GLENDALE, CALIF.
DISCUSSION.
DR. FIELD: There is much common sense to his paper; and if physicians will glean this particular fact (not only for babies) – dont be afraid to starve your patients – it will help.
In regard to the children, I believe you could have added that our setting a definite time for our breakfast, lunch, and dinner, is merely arbitrary. If the child happens to be a two or three oclock child, feed him at that time.
DR. ALMFELT: When anyone, baby, child, or adult, loses his appetite, there is a good reason for it. It is natures best message or signal that there is something wrong somewhere in the alimentary canal, and feeding should be stopped. I think one of the worst things you can ever do is to try to tease children and babies to eat when they have no appetite. Usually there is constipation when appetite is lost. This may not be manifested in an absolute lack of bowel movement, but in deficient or insufficient amount of bowel movements, and when the large intestine cannot eliminate what has accumulated there, which should be out, that naturally has a reaction on the stomach, especially if we keep on eating more.
Furthermore, I believe that the present system of feeding infants and children by the modern pediatric methods is absolutely wrong. It is over feeding. I believe that if we knew more about correct feeding of our children, there would be no sore throats, no tonsillitis and enlarged tonsils, and no diphtheria in our children. I am absolutely convinced about it in my own mind. This habit of feeding sugars and sweets and starches to children is positively detrimental.
I would review a few cases if I had time. I will take only one. This woman brought a couple of children to me, one about five years old, the other about fourteen months. The mother said that when the five-year-old child was eighteen months old, she was sick. She was fat, flabby, and choked up. She had colds continuously and had trouble with her nose, and sore throat, and enlarged tonsils. The physician had been feeding that baby too heavily, and then another physician she got happened to be a dietician and went a little too far the other way, but all the symptoms cleared up because the doctor in charge was working in the right direction. He was not a homoeopath. He was a dietitian, but he cleared up the symptoms by changing the diet. She was all right at five years of age, but a little underfed, a little dissatisfied.
I simply added a little bit to the diet but did not change it very radically.
The other baby, fourteen months old, never had a days illness, never a cold, and she was fed very moderately on very light food, and, by the way, regular fruit juices had been given, and yet this baby was a little undernourished, so I added a few more things to her diet.
I simply mention this because I know well enough that the average physician, allopath or homoeopath, or good or bad prescriber, pays too little attention to the importance of correct eating and diet.
When i say that I dont mean it as a slur at all, but I know from personal experience what I am talking about, because I happen to deal with a class of patients, and have for the last fifteen or twenty years, who have gone through the mill of treatment and who were still ill, and so I was obliged to study diet and food in relation to sickness and health, and for that reason I have acquired a certain amount of experience and knowledge on this subject.
This idea of calories is all humbug and has not the slightest relation to proper feeding, because a calorie is merely a heat unit, so much heat to one gram of water, one degree Centigrade, and what does that mean? It means simply that if your beds are steam boilers, this is the proper way of measuring your food. You can shovel anything at all in here, whatever you happen to have, and the more carbon in the food, the better, the more it will burn, and; naturally, the higher caloric value it has.
What does that idea come from the calories? Simply from the so- called catabolic endometabolism, because when the food has been digested and absorbed and carried to the various cells, the cells take what they need for the rebuilding process and that is the end of that part of metabolism, but when the cells have been using the food and it is thrown off as waste matter in the intercellular spaces and into the blood, it becomes toxin and a poison, and it must be oxidized, and oxygen comes in and plays a vital part and changes these into carbonic acid gas and carbonic acid, urea, and so forth, and from this conversion it is carried off the organs for elimination, and here is where the heat process comes in.
Whenever oxygen unites with carbon there is naturally a certain amount of energy and heat involved, and if you measure food value, you do so in calories, but it is faulty and wrong as far as absolute nutrition is concerned.
Secretary-Trasurer, I.H.A.
Business Manager, The Homoeopathic Recorder.
Author of The Home Prescriber Domestic Guide.
Dr. A. Dwight Smith was born in Monticello, Iowa, in 1885. He graduated with an M.D. degree from Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago in 1912, and in 1921 moved to Glendale, California. After spending a period in the Army Medical Corps he did a residency at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia specializing in pediatrics. During his many years of practice he was president for one year and secretary-treasurer for thirteen years of the International Hahnemannian Association. He also served as editor of the Homeopathic Recorder, for thirteen years. Dr. Smith also held the position of editor of the Pacific Coast Homeopathic Bulletin for over forty years.