THIS is a mechanical age and an age of specialisation. All the arts have become mechanical. The theatre is replaced by the picture theatre, music executed by the individual is replaced by machines emitting sounds, by wireless, etc. Not unnaturally modern medicine also has become mechanical. Doctors of the past diagnosed with the help of their five senses. Some used the clinical thermometer, while others measured temperature with a sensitive hand and tool the pulse with sensitive fingers.
The modern doctor possesses a large collection of scientific tools and machines for making tracings of the heart beat or of the pulse, for taking blood pressure, for making physical and chemical tests of every kind. Besides, every doctor knows that patients are impressed by a bewildering array of tools and machines assembled in consulting rooms.
The modern doctor relies not so much on his five senses, as did all the great doctors of the past from Hippocrates of Hahnemann- Hahnemann did not possess a clinical thermometer, or a stethoscope as far as I am aware-but on complicated and very ingenious tools and machines which are often used very unintelligently. Moreover, the modern doctor is a laboratory product. He has not been taught the art of healing at the beside, apprenticed to an experienced doctor i the manner of the past, but he has been taught by laboratory men a vast number of things which have nothing to do with the art of healing.
The modern doctor, the scientific doctor, being a laboratory product, talks in laboratory language. The modern doctor uses his scientific instruments for diagnosing a case and it if there is any difficulty he sends the exertions and secretions of the patient to laboratory specialists, who not only make a diagnosis, but direct treatment by means of chemicals, serums, etc., although they have not seen the patient. Modern medicine, scientific medicine, has become mechanised and de humanised. The modern doctor has become a user of many tools and a middleman to the laboratories and to the great drug houses.
It most cases a so-called scientific diagnosis made with the ingenious methods of modern science is quit unnecessary. Simple cases which in the past were successfully treated by simple practitioners at small cost to the patient are now handed over to a number of specialists who only too often spoil the case. Innumerable mistakes made by foremost physicians and specialists have come to my notice.
These mistakes would have been avoided if the men called upon to make a diagnosis had used their common sense. After all, the five senses of observant men are instruments of wonderful perfection and compared with these the most elaborate instruments are pitifully unreliable. A highly trained brain is the most perfect and the most potent scientific tool.
Unfortunately the modern doctor, having been enslaved by the laboratory fails to treat his patients with common sense, but treats them through the brains of specialists on whom he relies. A physicians, in the meaning of the word, should be a student of Nature and, in treating patients, he should exercise the ingenuity of a detective. Innumerable intractable diseases are due to some simple fault which ingenuity will discover and eliminate. I would illustrate my meaning by a few examples.
Some time ago, travelling in a railway carriage, I chatted with a married couple. The husband explained to me that he suffered from very grave heart disease, that he had consulted all the highest authorities in Harley, Street, that he had just come back from a six months holiday, taken on medical advice, and that he was not much better. He was a city solicitor with a very large practice. All the most expensive and the most scientific tests had been made to arrive at a correct diagnosis.
It may opinion most disorders and diseases are either caused, or aggravated, by faulty living. I asked the man a few question regarding his diet, and it came out that he was passionately found of mustard. He ate mustard not only with all meat but with all fowl, fish, on bread and butter, etc., and he consumed about he did not suffer form heart disease, but from too much mustard. I spoke strongly and took him a solemn promise not to touch mustard for a month and then to write to me about the condition of his heart. After a month he wrote to me that his heart had vastly improved, that it was practically normal.
A lady came to me from Japan. She had been treated without success by leading physicians. She told me that she suffered from advanced tuberculosis of the lungs, had lost much weight, which she could not regain, felt very weak, icy cold, and she was terribly anaemic. She looked the picture of Natrum muriaticum, Her. eyes watered easily in the wind and she did not like sympathy.
I discovered that she took a small teaspoonful of salt with every egg and similarly prodigious quantities with salads, meat, etc. To her consternation I forbade absolutely salt, of which she was passionately found, and gave her Nat. Mur. 30 and a few other homoeopathic medicines. After two or three months she told me that she had put on thirty pounds, that she did not know that she possessed lungs, and she had acquired the figure and the strength of a Channel swimmer.
I have come across a number of cases of salt poisoning. A middle-aged man consulted me about Xanthoma, an excessively rare skin disease which, according to the textbooks, is associated with debates. He had been shown to numerous medical societies as a curiosity and had been treated by about forty skin specialists. None of them had asked him about his diet or had made any dietetic suggestions.
His skin trouble had been treated from the outside with ointments and washes. Besides he had been treated for diabetes. That man had an even greater longing for salt than the case from Japan. A prodigious salt consumption caused corresponding thirst and frequent urination, and the latter gave rise to the diagnosis of diabetes.
If one wishes to go thoroughly and conscientiously into a case, one has to study a patients diet with the utmost care. A very obese woman told me with tears in her eyes that she ate next to nothing and she described to me meals which seemed utterly insufficient. When I asked her what she drank she told me that she had ten cups to tea per day in which she put form three to four lumps of sugar.
She ate, or rather drank in solution, approximately a pound of sugar per day and then she confessed that between meals she had very rich ices made of cream and sugar. About the same time a lady came to met who suffered from mysteries vertigoes and fainting fits which no doctor had been able to diagnose or to cure. She also took ten or twelve cups of strong and boiling hot tea pet day with a huge quantity of sugar, I reduced tea consumption to the minimum, gave her a few doses of conium, because her vertigo was particularly marked when in bed, and she rapidly go well.
An enormous number of people, suffer form chronic poisoning in some form or other, which often is overlooked. A lady asked me to see her husband who could not move hand or foot. He was a young man, and his disease had been diagnosed ad osteo-arthritis, rheumatoid-arthritis, disseminated sclerosis, etc., and he had been declared incurable and pensioned. The bedroom reeked like a smoking compartment. It was strewn with cigarette ends and empty aspirin bottles.
My first question was: “How many cigarettes do you smoke per day?” “About fifty”. “And how many aspirins do you take per day?” “From forty to fifty.” I told him that he did not suffer from a scientific disease which can be described only in mongrel Latin or Greek, but from tobacco poisoning and aspirin poisoning. I suggested to him that he should reduce cigarettes and aspirins by one per day. He did so during a few days and improved, but then went back to the old deadly dopes.
Some years ago a Post Office clerk told me that he was suffering from creeping paralysis. Objects dropped from his hands, he could not keep his balance, occasionally he dropped on the floor, the Post Office doctor had sent him to a Harley Street specialist and the specialist had declared his case incurable, had given him no treatment and had told him to go home and make himself as comfortable as he could. Although the man could not take exercise he lived on a concentrated diet with plenty of meat and was terribly constipated. He looked to me poisoned and I discovered that many years age he had had an abscess on the leg and during eight years he had rubbed in Zinc ointment by doctors orders.
I happened to know that Zinc is a nerve poison which particularly affects the spinal cord and the great nerves connected with it. I forbade further use of Zinc ointment, regulated his bowel, cleared him up with homoeopathic doses of Sulphur, gave him Turkish baths and the man became practically normal. Shortly afterwards a lady came to me with a mysterious disease of the stomach which had defied diagnosis and treatment by many doctors. Her diet was quite unobjectionable, but I found that during twenty years she had every night douched with Sulphate of Zinc.
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.