Again: "You own some prejudices about yourself and your ailments. They are a menace or a hindrance to your health. Let us get rid of them. All your prejudices amount to one. They arise from the mistaken idea that your ailment calls for a different remedy, or treatment, or diet, than somebody else's ailment calls for; or from the equally mistaken idea that you need a different remedy, or treatment, or diet, for your liver than you do for your kidneys, or for 'catarrh' than you do for 'rheumatism' or for 'constipation' than you do for 'diarrhea'? But you don't.

"Or, that any 'sick' organ or function anywhere in man's or woman's body should be treated differently than any other 'sick' organ or function anywhere else in man's or woman's body. But it shouldn't.

"At first it may seem somewhat difficult to see through this foundation-truth of Autology and Autopathy. Yet--think it over a minute. You--that's every bit of your blood and organs and tissues--were created with, and you subsist on, the same elements of light, air, water and food that enter into the creation and composition of other people's blood and flesh. And when you were well, nature kept you 'well' with the same blood and flesh remedies that she keeps other people well with. So, likewise, when nature makes or keeps you sick, she does it with the same blood-and-flesh things that she makes or keeps other people sick with."

To quote Arthur Vos, M.D., B.A., a reformed medical man, The Unity of Diseases: "It is indeed a strange and inexplicable fact that the regular medical profession, of all the various professions in the world today, should be the last one in point of time to recognize a unity in the phenomena of those things in which it claims to have what would almost amount to a monopoly of knowledge . . . the regular medical profession is alone groping along in its usual experimental and haphazard way of declaring that the thousand and one diseases described in its text books are so many independent entities, having no connection either in cause or in manifestation. That a neuritis of the shoulder, for instance, has been traced to a pyorrhoea alveolaris, to a diseased condition of the tonsil, to a sinus inflammation and even to a diseased ovary and tube is an occurrence frequent enough; but that pyorrhoea, tonsillitis, sinusitis and salpingo-ovaritis are conditions that may have a common, unifying causative element, even though such disease conditions appear remote in place and time has rarely been suspected. It seems rather contradictory and peculiar that the medical mind recognized the possibility of one disease condition arising either simultaneously with or subsequently to some other disease, commonly called complication, and yet be unable to comprehend that all such disease conditions must have a universal substratum, aside from the human body itself, to support them. It is indeed unfortunate that such a view is not generally held by the medical profession for it would add both confidence and certainty and would contribute very largely to the greater success of medical practice .....

"From the very time that I was taught to think in medical terms, in fact from the very day that I entered upon my duties in the Cincinnati General Hospital, the usual nosology and classification of diseases presented to my understanding a rather insuperable difficulty. I could not comprehend why such recurring ailments as sick headaches and many forms of neuralgia were not considered by the profession as standing in some causative relationship with such subsequent conditions as Bright's disease, diabetes or cancer, which invariably terminated the lives of individuals in whom simple ailments so frequently recurred. Presented with a problem of this kind, I could not but conclude that the patient who had been afflicted with recurring colds in the head from time to time and who came to me later with hay fever and subsequently developed bronchial asthma and still later rheumatic arthritis, must have been suffering with a single constitutional condition, the various so-called simple diseases and ailments being merely so many manifestations of one fundamental and constitutional origin. However, having neither time or inclination for formulating a philosophy on these, my observations, and being considerably disturbed because of a lack of clarity in my own ideas and understanding on the subject, I turned to the regular medical literature of the day in the hope of finding some definite and satisfactory answer to my problems. But here I was doomed to disappointment, and, not finding a satisfactory explanation of such disease phenomena that appeared to me to have some common element as their cause, I then turned to the literature of the so-called irregulars, where, much to my delight and benefit I found a theory of the unity of disease that satisfies my inquiries and gave me a safe and useful working hypothesis in the practice of my profession. The effect of this new theory of the unity of disease was revolutionary for, henceforth, all doubt as to the best method of procedure disappeared and I could ever afterwards approach the sick bed with a confidence and certainty that dispelled every misgiving as to the ultimate recovery of my patient. The singular advantage as I saw it then of a theory of the unity of disease consisted chiefly in the fact that active and successful treatment of disease could be begun in the first visit to my patient, even in those cases and under those circumstances where the diagnosis may, for a time, have been uncertain or in doubt."--Philosophy of Health, June, 1920.

What bearing do these facts have on specialism in medicine? Suppose, for instance, that a woman suffers with tonsillitis and metritis or ovaritis, does she need two "specialists", one a "specialist in diseases of the throat" and the other a "specialist in diseases of the genitourinary organs?" And if she also suffers with intestinal catarrh must she call a "specialist in intestinal disease" to care for the third condition? Or will the "cure" of one disease "cure" the other? It should be obvious that if we do not have two diseases, or three diseases, but merely the same condition in two locations or in three locations, neither of them causing the other, but all of them caused by the same primary factors, all "three" diseases would be cured by removing or correcting the primary factors. A specialist would merely treat the diseased organ that is the object of his specialty and ignore the basic cause of the trouble. In its very nature, specialism in medicine is a system of tinkering and patchwork. It is a failure where it is not a disaster. Although each part and its function should be regarded as a function of the whole, every specialist, owing to professional bias, interprets man in terms of the small fragment which is the object of his speciality. Fragmentary aspects are considered as representing the whole. When medical specialization separated the sick human being into a number of small fragments and assigned a specialist to care for each fragment, it created a dangerous ignoramus. Somebody has well defined a specialist as one who knows more and more about less and less until finally he knows every thing about nothing; while the clinician is a man who knows less and less about more and more until finally he comes to know nothing about every thing. A specialist is necessarily a man of limited experience and consequently of limited vision. The specialist's knowledge is detached, fragmentary, and incomplete. It is not necessarily antagonistic to that of another specialist.

It is a commonplace fact that the specialist can find the disease that is the object of his specialism in almost every patient that comes to him. It is no uncommon thing for a patient to visit a dozen or more specialists and return with a dozen or more "diseases" and a dozen or more prescriptions. And all these specialists may be right in their diagnoses inasfar as they name the symptoms and pathology they find. They are all wrong, however, insofar as they consider each "disease" to be a separate entity, each independent of the other and insofar as they fail to recognize that these dozen or more "diseases" are merely so many local manifestations of a general or systemic derangement.

Because it lacks unity and coherence, what is called medical science presents a pitiful spectacle of confusion, frenzy and impotency. Dr. Tilden well describes it as follows. "The mind without a fundamental philosophy looks about it and sees nothing but diversity; the philosophical mind sees order and unity in diversity. The doctor without philosophy sees in man a heterogeneous junk-pile of different kinds of organs requiring a specialist for each organ; the philosophical physician sees in a deranged organ a local expression, of a constitutional perversion, and, instead of 'plucking the eye out because it offends', the cause is removed and the eye stops offending.

"Unfortunately, the professional mind runs routine on custom-- professional precedent--which, with no fundamental philosophy, causes it to see in every symptom-complex an individual disease--not a clean cut individuality with a symptomatology so stable that he who runs may read. On the contrary, there is a borderland to every so-called disease, causing it to blend with other complexes or diseases, requiring the intensive farming peculiar to, and belonging to, specialism to designate--diagnose. Hence the field of symptom complexes--diseases--has been divided into four hundred individual diseases, requiring four-hundred specialists, who in turn require clinicians to survey the field and designate what particular specialist or specialists are required. Often a patient is so honeycombed with diseases that he requires several specialists. To meet this requirement of modern medical science, groups of scientific experts form collation for the purpose of special examinations and final group consultations; after which even Gort Almighty stands abashed at the display of erudition, not even dreamed of in His Philosophy."--Philosophy of Health.