Medical Delusions

Medical Delusions

When crises have been repeated (and cured) until organic changes are established, medical delusions multiply like rats in the corn crib - the most deluded and fatuous draw their air-line decisions, fight their therapeutic battles, and, if they belong to the "regular" school, promise therapeutic perfection - if only the United States Army and Navy will beat down the cultists and quacks, while they demonstrate the glories and wonders of "medical science" on the dear people.

WATERLOO - SYMPTOMS GET WORSE WITH TIME

It is in this field that all of the cures and curing systems meet their Waterloo. The pathology which has been in the making since the development of the first of these "self-limited" crises reveals no tendency to spontaneous disappearance. Rather its tendency it to grow worse and more complicated with the passing of time. Organic change occurs in more and more tissues and organs and these "complications" defy the best efforts of the peddlers of cures. Cause has been present from the beginning (the first cold of infancy represents an established toxemia) and has never been removed.

The physicians are long on diagnosis at this terminal stage of the evolving pathology. They name exactly the pathological status quo and, although they do not hesitate to treat the patient and to accept money for their experiments, they freely confess that their treatments are ineffective. They have all been experts at curing the continuous series of recurring crises - the "self-limited" diseases - but they are all helpless before the end-point of the development of which the first crisis was the initiation. They cannot cure cancer, or diabetes, or Bright's disease, or endocarditis, or arteriosclerosis.

INSULIN "CURES" UNTIL DEATH OF DIABETES

Toxemic subjects who continually poison themselves with excessive carbohydrates and thus stress the pancreas, develop sugar in the urine. These are cured with insulin. Indeed, insulin cures them until they die of diabetes - go out, perhaps, in either an insulin or a sugar coma.

Insulin-cured diabetics, like pepsin-cured dyspeptics, are made to feel fine for a year or two - until the burden of cause so stresses other organs that they develop "complications." They are also so filled with "reflex' discomforts that they demand other forms of "relief." When this stage is reached the curing must become a medley of palliating measures. Surgery, drugs, in fact, all kinds of cures, are now resorted to in keeping with the whims of the patient and the caprices of the physician. Because there are so many who refuse to die after being cured by all known cures, it is necessary to discover new cures all the time.

FATTER AND MORE DEGENERATED

Every day we watch people getting fatter and fatter on "plenty of good nourishing food" that "keeps up their strength" until they die of fatty degeneration, cerebral hemorrhage (apoplexy), or paralysis. Nobody warns them of what is in store for them and they will not heed if they are warned. So disgracefully have we become habituated to associating health and even distinction with a most pampered state of the body, that we think it most natural or normal for a fat man to maintain at the highest pitch, the unholy "love affairs" of his unregulated body. Unfortunately, our standards are empty of all value except for measuring varying degrees of ill health. Even our "normal" or "healthy" individuals, as measured by these standards, represent only a slightly less degree of ill health than that seen in the sick.

A study made by the collaboration of forty-three American life insurance companies, using three numerically equal groups of people over forty-five years of age, showed the incidence of diabetes in these three groups as follows. In the group of very thin people there was one case; in the normal group there were five cases; in the fat group there were two hundred and twenty-seven cases. Similar figures are available for cancer and a few other so-called degenerative diseases of later life. Fat and the overeating that is back of it are serious dangers at all ages of life.

"STRONG" MEN ARE NOT STRONG

Our strong men do not live any longer than the run-of-the-mill specimens of humanity. Many explanations for this have been devised. Actually, there is very little excuse for these mental meanderings. Athletes and strong men are often toxemic to the point of collapse.

They are so vulnerable from the effects of self-poisoning that all they need to bring them down with a "fatal malady" is some slight unusual enervating influence, or some slightly unusual amount of an accustomed influence. As unreasonable as it may appear, the average medical man as well as the average layman, recognizes those - who are on the verge of apoplexy, "heart failure," kidney disease, or other diseases resulting from the degeneration brought on from chronic toxemia, arterial tension and fat pressure - as ideal types of health.

They are commonly referred to as "pictures of health." In the early days of the recent war a young man was called before his local board for examination. The physicians found him fit and told him to go home and await his call for induction. He dropped dead on the way out.