Читать книгу Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration - Louis Dechmann - Страница 12

Table of Contents

In order to bring the entire system of regeneration under review, I shall here endeavour to present in condensed form all the essential points in my teachings. The reader will thus be enabled to picture to himself his body, with its vital organs, clearly as in a mirror; he will become familiarized with its composition and twelve principal tissues, as well as with the sixteen elements of which they consist.

Man is a unit, and the human body an accumulation of millions of separate cells, which are centres of life and which, in different groupings and combinations, form the various organs that render existence possible.

This existence is the natural sequel of the existence of former human beings. They generated the life that is to be transferred by us to other living beings.

The several functions of the organism combine to form a chain of activities in which there must not be a single link missing, if life is to continue.

These activities are comprised within an accumulation of cells which are by no means stationary, for life means nothing more than the constant dying, of the old cells and the reconstruction of the new. It means that the human body as a whole is continually in a state of composition and decomposition.

Not until the accumulation of cells we call the body is recognized as one complete correlated and inseparable entity and the absolute interdependence of the separate cells, each one upon the others, is likewise accepted as the verified fact that it is—not until then will the erroneous and obsolete idea be discarded, by which the various organs of the body have been professionally treated as separate and independent considerations, even to the extent of being dealt with, in cases of disease, as totally aloof from one another and conveniently classed as proper subjects for submission to the expert opinion of that superior class of physicians who devote their attention exclusively to special organs and are accordingly termed "Specialists."

Thus the question arises: What is the cause of disease? The question does not apply to any one particular form of disease or class of diseases, but to disease generally, as a concrete term meaning any disorder which may manifest itself by individual disturbances in the body; for such disturbance is but a variation in quantity or quality of one general disturbance, a variation in the mechanism that controls the work of keeping the existing cells in proper condition and replacing those cells which are constantly being destroyed. It is a variation in the process of regeneration, which we term life.

METABOLISM is the process which is constantly going on in the human system, whereby the cells that have been consumed by oxidation are removed through the excreta—the faeces, the urine, the perspiration, and the exhalations from the lungs—to be replaced by new ones.

Metabolism, means change of matter. It signifies the course by which nutritive material, or food, is built up into living matter. This process is accomplished through the blood, which distributes the necessary material to all parts of the body where cells need to be replaced and carries away the consumed portions.

In the marvelous performance of its functions, when properly supplied, it carries the elements that are essential to regeneration in the correct proportions. When not properly supplied, these proportions become incorrect and foreign formations may arise which are disturbing to the organism.

In nature there is a constant tendency to counterbalance disturbances in the proper proportion and by distribution of cell building material to restore the normal condition. We may thus speak of the overwhelmingly curative tendency of nature.

Metabolism is the function of the body which most constantly requires attention. So, therefore, it is always through the blood that we must assist nature in the process of counterbalancing and rectifying or healing abnormal conditions.

It follows then, that, despite the apparent variety in constitutional diseases, they are all practically the same. They are all disturbances of metabolism through some irregularity in the quantitative or qualitative condition of the blood.

Professor Jacob Moleschott, the great physiologist, has crystallized this truth in the immortal words: "One of the principal questions to be always asked of the physician is this: How may good healthy and active blood be obtained? View the question as we may, we shall be forced to acknowledge openly and explicitly or guardedly and indirectly that our volition, our sensations, our strength, and our pro-creative powers are dependent upon our blood and our blood upon our nutrition."

If such unity exists, why then the great difference in the human organs? How is it that a bone in its stonelike hardness is essentially the same as the exquisitely sensitive eye?

This is owing to the adaptive property of the cells, in the course of their enormous accumulation, to different functions, which, again, depends upon the varied arrangement of the constituent elements. These elements all find lodgement in the blood, and are carried by it in necessary quantities to the points where they are needed to assist the organs in replacing consumed matter.

The difficulty found in grasping this idea of unity has led to the most momentous errors in modern medical science.

One result has been the undue attention paid to the study of anatomy, insomuch that the different organs are regarded as wholly distinct groups of cells. This is convenient from a descriptive standpoint, but it tends too much to draw attention away from the source of life, and of health. Only by noting the common characteristics of the cell accumulations termed organs, are we enabled to supply the necessary elements that may be lacking. And thus we arrive at the subject of the chemical analysis of the human body and its various organs, a subject that has been badly neglected throughout the centuries.

It has been determined that the entire human body consists of a certain number of chemical elements, appearing in different aggregations in different parts. These aggregations repeating themselves in the various organs.

Twelve principal aggregations of chemical elements have been established and designated by the term tissues.

This fact led to the discovery of the truth that in the process of healing attention must be given, not to the various organs, but to the various tissues.

These tissues are dependent directly upon the condition and contents of the blood, whose office it is to nourish them and which exhibits the wonderful property of conveying to each tissue its selective regenerative materials, provided of course, that these elements are present at the time in the blood.

Sixteen definite elements have been established—and a seventeenth will probably soon be added thereto—which, in their various combinations and aggregations, form the different tissues of which the organs in the human body are composed.

The prevalence of one or several of these elements in a certain tissue forms the main or governing feature of that tissue. Thus, the prevalence of potassium phosphate characterizes muscle tissue, the prevalence of ammonium phosphate (lecithin) nerve tissue. Each one of the various tissues consists of certain of these elements, and each tissue at every point where it occurs is affected by the lack of any of its elements.

One of the greatest physiological chemists, Justus von Liebig, maintains that, if one of the necessary elements in a chemical composition is missing, the rest cannot fulfill their duties and the respective cells must become diseased and degenerate.

This discovery, known as "the law of the minimum," has thrown additional light upon the tasks before the new school of medicine.

Upon the basis of a careful diagnosis, the necessary nutritive salts or cell-foods, carefully compounded in accordance with the law of chemotaxis must be administered. This law discovered by Engelmann, requires that these cell-foods must be administered in digestible and assimilable forms so that the cells will be attracted by the chemical reaction, which may be of a positive or a negative character.

This being so, we can easily build up the tissues, by studying their chemical composition and supplying to the system that which is necessary, in the form of food. The cell will take care of the rest. Each tissue has its specific cell-system, and each cell will be attracted only by those ingredients which are needed for the mother tissue.

To bring to a tissue through the blood the lacking constituent element or elements is the only means of regenerating and healing diseased cells.

In this connection we are considering only constitutional diseases.

It has been shown that the lack of certain chemical elements from the blood signifies disease and that the variety of the disease depends on which of the elements are either lacking entirely or are present in incorrect proportion.

After this lack has been determined, the course to pursue in curing the disease is to supply the lacking chemical elements in the form of concentrated cell-food in addition to the regular food.

This method displaces entirely the old system of filling the body with poisonous drugs in order to counteract the effects of the disease. Such a system may suppress the symptoms by benumbing the nerves and preventing pain, it may counteract the natural process of healing of which inflammation, fever and pain, are the outward manifestations;—but it can never cure.

The discovery of dysaemia, or impaired blood supply, as the governing cause of disease, has destroyed another idol of modern fetish worship in medicine.

Since the discovery of various species of bacilli, which accompany nearly every form of disease in some form or other, these have been commonly declared to be the causes of diseases, and the tendency is to find some poison that will kill the bacilli in order to cure the disease.

The bacillus, on the contrary, is only the consequence, or symptom, of a disease. The diseased and decomposing parts furnish fertile soil suitable to the propagating of bacilli because of the lack of the normal chemical elements in the blood and tissue. But to kill them, while the underlying conditions for their reproduction remain unchanged, can, obviously, never effect a cure. So the great hopes that have attached to sero-therapy are doomed to disappointment, and the application of anti-toxins prepared from the serum of animals, are fated shortly to vanish in the wake of others of those strange temporary crazes which periodically obsess mankind for a while and pass away.

The discovery that a dysaemic condition of the blood leads to certain destructive processes termed diseases, was soon followed by the apprehension that one of the principal factors in bringing about such disturbance is predisposition—in many cases heredity.

The term "Hereditary disease" signifies that the improper chemical composition of the blood of one or both parents is transmitted to the offspring, and that it causes in them likewise a degeneration of certain tissues and of the organs composed of those tissues.

The hygienic-dietetic system of healing does not, however, regard heredity as an invincible enemy, especially since my discovery of the "Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics."

It is in the solution of this problem of "hereditary disease" that my system will eventually come into its own and will ere long be recognized as the most rational and effectual therapy ever applied since the beginning of the art of healing. It may be years before it is accorded the proverbially tardy acknowledgment of the "orthodox" schools, but that it will, nay must be eventually adopted is virtually a foregone conclusion—that is, if it be indeed the function or policy of the physician of the future to adequately seek to succour the suffering and regenerate the races of mankind. Of the physician of the present it can at best be said in Goethe's incisive words: