently, great uncertainty has entered science; it
has become indisputable that a theory or explanation of reality is only true only
to the degree it seems to work; conflicting or various explanations can all work,
all can be "true." At least, this uncertainty has overtaken the hard, physical
sciences. It has not yet done so with medicine. The AMA is convinced (or is working
hard to convince everyone else) that its paradigm, the allopathic approach, is Truth,
is scientific, and therefore, anything else is Falsehood, is irresponsibility, is
a crime against the sick.
But the actual worth or truth of any paradigm is found not
in its "reality," but in its utility. Does an explanation or theory allow
a person to manipulate experience and create a desired outcome. To the extent a paradigm
does that, it can be considered valuable. Judged by this standard, the Theory of
Toxemia must be far truer than the hodgepodge of psuedoscience taught in medical
schools. Keep that in mind the next time some officious medical doctor disdainfully
informs you that Theory of Toxemia was disproven in 1927 by Doctors Jeckel and Hyde.
Why People Get Sick
This is the Theory of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles continually
to purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced while going about its business
of digesting food, moving about, and repairing itself. The body is a marvelous creation,
a carbon, oxygen combustion machine, constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste
products of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by replacing worn out, dead
cells with new, fresh ones. Every seven years virtually every cell in the body is
replaced, some types of cells having a faster turnover rate than others, which means
that over a seven year period several hundred pounds of dead cells must be digested
(autolyzed) and eliminated. All by itself this would be a lot of waste disposal for
the body to handle. Added to that waste load are numerous mild poisons created during
proper digestion. And added to that can be an enormous burden of waste products created
as the body's attempts to digest the indigestible, or those tasty items I've heard
called "fun food." Add to that burden the ruinous effects of just plain
overeating.
The waste products of digestion, of indigestion, of cellular
breakdown and the general metabolism are all poisonous to one degree or another.
Another word for this is toxic. If these toxins were allowed to remain and accumulate
in the body, it would poison itself and die in agony. So the body has a processing
system to eliminate toxins. And when that system does break down the body does die
in agony, as from liver or kidney failure.
The organs of detoxification remove things from the body's
system, but these two vital organs should not be confused with what hygienists call
the secondary organs of elimination, such as the large intestine, lungs, bladder
and the skin, because none of these other eliminatory organs are supposed to purify
the body of toxins. But when the body is faced with toxemia, the secondary organs
of elimination are frequently pressed into this duty and the consequences are the
symptoms we call illness.
The lungs are supposed to eliminate only carbon dioxide gas;
not self-generated toxic substances. The large intestine is supposed to pass only
insoluble food solids (and some nasty stuff dumped into the small intestine by the
liver). Skin eliminates in the form of sweat (which contains mineral salts) to cool
the body, but the skin is not supposed to move toxins outside the system. But when
toxins are flowed out through secondary organs of elimination these areas become
inflamed, irritated, weakened. The results can be skin irritations, sinusitis or
a whole host of other "itises" depending on the area involved, bacterial
or viral infections, asthma. When excess toxemia is deposited instead of eliminated,
the results can be arthritis if toxins are stored in joints, rheumatism if in muscle
tissues, cysts and benign tumors. And if toxins weaken the body's immune response,
cancer.
The liver and the kidneys, the two heroic organs of detoxification,
are the most important ones; these jointly act as filters to purify the blood. Hygienists
pay a lot of attention to these organs, the liver especially.
In an ideal world, the liver and kidneys would keep up with
their job for 80 years or more before even beginning to tire. In this ideal world,
the food would of course, be very nutritious and free of pesticide residues, the
air and water would be pure, people would not denature their food and turn it into
junk. In this perfect world everyone would get moderate exercise into old age, and
live virtually without stress. In this utopian vision, the average healthy productive
life span would approach a century, entirely without using food supplements or vitamins.
In this world doctors would have next to no work other than repairing traumatic injuries,
because everyone would be healthy. But this is not the way it is.
In our less-than-ideal world virtually everything we eat
is denatured, processed, fried, salted, sweetened, preserved; thus more stress is
placed on the liver and kidneys than nature designed them to handle. Except for a
few highly fortunate individuals blessed with an incredible genetic endowment that
permits them to live to age 99 on moose meat, well-larded white flour biscuits, coffee
with evaporated milk and sugar, brandy and cigarettes (we've all heard of someone
like this), most peoples' liver and kidneys begin to break down prematurely. Thus
doctoring has become a financially rewarding profession.
Most people overburden their organs of elimination by eating
whatever they feel like eating whenever they feel like it. Or, they irresponsibly
eat whatever is served to them by a mother, wife, institution or cook because doing
so is easy or expected. Eating is a very habitual and unconscious activity; frequently
we continue to eat as adults whatever our mother fed us as a child. I consider it
unsurprising that when people develop the very same disease conditions as their parents.
they wrongly assume the cause is genetic inheritance, when actually it was just because
they were putting their feet under the same table as their parents.
Toxemia also comes about from following the wrongheaded recommendations
of allopathic-inspired nutritional texts and licensed dietitians. For example, people
believe they should eat one food from each of the four so-called basic food groups
at each meal, thinking they are doing the right thing for their health by having
four colors of food on every plate, when they really aren't. What they have actually
done is force their bodies to attempt the digestion of indigestible food combinations,
and the resulting indigestion creates massive doses of toxins. I'll have a lot more
to say about that later when I discuss the art of food combining.
Starches
Proteins
Fats
Sugars
Watery Vegetables
bread
meats
butter
honey
zucchini
potatoes
eggs
oils
fruit
green beans
noodles
fish
lard
sugar
tomatoes
manioc/yuca
most nuts
nuts
molassas
peppers
baked goods
dry beans
avocado
malt syrup
eggplant
grains
nut butters
maple syrup
radish
winter squash
split peas
dried fruit
rutabaga
parsnips
lentils
melons
turnips
sweet potatoes
soybeans
carrot juice
Brussels sprouts
yams
tofu
beet juice
celery
taro root
tempeh
cauliflower
plantains
wheat grass juice
broccoli
beets
"green" drinks
okra
spirulina
lettuce
algae
endive
yeast
cabbage
dairy
carrots
* Standard dietitians divide our foods into four basic food groups
and recommend the ridiculous practice of mixing them at every meal. This guarantees
indigestion and lots of business for the medical profession. This chart illustrates
the actual food groups. It is usually a poor practice to mix different foods from
one group with those from another.
The Digestive Process
After we have eaten our four-color meal--often we do this
in a hurry, without much chewing, under a lot of stress, or in the presence of negative
emotions--we give no thought to what becomes of our food once it has been swallowed.
We have been led to assume that anything put in the mouth automatically gets digested
flawlessly, is efficiently absorbed into the body where it nourishes our cells, with
the waste products being eliminated completely by the large intestine. This vision
of efficiency may exist in the best cases but for most there is many a slip between
the table and the toilet. Most bodies are not optimally efficient at performing all
the required functions, especially after years of poor living habits, stress, fatigue,
and aging. To the Natural Hygienist, most disease begins and ends with our food;
most of our healing efforts are focused on improving the process of digestion.
Digestion means chemically changing the foods we eat into
substances that can pass into the blood stream and circulate through the body where
nutrition is used for bodily functions. Our bodies use nutritional substances for
fuel, for repair and rebuilding, and to conduct an incredibly complex biochemistry.
Scientists are still busily engaged in trying to understand the chemical mysteries
of our bodies. But as bewildering as the chemistry of life is, the chemistry of digestion
itself is actually a relatively simple process, and one doctors have had a fairly
good understanding of for many decades.
Though relatively straightforward, a lot can and does go
wrong with digestion. The body breaks down foods with a series of different enzymes
that are mixed with food at various points as it passes from mouth to stomach to
small intestine. An enzyme is a large, complex molecule that has the ability to chemically
change other large, complex molecules without being changed itself. Digestive enzymes
perform relatively simple functions--breaking large molecules into smaller parts
that can dissolve in water.
Digestion starts in the mouth when food is mixed with ptyalin,
an enzyme secreted by the salivary glands. Pylatin converts insoluble starches into
simple sugars. If the digestion of starchy foods is impaired, the body is less able
to extract the energy contained in our foods, while far worse from the point of view
of the genesis of diseases, undigested starches pass through the stomach and into
the gut where they ferment and thereby create an additional toxic burden for the
liver to process. And fermenting starches also create gas.
As we chew our food it gets mixed with saliva; as we continue
to chew the starches in the food are converted into sugar. There is a very simple
experiment you can conduct to prove to yourself how this works. Get a plain piece
of bread, no jam, no butter, plain, and without swallowing it or allowing much of
it to pass down the throat, begin to chew it until it seems to literally dissolve.
Pylatin works fast in our mouths so you may be surprised at how sweet the taste gets.
As important as chewing is, I have only run into about one client in a hundred that
actually makes an effort to consciously chew their food.
Horace Fletcher, whose name has become synonymous with the
importance of chewing food well (Fletcherizing), ran an experiment on a military
population in Canada. He required half his experimental group to chew thoroughly,
and the other half to gulp things down as usual,. His study reports significant improvement
in the overall health and performance of the group that persistently chewed. Fletcher's
report recommended that every mouthful be chewed 50 times for half a minute before
being swallowed. Try it, you might be very surprised at what a beneficial effect
such a simple change in your approach to eating can make. Not only will you have
less intestinal gas, if overweight you will probably find yourself getting smaller
because your blood sugar will elevate quicker as you are eating and thus your sense
of hunger will go away sooner. If you are very thin and have difficulty gaining weight
you may find that the pounds go on easier because chewing well makes your body more
capable of actually assimilating the calories you are consuming.
A logical conclusion from this data is that anything that
would prevent or reduce chewing would be unhealthful. For example, food eaten when
too hot tends to be gulped down. The same tends to happen when food is seasoned with
fresh Jalapeño or habaneo peppers. People with poor teeth should blend or mash
starchy foods and then gum them thoroughly to mix them with saliva. Keep in mind
that even so-called protein foods such as beans often contain large quantities of
starches and the starch portion of protein foods is also digested in the mouth.
Once the food is in the stomach, it is mixed with hydrochloric
acid, secreted by the stomach itself, and pepsin, an enzyme. Together these break
proteins down into water-soluble amino acids. To accomplish this the stomach muscles
agitate the food continuously, somewhat like a washing machine. This extended churning
forms a kind of ball in the stomach called a bolis.
Many things can and frequently do go wrong at this stage
of the digestive process. First, the stomach's very acid environment inactivates
pylatin, so any starch not converted to sugar in the mouth does not get properly
processed thereafter. And the most dangerous misdigetion comes from the sad fact
that cooked proteins are relatively indigestible no matter how strong the constitution,
no matter how concentrated the stomach acid or how many enzymes present. It is quite
understandable to me that people do not wish to accept this fact. After all, cooked
proteins are so delicious, especially cooked red meats and the harder, more flavorful
fishes.
To appreciate this, consider how those enzymes that digest
proteins work. A protein molecule is a large, complex string of amino acids, each
linked to the next in a specific order. Suppose there are only six amino acids: 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So a particular (imaginary) protein could be structured: 1, 4,
4, 6, 2, 3, 5, 4, 2, 3, 6, 1, 1, 2, 3, etc. Thus you should see that by combining
a limited number of amino acids there can be a virtually infinite number of proteins.
But proteins are rarely water soluble. As I said a few paragraphs
back, digestion consists of rendering insoluble foods into water-soluble substances
so they can pass into the blood stream and be used by the body's chemistry. To make
them soluble, enzymes break down the proteins, separating the individual amino acids
one from the other, because amino acids are soluble. Enzymes that digest proteins
work as though they are mirror images of a particular amino acid. They fit against
a particular amino acid like a key fits into a lock. Then they break the bonds holding
that amino acid to others in the protein chain, and then, what I find so miraculous
about this process, the enzyme is capable of finding yet another amino acid to free,
and then yet another.
So with sufficient churning in an acid environment, with
enough time (a few hours), and enough enzymes, all the recently eaten proteins are
decomposed into amino acids and these amino acids pass into the blood where the body
recombines them into structures it wants to make. And we have health. But when protein
chains are heated, the protein structures are altered into physical shapes that the
enzymes can't "latch" on to. The perfect example of this is when an egg
is fried. The eggwhite is albumen, a kind of protein. When it is heated, it shrivels
up and gets hard. While raw and liquid, it is easily digestable. When cooked, largely
indigestable.
Stress also inhibits the churning action in the stomach so
that otherwise digestible foods may not be mixed efficiently with digestive enzymes.
For all these reasons, undigested proteins may pass into the gut.
Along with undigested starches. When starches convert best
to sugars under the alkaline conditions found in the mouth. Once they pass into the
acid stomach starch digestion is not as efficient. If starches reach the small intestine
they are fermented by yeasts. The products of starch fermentation are only mildly
toxic. The gases produced by yeast fermentations usually don't smell particularly
bad; bodies that regularly contain starch fermentation usually don't smell particularly
bad either. In otherwise healthy people it can take many years of exposure to starch
fermentation toxins to produce a life-threatening disease.
But undigested proteins aren't fermented by yeasts, they
putrefy in the gut (are attacked by anaerobic bacteria). Many of the waste products
of anaerobic putrefaction are highly toxic and evil smelling; when these toxins are
absorbed through the small or large intestines they are very irritating to the mucous
membranes, frequently contributing to or causing cancer of the colon. Protein putrefaction
may even cause psychotic symptoms in some individuals. Meat eaters often have a very
unpleasant body odor even when they are not releasing intestinal gasses.
Adding a heavy toxic burden from misdigested foods to the
normal toxic load a body already has to handle creates a myriad of unpleasant symptoms,
and greatly shortens life. But misdigestion also carries with it a double whammy;
fermenting and/or putrefying foods immediately interfere with the functioning of
another vital organ--the large intestine--and cause constipation.
Most people don't know what the word constipation really
means. Not being able to move one's bowels is only the most elementary type of constipation.
A more accurate definition of constipation is "the retention of waste products
in the large intestine beyond the time that is conducive to health." Properly
digested food is not sticky and exits the large intestine quickly. But improperly
digested food (or indigestible food) gradually coats the large intestine, making
an ever-thicker lining that interferes with the intestine's functioning. Far worse,
this coating steadily putrefies, creating additional highly-potent toxins. Lining
the colon with undigested food can be compared to the mineral deposits filling in
the inside of an old water pipe, gradually choking off the flow. In the colon, this
deposit can become rock-hard, just like water pipe scale.
Since the large intestine is also an organ that removes moisture
and water-soluble minerals from the food and moves them into the blood stream, when
the large intestine is lined with putrefying undigested food waste, the toxins of
this putrefaction are also steadily moved into the bloodstream and place an even
greater burden on the liver and kidneys, accelerating their breakdown, accelerating
the aging process and contributing to a lot of interesting and unpleasant symptoms
that keep doctors busy and financially solvent. I'll have quite a bit more to say
about colon cleansing later.
The Progress Of Disease: Irritation, Enervation, Toxemia
Disease routinely lies at the end of a three-part chain that
goes: irritation or sub-clinical malnutrition, enervation, toxemia. Irritations are
something the person does to themselves or something that happens around them. Stresses,
in other words.
Mental stressors include strong negative emotional states
such as anger, fear, resentment, hopelessness, etc. Behind most diseases it is common
to find a problematic mind churning in profound confusion, one generated by a character
that avoids responsibility. There may also be job stress or ongoing hostile relationships,
often within the family.
Indigestible foods and misdigestion are also stressful irritations,
as are mild recreational poisons such as "soft" drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
Opiates are somewhat more toxifying, primarily because they paralyze the gut and
induce profound constipation. Stimulants like cocaine and amphetamines are the most
damaging recreational drugs ; these are highly toxic and rapidly shorten life.
Repeated irritations and/or malnutrition eventually produce
enervation. The old-time hygienists defined enervation as a lack of or decline in
an unmeasurable phenomena, "nerve energy." They viewed the functioning
of vital organs as being controlled by or driven by nerve force, sometimes called
life force or élan vital. Whatever this vital force actually is, it can be observed
and subjectively measured by comparing one person with another. Some people are full
of it and literally sparkle with overflowing energy. Beings like this make everyone
around them feel good because they somehow momentarily give energy to those endowed
with less. Others possess very little and dully plod through life.
As vital force drops, the overall efficiency of all the body's
organs correspondingly decline. The pancreas creates less digestive enzymes; the
thymus secretes less of its vital hormones that mobilize the immune system; the pituitary
makes less growth hormone so the overall repair and rebuilding of cells and tissues
slows correspondingly; and so forth. It does not really matter if there is or is
not something called nerve energy that can or cannot be measured in a laboratory.
Vital force is observable to many people. However, it is measurable by laboratory
test that after repeated irritation the overall functioning of the essential organs
and glands does deteriorate.
Enervation may develop so gradually that it progresses below
the level of awareness of the person, or times of increased enervation can be experienced
as a complaint--as a lack of energy, as tiredness, as difficulties digesting, as
a new inability to handle a previously-tolerated insult like alcohol.
Long-term consumption of poor-quality food causes enervation.
The body is a carbon/oxygen engine designed to run efficiently only on highly nutritious
food and this aspect of human genetic programming cannot be changed significantly
by adaptation. Given enough generations a human gene pool can adapt to extracting
its nutrition from a different group of foods. For example, a group of isolated Fijians
currently enjoying long healthy lives eating a diet of seafoods and tropical root
crops could suddenly be moved to the highlands of Switzerland and forced to eat the
local fare or starve. But most of the Fijians would not have systems adept at making
those enzymes necessary to digest cows milk. So the transplanted Fijians would experience
many generations of poorer health and shorter life spans until their genes had been
selected for adaptation to the new dietary. Ultimately their descendants could become
uniformly healthy on rye bread and dairy products just like the highland Swiss were.
However, modern industrial farming and processing of foodstuffs
significantly contributes to mass, widespread enervation in two ways. Humans will
probably adjust to the first; the second will, I'm sure, prove insurmountable. First,
industrially processed foods are a recent invention and our bodies have not yet adapted
to digesting them. In a few more generations humans might be able to accomplish that
and public health could improve on factory food. In the meanwhile, the health of
humans has declined. Industrially farmed foods have also been lowered in nutritional
content compared to what food could be. I gravely doubt if any biological organism
can ever adapt to an overall dietary that contains significantly lowered levels of
nutrition. I will explain this more fully in the chapter on diet.
Secondary Eliminations Are Disease
However the exact form the chain from irritation or malnutrition
to enervation progresses, the ultimate result is an increased level of toxemia, placing
an eliminatory burden on the liver and kidneys in excess of their ability. Eventually
these organs begin to weaken. Decline of liver and/or kidney function threatens the
stability and purity of blood chemistry. Rather than risk complete incapacitation
or death from self-poisoning, the overloaded, toxic body, guided by its genetic predisposition
and the nature of the toxins (what was eaten, in what state of stress), cleverly
channels surplus toxins into its first line of defense--alternative or secondary
elimination systems.
Most non-life-threatening yet highly annoying disease conditions
originate as secondary eliminations. For example, the skin was designed to sweat,
elimination of fluids. Toxemia is often pushed out the sweat glands and is recognized
as an unpleasant body odor. A healthy, non-toxic body smells sweet and pleasant (like
a newborn baby's body) even after exercise when it has been sweating heavily. Other
skin-like organs such as the sinus tissues, were designed to secrete small amounts
of mucus for lubrication. The lungs eliminate used air and the tissues are lubricated
with mucus-like secretions too. These secretions are types of eliminations, but are
not intended for the elimination of toxins. When toxins are discharged in mucus through
tissues not designed to handle them, the tissues themselves become irritated, inflamed,
weakened and thus much more subject to bacterial or viral infection. Despite this
danger, not eliminating surplus toxins carries with it the greater penalty of serious
disability or death. Because of this liability, the body, in its wisdom, initially
chooses secondary elimination routes as far from vital tissues and organs as possible.
Almost inevitably the skin or skin-like mucus membranes such as the sinuses, or lung
tissues become the first line of defense.
Thus the average person's disease history begins with colds,
flu, sinusitis, bronchitis, chronic cough, asthma, rashes, acne, eczema, psoriasis.
If these secondary eliminations are suppressed with drugs (either from the medical
doctor or with over the counter remedies), if the eating or lifestyle habits that
created the toxemia are not changed, or if the toxic load increases beyond the limits
of this technique, the body then begins to store toxins in fat or muscle tissues
or the joint cavities, overburdens the kidneys, creates cysts, fibroids, and benign
tumors to store those toxins. If toxic overload continues over a longer time the
body will eventually have to permit damages to vital tissues, and life-threatening
conditions develop.
Hygienic doctors always stress that disease is remedial effort.
Illness comes from the body's best attempt to lighten its toxic load without immediately
threatening its survival. The body always does the very best it can to remedy toxemia
given its circumstances, and it should be commended for these efforts regardless
of how uncomfortable they might be to the person inhabiting the body. Symptoms of
secondary elimination are actually a positive thing because they are the body's efforts
to lessen a dangerously toxic condition. Secondary eliminations shouldn't be treated
immediately with a drug to suppress the process. If you squelch the bodies best and
least-life-threatening method to eliminate toxins, the body will ultimately have
to resort to another more dangerous though probably less immediately uncomfortable
channel.
The conventional medical model does not view disease this
way and sees the symptoms of secondary elimination as the disease itself. So the
conventional doctor takes steps to halt the body's remedial efforts, thus stopping
the undesirable symptom and then, the symptom gone, proclaims the patient cured.
Actually, the disease is the cure.
A common pattern of symptom suppression under the contemporary
medical model is this progression: treat colds with antihistamines until the body
gets influenza; suppress a flu repeatedly with antibiotics and eventually you get
pneumonia. Or, suppress eczema with cortisone ointment repeatedly, and eventually
you develop kidney disease. Or, suppress asthma with bronkiodialators and eventually
you need cortisone to suppress it. Continue treating asthma with steroids and you
destroy the adrenals; now the body has become allergic to virtually everything.
The presence of toxins in an organ of secondary elimination
is frequently the cause of infection. Sinuses and lungs, inflamed by secondary eliminations,
are attacked by viruses or bacteria; infectious diseases of the skin result from
pushing toxins out of the skin. More generalized infections also result from toxemia;
in this case the immune system has become compromised and the body is overwhelmed
by an organism that it normally should be able to resist easily. The wise cure of
infections is not to use antibiotics to suppress the bacteria while simultaneously
whipping the immune system; most people, including most medical doctors, do not realize
that antibiotics also goose the immune system into super efforts. But when one chooses
to whip a tired horse, eventually the exhausted animal collapses and cannot rise
again no matter how vigorously it is beaten. The wise cure is to detoxify the body,
a step that simultaneously eliminates secondary eliminations and rebuilds the immune
system.
The wise way to deal with the body's eliminative efforts
is to accept that disease is an opportunity to pay the piper for past indiscretions.
You should go to bed, rest, and drink nothing but water or dilute juice until the
condition has passed. This allows the body to conserve its vital energy, direct this
energy toward healing the disordered body part, and catch up on its waste disposal.
In this way you can help your body, be in harmony with its efforts instead of working
against it which is what most people do.
Please forgive another semi-political polemic here, but in
my practice I have often been amazed to hear my clients complain that they have not
the time nor the ability to be patient with their body, to rest it through an illness
because they have a job they can't afford to miss or responsibilities they can't
put down. This is a sad commentary on the supposed wealth and prosperity of the United
States. In our country most people are enslaved by their debts, incurred because
they had been enthralled by the illusion of happiness secured by the possession of
material things. Debt slaves believe they cannot miss a week of work. People who
feel they can't afford to be sick think they can afford to live on pills. So people
push through their symptoms by sheer grit for years on end, and keep that up until
their exhausted horse of a body breaks down totally and they find themselves in the
hospital running up bills to the tune of several thousand dollars a day. But these
very same people do not think they can afford the loss of a few hundred dollars of
current income undertaking some virtually harmless preventative maintenance on their
bodies.
Given half a chance the body will throw off toxic overburdens
and cleanse itself. And once the body has been cleansed of toxemia, disagreeable
symptoms usually cease. This means that to make relatively mild but unwanted symptoms
lessen and ultimately stop it is merely necessary to temporarily cut back food intake,
eating only what does not cause toxemia. These foods I classify as cleansing, such
as raw fruits and vegetables and their juices. If the symptoms are extreme, are perceived
as overwhelming or are actually life-threatening, detoxification can be speeded up
by dropping back to only dilute raw juices or vegetable broth made only from greens,
without eating the solids. In the most extreme cases hygienists use their most powerful
medicine: a long fast on herb teas, or just water. I will have a lot to say about
fasting, later.
When acutely ill, the most important thing to do is to just
get out of the body's way, and let it heal itself. In our ignorance we are usually
our own worst enemy in this regard. We have been very successfully conditioned to
think that all symptoms are bad. But I know from experience that people can and do
learn a new way of viewing the body, an understanding that puts them at cause over
their own body. It allows you to be empowered in one more area of life instead of
being dependent and at the mercy of other peoples decisions about your body.
Finally, and this is why natural medicine is doubly unpopular,
to prevent the recurrence of toxemia and acute disease states, person must discover
what they are doing wrong and change their life. Often as not this means elimination
of the person's favorite (indigestible) foods and/or (stress-producing) bad habits.
Naturally, I will have a lot more to say about this later, too.
Go To Chapter Three
HOME HYGIENIC
LIBRARY CATALOG