ENLARGED PROSTATES


There must be a reason for the enormous increase of cases of enlarged prostate, quite apart from the fact that enlarged prostate is a disease of advancing years. People live nowadays to a greater age than they did twenty, thirty or forty years ago. I am under the impression that the enlarged prostate is a disease of civilization.


FROM year to year the number of cases of enlarged prostate is increasing. Some of the most distinguished men in this country, in France, in the United States, and elsewhere have undergone the operation which has become almost as fashionable as the appendicitis operation. However, while the appendicitis operation is comparatively easy, safe, and pleasant, the operation on the prostate is risky, speculative, and often terribly disappointing. A large percentage of these operations are failures although the patient may not die on the operating table and although the operating surgeon may prematurely proclaim the operation a success.

Unfortunately, the doctors and surgeons do not seem to be interested in the causation of disease. They are engaged in combating the diseases actually existing, and their whole life is dedicated to the curing of disease and not to the prevention of disease. One might almost suggest that a new profession, a profession of disease preventers is called for. It is hopeless to expect that a doctor should, at the same time, act as a curer of disease and as a disease preventer. One might as well expect the police, who have been created to avoid crime, to teach morality in the schools and in the homes of the people.

There must be a reason for the enormous increase of cases of enlarged prostate, quite apart from the fact that enlarged prostate is a disease of advancing years. People live nowadays to a greater age than they did twenty, thirty or forty years ago. I am under the impression that the enlarged prostate is a disease of civilization.

At least, I have never seen this disorder mentioned in any of the numerous books I have read written by doctors and surgeons practising in the wilds. It may be that the trouble is due to hard water and an over-refined diet, the employment of Cerebos and Saxa salts which contain a large proportion of phosphate of lime, the employment of aluminium for cooking, constipation and auto-intoxication etc.

I would like to have opinions from professional and non- professional readers of this journal regarding the causation of this trouble, but only those opinions will be welcome which are based on actual observation, not on fancy.

The orthodox doctor learns from his textbooks that there is no treatment for the enlarged prostate except surgery. His textbooks have been inspired by the surgeons and the statement is as untrue as the statement that there is no treatment for cancer except surgery. Cancer is largely a nutritional disease.

At least 90 per cent. of the cancer patients are very favourably influenced by placing them on a diet free from fish, flesh, fowl, and everything made of them, coffee, strong tea, alcohol, spices and condiments, including salt, and other irritating foods. Similarly, the vast majority of the prostate cases readily respond to dietetic reform devised to reduce the irritation of the bladder and prostate by acrid urine, made acrid either by an over-heating diet or by the insufficient intake of liquid or by both these factors.

Besides, enlarged prostates can be favourably influenced, or reduced to normal or something like normal, by the use of various medicines, among them being Silica, Aurum iodatum, Pulsatilla, Sulphur iodatum, Calcarea iodata, Sarsaparilla, Thuja, Sabal serrulata, and many others.

Of course in the treatment of prostates and other apparently local conditions one must not think of “a specific” for the disorder to be treated, but one must study the constitution of the patient as well as the various manifestations of disorder. Therefore any one of the numerous remedies known to homoeopathy may be called for in the treatment of enlarged prostates or any other disease.

If there are strong Sulphur symptoms one gives Sulphur, if there are strong Lycopodium symptoms one gives Lycopodium, and so forth. The name of the disease is a secondary matter because the so-called local disease is as a rule merely the local manifestation of a constitutional disorder which must be treated constitutionally and not locally.

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.