The heart is such a misunderstood organ that it is easy for the specialist in heart disease to find some slight abnormality in almost every heart presented for treatment. If you have never been told that you have something wrong with your heart it must be because you have not had occasion to consult the heart specialist, or else he was not in when you called.
The heart is merely a part of the body, and it does reflect the troubles that afflict the whole man, perhaps even more directly than do most of his organs, for it is one organ that has little time for rest.
With most heart specialists heart disease and Digitalis are almost synonymous terms, for the two are connected so intimately in his thought that it is hard to dissociate them.
Yet Digitalis has but one use in heart conditions, and this is in acute dilations, where it does stimulate the heart to more efficient contraction, but it does nothing to remove the causes of the dilation. If these causes are mechanical, they still persist, for the Digitalis cannot restore a leaking valve. IF they are nutritional, as they so frequently are, still Digitalis does nothing to change the body chemistry to the normal, and again it is merely a whip to stimulate function for a time, leaving the chemistry as chaotic as before.
Heart disease treated as any other disease, by correction of the chemistry of the whole man, disappears as does every other manifestation of body failure, with the exception of the valvular lesions, which are not usually changed by correction of the nutrition. Yet even these do disappear, if the dilation is the result of weakening of the heart muscle, instead of from a previous crippling of the valvular mechanism.
Not infrequently the most heroic thing that can be done is to wait, however hard this seems to be. It is perfectly natural for the friends, perhaps also the patient, to feel that “something ought to be done” to antagonize the disease, to eradicate it completely, little realizing that every disease is merely the price we are paying for our failure to live according to the divine plan of nature herself, and that we cannot get back to the normal at once, but must let nature herself work out the plan to return in her own way.
We offend nature all of our lives, and we pay, not occasionally, but always and infallibly, whether we realize this or not.
To recover from disease of any kind is to stop all the infractions of natural law, nothing more or less; and to attempt to recover from disease without cessation of the infractions that have caused the thing is as futile as bailing a leaky boat without first stopping the leak.
