HOW TO CURE HEART DISEASE


I habitually explain to patients that far more pressure is required to drive a thick liquid through a given system of pipes than a thin liquid. “Report progress once a week and act with wise discrimination, not with mechanical obedience to these directions, for no one understands the working of your body better than you do yourself.


I have described some of my successful heart cases, but, of course, I have had failures. Unfortunately many of my failures were caused by my patients. Nothing is more dangerous for a patient than too rapid a recovery, which often causes him to get reckless. Mrs. M. herself had a bad set-back or two through taking risks, running after a bus when she had been strictly forbidden to run, etc.

I had a very similar case to Mrs. M. The woman in question was doing wonderfully well and I had told her very strictly not to take any risks, not to rush, and to avoid excitement. Her daughter-in-law was to have a baby. Being an excellent mother and mother-in-law, she went around at the critical moment. Labour pains began as soon as she arrived, there was no nurse and the doctor had not come. She got terribly excited, rushed about frantically, trying to fetch help and help her daughter-in-law, collapsed and died.

There was in the West End of London a most devoted couple, a Mr. and Mrs. A.F.D. They were childless. They lived for one another. Mr. D. was fond of social life, he liked tobacco and alcohol, and he had a weak heart and a high blood pressure, which frequently go together. It got worse and worse. One day he went to a Harley Street consultant and he was horrified to be told that he had a blood pressure of 300 and that his heart had gone to pieces.

He refused to accept this opinion, he went immediately to two other consultants, who confirmed the ghastly verdict of the first. Totally broken down by the stunning news he sought his wife and told her that all was over with him. With bitter tears in her eyes she knelt down and prayed that God should send her a saviour.

At that very moment a friend of mine, Sir R.P., was walking in a street nearby and it occurred to him that he might call on Mrs. D He did so, found her in tears with her husband weeping as well. He was thunderstruck and suggested: “Send for Mr. Ellis Barker.” I saw the pair on the next day and I noticed that the husbands face was jaundiced, drawn, greasy-looking, and that his eyes were very watery.

These are indications of salt-poisoning. He told me about his blood pressure and his symptoms and showed me his prescriptions, which seemed to me worthless. “Did your doctor or did the consultants tell you anything about your diet?” “Not a word.” It came out that the man took large quantities of meat, strong coffee, strong tea, alcohol, and smoked numerous cigarettes, a deadly combination in a heart case. It appeared that he took in the course of the day a tablespoonful of salt and he took other condiments as well in huge quantities.

In view of the very clearly marked symptoms of salt-poisoning, I gave him a stringent diet from which all heating and irritating things were eliminated, forbade absolutely the use of salt in cooking or at the table, and gave him Natrum muriaticum 30, dose of three pilules to be taken three times a day.

Natrum muriaticum is table slat, and I gave it to him in the 30th potency, which means by the decillionth of a grain. A decillionth is 1 with 60 noughts behind it. In this high potency salt is a very powerful remedy. It is my favourite prescription in cases of salt poisoning. Mr. D. started improving at once and the homoeopathic medicine caused him to sweat salt from every pore. A few days after our first meeting he told me laughingly: “You cant deprive me of my beloved salt.

If I want to have a taste of it, I need only lick my lips or my hands. They taste like concentrated salt.” He also spat out phlegm tasting like concentrated salt. In a few weeks he had improved greatly. His blood pressure rapidly went down from 300 to 180.

A little while after this he went to his club in the West End, where he met some of his friends. They wished to celebrate his marvellous recovery. There were cocktails and wines with which salmon, beef and game pie were washed down, there were Stilton, ices and strong black coffee and brandy to wind up with, and then they smoked. Unfortunately Mr. D. took all these things which I had strictly forbidden. When the meal was over he stepped into his car to drive home. Suddenly he felt like dying.

He pulled up the car and sat helpless for more than two hours, gasping for breath. That glorious meal was the turning point. Up till then he had reacted magnificently to treatment. The debauch finished him. He went down steadily. He tried a number of doctors and consultants, but the utmost skill of the doctors, both allopathic and homoeopathic, and the sleepless devotion of Mrs. D. proved unavailing. He had improved too quickly.

Frequently people with high blood pressure come to me and report that they have been told by their doctors that nothing can be done for high blood pressure, that the hardened pipes through which the blood is running with difficulty cannot be widened by any possible means. Whether this often-heard statement is correct or not, I do not know.

The body has unsuspected powers of rebuilding and of repair, if rightly treated. Very likely hardened arteries will remain hard if the sufferer is given iodine or some compound of it perfunctorily. Possibly the hardened arteries may be favourably influenced by wisely chosen diet, which cannot possibly do any harm, but may do some good. Possibly facts may be helpful. At any rate there is second factor, apart from the size of the arteries, which has to be considered in a case of high blood pressure.

I habitually explain to patients that far more pressure is required to drive a thick liquid through a given system of pipes than a thin liquid. Far more pressure would be needed to drive tar through a one-inch pipe than to drive water through a one-inch pipe. Usually people with high blood pressure have thick blood. In the olden times such peoples were bled profusely. This was very beneficial to the patients. The loss of blood was immediately made good by water from the tissues and the thick blood was promptly made thin.

Medicine is ruled not by sense but by fashion. A century ago practically all patients were bled profusely, whether they needed it or not. If a doctor attended a case where injury had been inflicted by a sudden accident, he would probably immediately bleed him, even if the accident had already resulted in great loss of blood. Had he refused to do so, he might have been censured by his colleagues or might have been lynched by the populace. Hahnemann protested with the utmost vigour against the indiscriminate bleeding of patients.

Bleeding was considered the most important procedure in treatment. Hence, when, a century ago, an important new medical journal was started in London, it was given the title The Lancet. Nowadays hardly one doctor in a hundred uses the lancet or knows how to apply leeches. The subcutaneous syringe rules supreme, and it is used as indiscriminately and as foolishly as lancet and leeches were used a century ago. The mania of treating everything with serums will, of course, disappear.

It is doing infinite harm to the patients of the present. Doctors had better study once more the art of bleeding and leeching which is once more being employed by a few medical men who use their brains.

The thinning of the blood can be affected by dietetic regulation which is apt to reduce blood pressure gradually in practically all cases, especially if it is accompanied by bowel regulation. People with high blood pressure usually suffer from constipation and auto-intoxication and they live as a rule on a concentrated, stimulating and heating diet, which is supposed to give them strength, but which in reality weakens them, keeping the blood thick and the blood pressure high.

In nearly all cases which have come under my care I have been able to reduce blood pressure considerably by dietetic means alone. If the blood pressure is brought down by drugs, the improvement will not last. As soon as the drug is withdrawn, blood pressure shoots up again.

On the 4th February, 1932, Mrs. B.A.B., wrote to me from Birmingham:.

“My mother-in-low, who is 70, has had two very severe heart attacks, and other minor ones. Up to this age she has enjoyed fairly good health, and had no attack whatever. These attacks come on at night and the specialist says she will always be subject to them and that to the end of her days, which will be short if she has any severe ones. She must consider herself an invalid.

The trouble is high blood pressure which causes the walls of the heart to collapse. It is really tragic for her to realize what all this means. Could you suggest a diet or other means whereby her days may be made less wearisome. I should be most grateful if you could give me some advice”.

With the usual brutal crudeness a specialist, considering only the mechanical action of the heart and the deteriorated state of the arteries, had made a statement which gave the invalid no hope, but filled her with despair, aggravating her condition. I immediately asked the usual questions, which the specialist had not asked, as to her way of living, diet, etc. Her daughter informed me that Mrs. lived on white meat and fish, milky foods, etc. by doctors orders. A white diet may e very artistic.

J. Ellis Barker
James Ellis Barker 1870 – 1948 was a Jewish German lay homeopath, born in Cologne in Germany. He settled in Britain to become the editor of The Homeopathic World in 1931 (which he later renamed as Heal Thyself) for sixteen years, and he wrote a great deal about homeopathy during this time.

James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.