A recent conversation with someone who claims to understand health and wellness prompted me to do some research on the history and dangers of medicine. Already having a knowledge for this I was amazed to learn some important issues surrounding the broad topic.
"One of the biggest tragedies of human civilization is the precedents of chemical therapy over nutrition. It's a substitution of artificial therapy over nature, of poisons over food, in which we are feeding people poisons trying to correct the reactions of starvation." Dr. Royal Lee, January 12, 1951
Since early Egyptian times, it has been recognized that obedience to physiological law is a prerequisite for maintaining health. Hippocrates is supposed to have said that the physician should have two special objectives regarding disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. According to the Hippocratic concept, the doctor is the servant, the "helper" of pthisis (nature). He said, "It is important to help, or at least not to harm."
The very early physicians knew of the importance of obeying these natural laws and their practices evolved around this concept. Today there is an increasing body of scientific evidence which supports these concepts and more attention is now being devoted to diet, exercise and the other natural essentials of health.
During the very early years when man was evolving into the being we know today, he knew nothing about science and medicine yet his bones healed, his wounds healed and life went on. Primitives, like animals, instinctively relied upon their own intrinsic powers of healing.
During the 19th century, medical sects arose out of opposition to the so-called "heroic" treatment of their day and they shared some success. When we study each of these sects which arose during that time, we begin to see certain patterns emerging. The highest success rate was among those practitioners who did the least harm and allowed "nature's healing powers" to work unhampered.
By "nature's healing power" I do not mean a specific entity for healing but a capacity which resides in all living animals to heal themselves and to maintain a steady state. The goal of life is to maintain life and the body always strives toward a healthy state. Problems arise when too many obstacles are thrown in the path of this effort. The role of the Hygienic practitioner is to remove those obstacles by teaching his students how to correct those errors in living which caused his illness and making sure that all of the conditions for health are supplied in the proper quantity and quality. It is important that all of these conditions are present at the same time as health cannot be achieved if any of them are missing or lacking. These conditions include proper food, pure air, pure water, sunshine, rest and sleep, exercise and emotional poise. The body then becomes the healing force. This is demonstrated in wound healing, healing of broken bones, in self-limited diseases such as colds, flu, etc.
When we consume such unnatural and unwholesome foods as the highly refined products which are so popular today, we build disease. We inflict our illnesses upon ourselves by poor dietary habits, lack of sleep, a sedentary lifestyle and other unhealthy habits. We then develop atherosclerosis, cancer, kidney stones, or ulcers from our own wrong actions. We cannot eliminate these errors in living by taking a drug. We must look amongst our practices for the "cure."
The cell is a homeostatic mechanism requiring precise entry of nutrients and elimination of wastes. These wastes result from ongoing metabolic activity and the deterioration of structural elements. With proper nutrition and detoxification, the cell is programmed for specific functions. Assuming these functions are healthy cells and tissue that lead to healthy organs that lead to a healthy organism.
Since illness is the result of unhealthful practices, then health should be restored by removing these causes and supplying the conditions for health. This is the philosophy of the drugless practitioners. They do not add further contaminants to an already toxic organism by dispensing drugs but rely on natural means which depend upon the body's own ability to heal.
History Of Drugs
The oldest known written record of drug use is a clay tablet from the ancient Sumerian civilization of the Middle East. This tablet, made in the 2000's B.C., lists about a dozen drug prescriptions. An Egyptian scroll from about 1550 B.C. names more than 800 prescriptions containing about 700 drugs.
Ancient peoples used many drugs. An Egyptian physician, for example, tried to cure blindness by pouring a mixture of honey, pig's eye, and other ingredients into the patient's ear. But occasionally people who had taken drugs as remedies would recover naturally. As a result, they credited the drugs for their healing.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the demand for drugs remained high and pharmacies became increasingly common in Europe and the Arab world.
In the early 1500s, the Swiss physician Philippus Paracelsus pioneered the use of minerals as drugs. He introduced many compounds of lead, mercury, and other minerals in the treatment of various diseases.
The drug revolution began about 1800 and has continued up to the present. During this period, scientists have discovered hundreds of drugs. Scientists learned how to isolate drugs from plants in the early 1800s. In 1806, morphine became the first plant drug to be isolated. Within a few years scientists had isolated quinine and several other plant drugs.
The pace of the drug revolution quickened in the 1900s. In fact, most of the major drugs used today have been discovered since 1900, such as hormones, antibiotics, and sulfa drugs.
What Are Drugs?
Pharmacologists consider all chemicals that affect living things to be drugs. Stedman's Medical Dictionary defines a drug as "A therapeutic agent; any substance, other than food, used in the prevention, diagnosis, alleviation, treatment, or cure of disease in man and animal."
The truth is that all drugs are poisons and always do much harm, even when taken in small quantities. The body reacts defensively to all foreign substances which are introduced. This response is mistakenly attributed to the action of me drug when in fact the drugs do not act mechanically to produce any response. It is the body which acts upon the drugs in its efforts to dispose of this dangerous substance as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Hygienists know that the living organism is dynamic and full of energy. Its self-reparative and restorative ability remains intact as long as energy is abundant. Over 100 years ago Dr. R.T. Trall demonstrated the difference between lifeless matter and the living organism. He said that the living organism is active and the lifeless matter is passive.
Drugs are passive inert substances which have no magical powers to impart life and health to a living organism. Drugs combine chemically with the chemical constituents of the body where they do much harm by interfering with normal life processes.
Drugs Produce Disease
People take so-called headache remedies, stimulants, anesthetics, pain killers, sleeping pills and narcotics for the temporary relief they afford. As a direct consequence of drug poisoning, gastric ulcer, anemia, kidney disease or any of many other ailments many develop. The pathologies these poisons occasion are added to the disease for which they are given. This is to say, physician-made diseases are worse than the natural disease.
It has been said that drug-treated patients have to recover twice—first, they have to recover from the original disease and, second, they have to recover from the drug-induced disease. The fact is that every drug is a poison and every drug produces disease. All too often patients are killed by the drug and, in an even greater number of cases, where the drug does not kill, it produces permanent harm. In fact, the most common cause of chronic disease is drug treatment for acute disease.
There are no harmless drugs; there are no safe drugs. All of them, even the least toxic, result in the production of pathologies, if they are repeatedly administered, even in small doses. It is certainly unwise to continue drug practices, especially in the face of the fact that they produce only ills. For example, what good comes from the administration of cortisone for arthritis? The symptoms are temporarily suppressed; the patient may be provided a certain measure of relief from pain, but the sufferer's condition inevitably becomes worse and recovery is more difficult. The ultimate result is increased suffering for a brief respite from pain. This is true of all suppressive measures. Both physician and patient are deluded into believing that some suffering is being saved, but the later increased suffering outweighs the brief periods of freedom from pain. In fact, the increased suffering is usually of longer duration than the periods of comfort and is far more acute than the periods of "relief."
There are no drugs now used by the medical profession and there were no drugs used by any of the schools of medicine in the past that did not and do not produce disease.
Side Effects
If a drug, which is a chemical substance, unites with the protein of the cell, it destroys the cell. It is precisely to prevent this union and thus to save the life of the cell that the drug is resisted, rejected and expelled. All the action that is mistaken for drug action is cellular or organic action designed to protect and preserve life.
When a drug is picked up by the blood, either from the digestive tract or from the site of the injection, it is carried by this medium throughout the body, so that it comes in contact with tissues everywhere. The so-called side effects of drugs are the actions of the different tissues with which the drug comes in contact in rejecting, resisting and expelling the drug. So-called drug effects are not drug actions but vital actions.
If a drug may be employed and it suppresses symptoms, it is said to be good. That the drug may produce unwanted effects at the same time it suppresses the symptoms is, of course, unfortunate and the physician hopes that the "side" effects will not be too great or that he can stop the drug if the "side" effects threaten to become formidable.
Hygienists know how to avoid these poisonous effects. They simply avoid all drugs. We cannot be poisoned into health.
Why Drugs Should Not Be Used
As you have learned from previous lessons, disease is a body-conducted remedial process. It is an effort on the part of the organism to repair and heal itself. You have also learned that disease is not something lurking in the bushes ready to attack the first person who passes by it. Rather it is occasioned by our own transgressions of life's laws.
Drugs cause disease and only disease. They do not prevent or eradicate it. Ingestion of drugs adds further toxins to an already toxic organism. Further, it is very enervating for the body to deal with drugs. The less vital energy the body has, the less equipped it will be to initiate healing.
Further, taking drugs does not solve the problem. One cannot attain health by suppressing symptoms. The problems of ill health still remain and the person is usually worse off than before he or she began taking the drugs. We are, in effect, telling our body a lie when we take drugs. We attempt to deceive it into thinking that this or that drug will be the "miracle cure." But in reality, we are hurting our body more by taking these poisonous substances.
Healing powers are possessed solely by the living organism. It is always in force and is forever functioning in the body in sickness or health. Hygienists cannot "cure"; they have no "cures." Neither has anyone else.
Outside of the human body, man cannot make blood; he cannot produce a cell; he cannot mend a broken bone; he cannot repair a wound. All that he may do is to remove all interfering factors, whether internal or external, and supply the normal conditions for life. After that, the organs and processes of life do the work of healing.
People do not become well if the causes of their illnesses are not discontinued and their modes of living are not corrected. Enervating habits cripple their functioning powers so that they remain toxic. They can get well as soon as they cease to build disease.
A toxic state of the body develops and slowly devitalizes the tissues for years, resulting in delayed healing and degeneration in injured or devitalized parts. When men live in a manner to maintain a continuous toxin saturation, they are in line for the development of any disease to which diathesis or environment determines them.
It is foolish to suppress symptoms. Let us consider a cough. It is a vigorous, forceful and dramatic expulsion of air from the lungs and is accomplished by sudden contractions of the walls of the chest and of the diaphragm. It is intended to force obstructing and irritating matter (mucus, blood, water, particles of dust, smoke, gas, etc.) from the air passages. In pneumonia, coughing keeps the lungs cleared of exudate so that breathing remains possible. The cough is part of the remedial effort, not an attack upon the body from without. If the cough is checked or suppressed by drug devitalization, passages tend to fill with exudate. Checking the cough definitely, reduces the patient's chances of recovery.
Analogous to coughing is diarrhea. Like coughing, diarrhea is a dramatic acceleration of a normal physiological action. It is a bowel action and is, designed to free the colon, perhaps even the small intestines, of unwanted material. The unwanted substance may be unsuitable, or decaying food or drugs, or it may be a mineral water. In any case, the diarrhea is a remedial effort. To check the diarrhea while there is a need for it is to lock up, as it were, in the food tube the unsuitable material the diarrhea is intended to remove. The diarrhea automatically ends when its purpose is served and no suppression is necessary.
What The Body Does When Drugs Are Taken
The first thing the body does when drugs are taken is to make an attempt at their removal through the bowels, the skin, the kidneys, the liver, the lungs, the mucous membranes, by vomiting or by other means.
Noxious materials within are either rejected or, failing that, shunted aside where they offer the least harm. Resistance and expulsion are self-preservative efforts on the part of the living organism. Sometimes due to lowered vitality, it is very difficult to expel certain toxic substances and may even be too difficult. Then the body adopts another technique for self-preservation—it stores them away in the bones' fatty tissues or even creates sacs called cysts or tumors for this purpose.
The poisonous quality of drugs that occasion vital defensive actions are termed the "medicinal action" of the drug.
Pharmacologists mistakenly believe that drugs have specific relations to various parts, organs, or structures of the organism, although they have never been able to verify it. Hence their belief in selective affinity, i.e. certain drugs act on one part of the body, and others act on other parts. Thus they classify drugs as cathartics, emetics, purgatives, diaphoretics, etc.
It is the body, the living organism, which chooses the way it can best expel drugs. Some drugs will be thrown out of the body via kidney excretion, which the pharmacologist will call diuretics, another by vomiting, and yet another by expectoration. Some drugs, because of their more poisonous nature, will be ejected by the body through as many channels as possible. Hence, its alleged "multiple actions."
Healing is a normal physiological or biological process. It results from the orderly operations of the ordinary and regular forces and processes of life, working with agents and substances that bear a normal relation to the living organism. Success of the body's efforts at self-healing depends absolutely upon removal of the cause of its ills. This is to say, the body mends itself when causes are removed. No healing can take place without removal of cause.
The force that is in any "medicinal action" is really vital power, that is, the power of the body itself. Understanding this property of living matter, we can clearly see that medicines do not at all act; do not furnish power for action; and do not in any mysterious way impart power to the body for its own action. The action occurring between the body and drugs is exclusively vital action, power being expended, not generated.
The organized body has remarkable powers of self-regulation, adjustment and distribution. When unhampered, it distributes its available energy to the various organs and tissues in proportion to their importance and needs.
Easily shown is that disease is a process of repair, renovation or healing; and that "cure" in the proper sense is nothing more nor less than the correction of those basic causes which necessitated, in the first place, the institution of disease. All disease phenomena exhibit vital action.
There is this relationship: unhygienic conditions of life give rise to a toxic state of the body. Toxicosis (or toxin saturation) develops beyond a point of vital toleration and evokes special eliminative efforts. These special efforts are the process called disease. Disease tends to free the body of its toxic overload. Disease is, itself, the healing process. Recognizing disease as the "cure," why employ drugs to stop it? Does that make sense? Is it working against the body's efforts to heal an exhibition of wisdom or ignorance?
Constructive disease is evidence of vitality. It is obvious, therefore, that therapy is anti-vital—destructive of the vital faculties of the body. Treatment by means of drugs is in reality directed against a beneficial, curative process. The remedy actually subdues vitality and with it physiological activity called "disease." This is harmful inasmuch as vitality is wasted, the restorative process is arrested, and poisonous substances are introduced into the system to lay the basis for further toxemic crises when vitality shall have been summoned to eject the "medicinal" accumulation. Thus the drug-treated body has a double liability: (1) The poisons introduced and (2) the continued retention of noxious materials because of suppressed remedial efforts.
To the extent that the body diverts energy to drug expulsion, to that extent a reduction in vital activities elsewhere in the body is occasioned. This usually results in the reduction of the remedial- process, or illness, not by removing its needs, but by a reduction of the vital power whereby it is conducted. Such a reduction comprises suppression.
It becomes apparent that you cannot indulge in the causes of disease and expect to be made free of its consequences. Physiology does not work that way. We cannot be made exempt from violations of Nature's laws.
The medical profession no longer advocates bloodletting, leeching, purging, puking, mercury treatments, tobacco and alcohol treatments, or a long list of other injurious and deadly practices of the past.
The medical profession, however, continues to defend drugging, vaccination, blood transfusion and a whole host of injurious and deadly practices. How long will it take them to admit the fact that these practices also require condemnation?
The Poisoning Practice by Virginia Vetrano, B.S., D.C.
Beginning about twenty-five hundred years ago and making but little headway in public patronage until the time of the renaissance, the drug system has now completely blanketed the earth. So great has grown popular reliance upon the drug practice and so thoroughly have the people been indoctrinated in the belief in drugs, that the practice has become a greater threat to mankind than the nuclear bomb. The drug system is filling the land with side effects of drugs, filling hospitals with iatrogenic diseases, the jails with drug addicts, the mental institutions with drug-induced psychoses and the graveyards with the premature dead.
In the great main the drug system is a system of spectacular palliation. Physicians are for the most part engaged in providing the sick with temporary and doubtful relief from their discomforts. Instead of seeking for and removing the causes of suffering, physicians seem to be content to provide questionable and evanescent respite from pain and discomfort.
A patient says to a physician, "I have a headache, what should I do?" The physician is likely to reply, "Here, take this aspirin."
As an outstanding example of this kind of practice and its results, let me briefly go over a case history that I recently received from a guest of the Health School.
A young girl, age 21, arrived at the Health School with the following story: at the age of thirteen she developed severe abdominal pains and was taken to the hospital and operated on for appendicitis. Later it was discovered that this was not her trouble as she still suffered with the same pains after the operation. Her parents reentered her in the hospital for an exploratory operation, during which the physician found lymphatic tumors in the abdominal cavity. Soon after this operation she developed epilepsy, and had to make frequent trips to the hospital for tests. She had all the diagnostic X rays known and many other diagnostic procedures for epilepsy. There were an array of diagnoses, first hypoglycemia, then hyperglycemia, then high blood pressure, then low blood pressure. One diagnosis contradicted another, and there was no end to the diagnoses, but they never could ascertain the reason for her epilepsy. Her brain waves appeared normal on the electroencephalogram .
Every known drug for epilepsy was given her, but she said that they only made her worse. Her physician insisted that she continue taking the drug despite the increased incidence of her convulsions. In desperation he finally decided to use new experimental drugs, but with the same results—no decrease in her epileptic fits. Is it any wonder that she developed kidney trouble, after this treatment? Soon she couldn't have normal micturition but required a catheter. For five weeks straight, she was forced to have the catheter in place. During this time, she complained that 'they injected drugs through the catheter into the bladder in an effort to reach an infection. It was during this period in the hospital that she began losing the ability to walk. After this her sight and hearing became impaired. It was then that her physician told her parents that she wouldn't live and sent her home to die.
She was indeed a victim of the curing practice. There is no wonder that at the hospital she lost her ability to walk, see and hear, as she said she had to take 200 pills a day, every day. Furthermore, she was force fed, and had seven shots a day. Despite her continual complaint of lack of appetite, they made her eat.
Her parents took their dying child home. Here she became more a master of herself. She was disgusted with having to take so many drugs that were apparently making her worse. She said no one but a blind person could fail to see that she was steadily growing worse under this treatment.
When she arrived home, she had to be carried to bed. Sensing that the drugs were making her worse, and with the permission of her father, she quit 90% of them. She was afraid to quit all of them at once. Disgusted with the encumbering and uncomfortable catheter, she took it out. She noticed immediate improvement in her health. Her eyesight improved, her impaired hearing became normal and almost overnight she found that she could walk again. Within five hours her bladder was functioning satisfactorily.
When it was lime to make her regular trip to the epileptic clinic, she walked in unaided. Her M.D. marveled at her improvement and called in other practitioners to show off the miracle. The girl that couldn't walk, that was dying just a few weeks before, walked in unaided! Her drugs were indeed miracle workers! He immediately prescribed more of the same. He never learned that she had quit taking most of her drugs. It was after this that she presented herself to the Hygienist.
Can she regain the high level health she had at birth? How much recovery can she make after being subjected to such treatment? It is doubtful that she can regain the high level health of which her pristine organism was capable. Drugs and surgery have made of her a cripple. This girl has adamantine determination, however, and I'm sure that she will recover as much health as is possible.
The Hygienist has little to work with when a patient comes to him machine gunned with X rays, vandalized by the surgeon's knife and enervated by the drugging practice. Can you imagine a family afraid to try natural and harmless methods after subjecting their daughter to all the most pernicious practices of our times? Her family was against her from the start and she had to plead, beg and cajole them into letting her stay long enough to take a lengthy fast. Because of her medical abuse, I was fearful of taking her as anything may happen on a fast after such treatment, and her parents would have been the first to point an accusing finger.
At the end of 18 days of fasting they told her she would have to come home soon. I immediately broke her fast in order that she would be able to travel. She began having mild convulsions soon after taking juices, and developed a slight fever and symptoms of acute distress. There was nothing to do but place her back on the fast and let nature continue the healing process. Somehow she persuaded her parents to let her stay longer. They were very apprehensive and couldn't believe that she could live through 18 days of fasting. When she continued on through 58 days of fasting, they were sure she could not even walk down to the phone and talk to them. During the second fast she passed kidney stones. During her second fast and subsequently she had no convulsions and has not reported any since leaving here.
How soon she will reach positive and top level health depends upon how well she carries out her Hygienic living. But as mentioned at the beginning of this article, she will have her limitations because of medical bungling.
It is unfortunate but most everyone coming to the Health School has his limitations in recovery because of his prior use of drugs, X rays and surgery. It is not only the elderly, whose health has been wrecked by drugs and surgery, but younger and younger person's, organisms are impaired because of their physicians' poisons and their surgeons' knives.
Daily we receive clippings in the mail from Canada and the United States describing the evils attributed to drugs, but the drugging continues. Neither patients nor physicians lose their faith in magic potions. It seems that very few people ever lose their faith in the physician with his armamentarium of poisons. Despite all the enlightenment of hazardous effects of drugs in the papers today, physicians and their patrons cling to the belief in their efficacy and harmlessness. The drugging continues.
The title of an article received recently, is "No Drugs During Pregnancy," then in small letters "unless absolutely necessary." These were the words of Dr. Benirschlese, research pathologist of animal pregnancies. To prevent pregnant mothers from refusing drugs a loop hole is always left for the physician to deem the taking of a drug absolutely necessary. Intelligent mothers, fearing it may hurt their baby, may balk at taking their physicians' prescriptions and ruffle their physicians' pride. He can then assure them that he is giving the drug only because it is "absolutely necessary" in each instance.
Dr. Benirshchlese said "even such simple drugs as sleeping pills have unknown effects on unborn children." He continues, "We don't really know what effect different drugs have on the human fetus but we do know they bring about changes in animals."
Are we not of the animal kingdom? Are we intangible angels? We are of the animal kingdom and we have the most complex and differentiated organism of any animal on earth. Because of this complexity, many more things can go wrong with human physiology than with the physiology of a lower animal. We can also enjoy greater functioning capacity than the lower animals because of our increased complexity of structure.
A simple machine has fewer things to go wrong than a more complex one. The slightest change in complex machine will immediately upset its workings, whereas a little flaw in a simple machine may not result in any modification of the machine until the damage becomes immense, then it is easily fixed.
Being the most complex living organism, man is more sensitive to inimical agents and influences than are the lower animals. It has been shown that man is more sensitive to radiation than the mouse, so also is he more sensitive to drug poisons.
A significant remark made by Benirschlese was exactly what Dr. Shelton has been saying for years, that a "nine-month gestation period in humans makes research difficult and long-term effects of drug use should be studied until a child is twenty years old." Minute impairments of vital organs from drugging may not manifest until a child has reached maturity. The increase in microcephaly, liver damage, heart trouble, kidney trouble, diabetes, and cancer in younger and younger people makes us wonder just how many of these young people would not have suffered if their parents had not taken drugs while these children were in utero.
The vigor that was manifested in our pioneers and in the Amerinds is not seen today in our youth and middle aged. This is certainly due in part to our greater dependence upon the medical profession to care for the slightest bruise, cut or headache, and the prescriptions of drug poisons given for these mild afflictions.
Recently a jury awarded a child $500,000 because her mother was given demerol, a drug used to lessen pain during labor, and the child failed to develop mentally. The child was chronologically seven but had the mind of a three-year old. The drug was not supposed to be given to mothers of premature babies. Despite the prematurity of her baby, this woman's physician gave her the drug.
Another clipping received by mail stated "digitalis drug poisons many patients." The article states , "digitalis, one of the most commonly-used drugs for treating heart failure, causes some form of poisoning in an unbelievably unusually high proportion of the patients who take it." John Ruedy of the McGill University said this is happening because of "improper" use of the drug.
I should like to point out that there is no such thing as the proper use of a drug poison. They are poison no matter how given. They never prolong life but always shorten it, and make more uncomfortable whatever life is left in the patient. Drugs greatly lessen the person's ability to get well Hygienically. They damage and lessen the vitality of every organ and organ system in the body.
When a drug is given to a man suffering with a weak heart, it weakens the heart still more. It is like whipping a tired horse to make him go. He expands more vital energy to get away from the whip, but he wears out quicker. The impaired heart must now pump more blood with each beat to help get the drug out of the system by increasing circulation. But the heart, in doing this, will wear out quicker than if left alone and patient rests. The heart needs rest not stimulation. Exhaustion of all the vital organs is the common result of such stimulation. Premature death is the result of stimulating people into such good "health."
With 5,000 new drugs being created each year, we should all remain healthy until the age of 140. We actually see more and more of the crippling disease, that people can't get well of (even by Hygienic means). All drugging impairs the organism's ability to function.
Instead of removing the causes of the impairment, people are drugged into insensibility in order that they may continue in their disease-producing ways until there are so many organic or morbid changes in the tissues that full recovery is impossible. The Tribune medical reporter states that this is creating one of the most pressing challenges in medical history; that of how to prevent the new drugs from causing other illnesses or side effects. This has led to the development of a new science, pharmacokinetics.
The very name of their "new" science indicates that they do not yet know the relation between lifeless and living matter—the former being passive and the latter active, always. Kinetics indicates movement and drugs do not move but are moved by the body to various parts of the body.
Pharmacologists freely admit that they don't know how their drugs act, or how the drugs achieve their therapeutic effect or that they act at all. They don't even bother to try to prove that drugs act.
If physicians, pharmacokineticists and pharmacologists could begin with a valid premise, their conclusions would be more likely to be correct. They would soon learn that all drugs are as inert in the living organism as in the pill bottle, and that all action attributed to the drug is body action. They would soon realize that these actions, occasioned by the drug, are the actions of the living organism expelling the drug because it is not useful, hence poisonous. As long as they attribute action to inanimate substances, they will continue to confuse themselves about the true nature of the drugging practice, and fail to see the destructiveness of their poisons.
Because of our self-preservative instincts, if a substance is introduced into the organic domain that it can't use, the cells in immediate contact with the drug, via our magnificent complex nervous system, alert the entire organism to the threat to its integrity. It is not one part of the body that resists a drug but many parts acting as a whole. It is the integral organism which acts to expel the drug before ii damages any one part too greatly.
Digitalis may be given to a man with a feeble heart and there is an immediate pick-up in the pumping ability of the heart, not because the drug acts on the heart but because the heart has to pump blood faster to the emunctory organs in order to save the whole from succumbing to the drug. The digitalis didn't stay in the heart; it didn't even have to be near the heart, for it to know that something poisonous was in the system and that it had to .step up its activities in order to do its share in the expulsion and rejection of the nonusable toxic substance.
Because the living organism has done all the acting, its energy is depleted in exact proportion to the amount of work it has had to do to eliminate the poison. His functioning power is permanently lowered, and much rest is needed to recover from the depletion. The already weak heart is more feeble than before the digitalis was taken.
Trall frequently clarified the explanation of the fact that it is the living system that acts and not the drug, by the following example: if you introduce a drug into a dead person, there will be no action whereas there should be more action if the drug acted, because there would be less resistance from a dead person's tissues than a live one. But the dead body cannot vomit it, it cannot develop diarrhea, nor do its kidneys function to expel it. The drug does nothing to a dead body, except chemically combine with the constituents of its tissues.
This is the difference between drugging a live person and a dead one. The live person resists the chemical union, and as long as it is alive it will continue to do so. For the chemical to combine with the constituents of the cell would mean death of the cell, and the formation of a third substance unlike the two which combined to form it. The living organism fights with herculean force to prevent the chemical union, and in doing so sometimes dies in the struggle. The cells had to die first before the chemical could combine with their constituents.
A debilitated old person cannot resist a drug as well as a healthy young person, for the same reason that a dead person can't act. The debilitated person has less energy to expend in eliminating the drug. Trail points out that if the drug acted, it should act with more force in a weak person because of less resistance from the weak organs, but we see the opposite.
I cannot repeat too often that anything that the living organism cannot make into living tissue or use in any of its metabolic processes is a poison. Drugs cannot fit this qualification, and hence are all poisons. Some are more virulent than others, depending upon their chemical compositions, but they all cripple the organism to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon how much ability a particular organism has to eliminate them.
Cells, tissues and organs are damaged in resisting and expelling drugs. This results in impaired function. Because much of the damage to the organism from drugs is permanent, complete recovery is impossible in those who have been drugged for years.
The damages of drugs are legion and we could fill many volumes with their evil effects, but I shall end this article by stating that if you desire to recover your health drugging is definitely not the answer. Drugs hinder the healing process and occasion diseases of their own.
The causes of disease must be removed. Then, the primordial requisites of life must be supplied in keeping with the living organism's ability to use them. Then and then only will the living organism be able to return to health. It will make as full recovery as is possible, depending upon how much previous damage has been done by the drugs. The fewer the drugs taken, the speedier and more complete the recovery.
