The Cause of Disease - Herbert M Shelton

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The Cause of Disease

Herbert M Shelton

Hygienic Review Sept. 1972

 

 

A poisoned or injured body, when not overwhelmed by toxemia, speedily

reestablishes normal health. When this does not occur, there is a

pre-existing systemic impairment what Tilden called a " sick-habit " -that

required some such contingency to make it sensorially evident.

 

Tilden says that at first, he believed that enervation was the one general

cause of disease. After more study and thought he decided that simple

enervation is not disease; that disease results from poisoning. Then came the

thought that to be the general cause of disease, the poison must be

autogenerated. But, if the autogenerated poisoning is the general cause of

disease, what causes the autogeneration? He says that he long tried to trace

disease back to poison taken into the body from without, such as eating food

after putrescence had set up; or from poisoning due to putrescence after the

food is ingested. But observing the results of poisoning of this character,

he reached the conclusion that poisoning (exogenous poisoning) per se is not

the cause of disease. Watching recoveries from injury and failures to

recover, he was brought to the same conclusion.

 

He calls this his discovery, yet there is not a single element in the

whole theory that had not long been held by Hygienists from Jennings, Graham

and Trall through Page and Walter to the present. Tilden merely systematized

the thought on the subject.

 

In his masterly work on 'Human Physiology the Basis of Sanitary and Social

Science', Dr. Thomas Low Nichols well defines the confusion and differences

of views as to the cause of disease that existed among Hygienists. He points

out that there were those who regarded disease as the result of a diminution

of the nervous power or vital force (Jennings and Gove), while others thought

that the blood is the life and impurity of the blood is the cause of all

disease action (Trall) He, himself, anticipating Tilden by several years,

says of the cause of disease: 'But good blood cannot be formed without

sufficient vital or nervous power; and good blood is necessary to the healthy

action of the brain and nervous system. Here is reciprocal action, each

depending upon the other

Waste matter, retained in the human system is a materia morbis and there are

many kinds of blood poisoning. "

 

Waste matter or, as they called it in those days, effete matter, resulting

from the normal activities of life is toxic. It is being continuously formed

and as continuously carried away from the cells and excreted. If waste is

retained it becomes a source of poisoning, hence a cause of disease. It is

here that the diminution of nervous power (enervation) or lowering of

vitality enters into the development of disease. A lowering of the

functioning power of the body not only cripples the nutritive functions of

the body, as Nichols suggests, but it also checks excretion.

 

Enervation must always inhibit the activities of the organs of

elimination. Excretion will be in keeping with the functioning power

possessed by the body. Function is strong or weak, as the case may be, as

nerve energy rises and falls in keeping with the amount of expenditure and

the time allotted to repose. Nerve energy is expended in doing all forms of

work, mental, emotional, physical and physiological. It is recuperated during

rest and sleep. When expenditure exceeds' recuperation, nerve energy is

gradually lowered and function lags commensurate with the lowering of energy.

 

With excretion inhibited, consequent upon a lowering of nerve energy,

there follows a gradual accumulation in the blood, lymph, and tissues, of the

same waste that the body is engaged in eliminating every second of life,

asleep or awake, from before birth until death. As this toxic waste

accumulates, it becomes a menace to the integrity of the organism, Other ways

and means must be found to free the body of its presence.

 

Channels of supplementary or compensatory or vicarious elimination are

established. The inner and outer skins are the favorite sites of such

processes of supplementary excretion. A cold, a bronchitis, a diarrhea, a

skin eruption, - these are the most common processes of compensatory

elimination that we observe in infancy. The development of such a fontanelle

is the first evidence that toxemia has been established. As the crisis does

not correct the way of life, the toxemic state is rebuilt following the

ending of the eliminating process, so that another crisis evolves sooner or

later.

 

Crisis follows crisis, as the enervating mode of living is continued,

until the disease becomes chronic. With the passage of years other parts of

the body become chronically ill so that the individual has a collection of

diseases. Chronic disease means chronic provocation; it means that the body

is in a state of chronic toxemia. Chronic disease may be punctuated by

occasional acute crises, as the way of life pushes the toxin accumulation

above the point of established toleration. But the individual never gets well

for the reason that he is constantly building disease.

 

Our self-styled scientific etiologists are content to scratch the surface

o£ causation and rest their case there. They find a particular microbe

present in a certain so-called disease and they say that this microbe is the

cause. It may well be the effect so far as their researches can reveal. They

are in the same position as the man, finding a dead horse filled with magots,

concludes that the magots were the cause of death. They are agreed that the

germs are without effect until the body's resistance is broken down, but they

are unwilling to include the causes of broken resistance in the complex of

factors that constitute cause. They demand a unitary cause and the germ or

the virus is " it "

 

From the time we emerge from the placenta at birth until we die at, let us

say, the age of a hundred, we spend our lives in an ocean of germs and

viruses. They are in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat,

they are on everything we touch, they are on our body, in our nose, mouth and

throat, they get into every cut and scratch we sustain- we can't escape them

and have to learn to live with them. If germs cause pneumonia or typhoid or

meningitis, why is not the whole human race suffering with those diseases at

all times. If they cause colds or cholera or tuberculosis, why does anybody

escape these diseases?

 

The obvious fact is that these organisms do not or cannot attack healthy

tissues. If they contribute to the cause of disease, they can do so only

after other and primary causes have prepared the way for them. Among the

things that prepare the way for bacterial activity are serums and vaccines.

As proof, note the frequency with which epidemics of hepatitis and meningitis

occur in the armed forces following an epidemic of vaccinating and

inoculating. It is a fact that cannot be denied that medicine in all of its

branches is the greatest cause of disease, degeneracy and death in the world

today.

 

In seeking for the cause of disease it is necessary that we look among the

environments of man and into his ways of life for all the factors that singly

or collectively lower his powers of life. It is not enough that we recognize

that smoking contributes to the production of lung cancer and ignore its

health-impairing influence in general. It is not enough that we recognize the

health-impairing influence of alcoholism and close our eyes to the health

impairing effects of our other poison-vices. It is not enough that we note

the effects of fatigue and ignore all else. We live a total life and as it is

lived today, it is a varying mixture of the good and the bad, the wholesome

and the unwholesome, the constructive and the destructive, of elements that

enhance life and elements that detract from the excellence of our organic

qualities.

 

To find the causes of disease, any disease, in any particular person, it

is essential that the total way of life of that individual be carefully

studied and analyzed. To pick on a microbe and ignore the habits of living,

to discuss the pneumococcus and ignore the long chain of dietetic abuses and

the alcoholism that have preceded the development of the pneumonia, is to

close our eyes to the most essential elements of causation. A unitary cause

is unthinkable. The simplest of so-called diseases is the complex effect of a

number of correlated antecedents. How, then is health to be restored if we

direct our attention to one of those antecedents and ignore all the rest?

 

It should not be difficult for us to understand that the human organism is

constructed, as is the organism of the elephant, deer, gorilla, whale or

turtle, to live in a world that is teeming with microbes. Man does not

require a sterile environment in which to live and to live in health and

vigor. lie requires only to live in such a way as to preserve his organic

integrity and functional efficiency and he can laugh at microbes or eat them

for breakfast. They will hold no terrors for him. Perhaps, as scavengers,

they will help in removing the moribund from the earth. Microbes serve a

number of vitally important functions in the scheme of life. Only a small

percentage of them are even thought to he pathogenic, and these are harmless

in the healthy body.

 

A deer may live in health and vigor and be very active. Then it is shot

and left to lie where it falls. Within a few hours its carcass is puffed up

with gas and it smells foul, all this the result of bacterial action. They

have a feast upon the dead deer, they were helpless in the body of the living

deer, Soon, with the able assistance of buzzards, opossums, and other

scavenger animals, the microbes rid the landscape of the dead deer. But they,

no more than the buzzards, do not attack the healthy animal.

 

It is time we begin to put first things first in our search for the causes

of human suffering. What makes the human organism vulnerable to microbic

attack? What makes it vulnerable to parasitic infestation? Why spend time

killing fungi and parasites and ignore the systemic state (and its causes)

that make the fungus and worm invasion possible? If we kill the fungus, we do

not restore health, but leave the sick susceptible to another invasion. We

should not ignore the fact that infestation is likely to follow in the wake

of liability.