Читать книгу Intestinal Irrigation: Why, How and When to Flush the Colon - Alcinous B. Jamison - Страница 4

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In the year 1496 an Italian, Gatenaria, invented an appliance for taking an enema; since that time depuratory instruments have had more or less vogue in all civilized countries. Of late years inventive powers have been taxed to construct more convenient and effective appliances, and now perfection has been almost reached, and the poor civilizee, whose habits are really very bad from the savage point of view, may enjoy the delicious privilege of an internal bath whenever he feels the need of it. By any other name this bath is just as purifying: call it irrigation, injection, lavement, clyster, enema—its many names and what they mean testify to the fact that it is for the disease of civil­iza­tion.

The medical profession is really behind the layman in genuine therapeutic measures. It still cares more for the pill-and-powder-prescription-earning fee than for the real health of the patient. When it shall wean itself from its sordid commercialism, it will make the use of the enema a fundamental factor in most forms of therapeutic treatment, and then the enema will become universal.

From the origin of the enema to the present day, the layman has not been unmindful of this valuable resource for removing morbid matter from his physiological sewer. The great relief he thus obtained, and the invariably good results that followed its use, established as a necessary toilet article some form of depuratory apparatus in many homes for all time to come.

But of the nature of the disease that had occasioned its use, both layman and physician were, and for the most part are, ignorant. Local obstruction and discomfort were sufficient to suggest this mode of relief; yet no truly scientific inquiry seems to have been instituted to discover the cause of the obstruction. The author, during an experience of over twenty-three years as a specialist in diseases of the bowels, rectum, and anus, has found the true cause, namely, Proctitis; that is, the chronic inflammation (dating often from infancy and childhood) of the anus, rectum, and frequently of a portion of the sigmoid flexure and colon. Proctitis is practically the universal cause of chronic con­sti­pa­tion. Victims of con­sti­pa­tion have more or less haphazardly resorted to the enema as a ready means of relief—a recourse that was often, nay generally, against the advice of their medical counselor: a professional opposition that indicates either ignorance, mistaken judgment, or fear of losing a profitable patient. But the layman has not been uniformly wise. He is an experimenter on his own hook—encouraged in his experiments by the most promising and seductive of advertisements in the whole gamut of advertising. He experimented on his organism, tinkering it now with cathartics or purgatives of multiform nature, and again with digestive and other agents. This tinkering habit seems to have become all but universal with civilized man. Constipation—which is caused by proctitis—will, of course, bring indigestion and bilious­ness and diarrhea and nervous­ness and headache and a host of other maladies in its train; all of these induce the civilizee to increase his tinkering with his divine abode until it eventually falls in ruins. The tinkerer loses sight of the fact that his abode is not a body like the bodies of wood, stone, and iron that he handles and putters with daily; he forgets or ignores the fact that it is a vital organic machine, which, when tinkered too much, will stop, “never to go again.” It is poor consolation when you have reached your last gasp, after a chronic invalidism, to feel that you have done the best you knew how. You have not sought the cause, nor, having learned it somehow, sought to remove or avoid it. For the last four hundred years this tinkering, this futile medication, has been kept up at a furious pace without even a hope of permanent cure. Poor, outraged human nature dimly knew that it was simply doctoring a symptom, a consequence of something or other—for that is all that con­sti­pa­tion and its host of symptoms really are.

The writer is of the opinion that con­sti­pa­tion is the fundamental disease that afflicts mankind; that, at all events, there are more cases of proctitis than of any other disease; that very few “civilized” persons are free from it; that so prevalent a disease must have a common origin, which he traces right back to babyhood, to the wearing of soiled diapers, a practice that cannot but result in inflammation of the buttocks and mucous membrane of the anus and rectum; and that this inflammation continues and finally becomes deepened and established, producing in after years chronic con­sti­pa­tion and its train of evils. Of course, there are other causes that bring on proctitis among children and adults; but careful examination shows that the severity of the malady with its train indicates long duration in the tissues comprising the wall of the anal and rectal canals and the adjoining tissues of the bowels.

Proctitis, with its extension, colitis, is by no means a slight disease, as it is supposed to be by a few members of the medical fraternity who are beginning to apprehend its existence; on the contrary, it is so serious that its gravity cannot be impressed too forcibly upon both laymen and physicians. During the many years of special attention the writer has given to diseases of the anus, rectum, colon, etc., he has not ceased to wonder how it was possible that the victim of deep-seated proctitis could have so dreadful a disease and not be greatly alarmed at its ravages and dangers. The anatomy, physiology, and hygiene of the parts involved in this inflammation continue in some manner to permit the passage of excrement along the diseased canal; and the victim continues to swallow drugs and tinker with these—his irreplaceable “inards.”1

It is not my purpose at present to go into a detailed description of the organs involved in this inflammatory process, but to make plain why the enema is superior to all other means of securing cleanliness. When we know why we do a thing, the task is not so difficult and annoying as when we go it blind or simply obey the behest of a physician. Ignorance has no business bothering with anything; experience, however, is usually a painful if not a fatal instructor. The human race at large is ignorant concerning the normal and abnormal processes of its internal organs. “Out of sight, out of mind” seems to be the maxim of almost every one as to our vital organs and the conditions for their hygienic functioning. The purpose of the writer will be achieved if he succeed in sounding a note of warning that will be heard and heeded by those whose influence will extend the echoes till the world listens and learns the claims of the inner physiological economy.

Those that possess even a modicum of sense will easily understand how a muscular tube like the anus, rectum, sigmoid flexure, etc., when invaded and traversed for eight to ten or more inches by disease, will offer obstruction to the descent and escape of gases and feces. All are familiar with the contraction that occurs when a finger, hand, or limb is inflamed; how little we can then use the diseased part until all of the inflammation has left the muscular tissue. Why do we give so much attention to an inflamed external part and none at all to the all-important internal organ for the expulsion of the sewage of the body? The parts are not “weak” when contracted with inflammation: weakness is not what is the matter with them. The trouble is that the muscular fiber is then too active, made so by the excessive irritation of the local disorder. Irritation of muscular tissue always causes contraction of its fiber. Such contraction well accounts for con­sti­pa­tion.

We are a nation of con­sti­pated people, so con­sti­pated indeed that we have developed dyspepsia and neurasthenia. As I have already stated, the chief ill of “civilized” people is proctitis; the chief symptom of proctitis is con­sti­pa­tion; the chief symptom of con­sti­pa­tion is dyspepsia; and the chief symptom of dyspepsia is neurasthenia, and so on and on—all of them the outcome of imperfect elimination of morbid matter from the intestinal canal.

The common sense learned in the treatment of external parts should be applied to such diseased portions of the body as the anus, rectum, etc. Common sense declares that an enema ought to be used on all occasions of undue retention of the contents of the bowels. It is the only sensible thing under the circum­stances. Yet, for the last four hundred years, only independent men and women have had the courage to proclaim its merits, since the subject was under the ban of both laymen and physicians. Now that we have learned the absolute necessity of such a device, it is to be hoped that the taboo will be removed, and that the numerous victims of proctitis will be instructed in the wisdom of availing themselves of the valuable aid of the enema in either curing proctitis or preventing it from growing worse, while they are at the same time securing relief through its use by the removal of feces and gases several times daily, thus preventing the absorption of poison, which the retention of waste invariably facilitates.