Failure of the effort to eliminate pathogen and restore structural integrity does not alter the essential nature or the healthward tendency of the vital struggle. Trall said "if the process of inflammation fails in its object, it is none the less a remedial effort".

As the body quite frequently breaks down and dies during a continuance of those functional modifications commonly called "disease", it is thought the road to health lies through suppressing or subduing these functional modifications. From what has gone before it logically follows that no indication of "disease" (biogony), no symptoms, should be removed through forcible means, but should be permitted to continue unabated until it has accomplished its work. To suppress these curative efforts builds complications, sequlea, chronic "disease" and results in death.

Although orthopathic phenomena always tend towards a definite end, they are not always successful. They have their limitations and are capable of resisting only a given amount of poisoning, or of withstanding and repairing only a given amount of damage. However, the body never entirely surrenders a part until its death and destruction renders restoration impossible. Hence, we see that the vital, conservative, healing process, designed to mend and protect the part, which we call inflammation, is always faithfully endeavoring to accomplish its purpose, and continues in and about a lesion until healing is accomplished, or the destruction of the part is completed.

It makes no difference whether the end for which these changes are made, is attainable or not. If the heart, for instance, is injured, beyond the possibility of recovery, unless the injury proves immediately fatal, so as to preclude all attempts at repair, a reparative process will be immediately begun and prosecuted in the same manner and with the same vigor as if the case were a curable one.

Suppose a man is wounded in some vital spot, is pierced by a bayonet or gun shot, or is poisoned by arsenic or other deadly agent, not immediately fatal, but of such a nature and extent that recovery is not possible. In spite of this, nature will put forth every possible effort to repair the damage and restore soundness to the injured organ or organs. And she will pursue precisely the same course in such a case as she would have pursued had the injury done been reparable and recoverable from.

The sick body musters all its forces and expends them with a most rigid economy in an effort to repair damages and perpetuate its existence, and even when the saving work is beyond their power of achievement, or the interference interposed by treatment renders it impossible for them to accomplish their work, and they must fail, they continue, to the last to attempt to repair damages and eke out their existence.

Death is not due to the "disease", more properly, to the biogony-- fever, pain, inflammation, emesis, diarrhea, etc.--but to the pathogenic forces and obstructing treatment. When these are sufficient to overwhelm the forces of life, death results in spite of and not because of the defensive and conservative physiological adjustments and modifications.

Densmore rightly defined "disease" (biogony) in these words: "disease always ensues upon the disturbance of the condition of life natural to the animal, and is an unfailing and friendly expression on the part of the system of an effort to rid itself of conditions inimical to health." Dr. B. S. Claunch, declares that it wold break a law of nature if acute disease were to kill one man or woman. It is just as reasonable for us to expect a curative process to kill as for us to expect a killing process to cure. When the patient dies, not the biogony (the "disease"), but the pathogenic causes and the suppressive treatment, kill him. Tilden says: "It is said that fever kills; it is the cause of the fever that kills."

A recent remark made by Dr. Hutchinson, consulting physician to the London Hospital, in a lecture at Aberdeen University, on "The Progress and Present Aspect of Medical Science," and published in the British Medical Journal, confirms this view. He said: "So few, are the diseases we can really cure, that one is tempted to believe that if all the doctors went on strike for a year the effect on the death rate would be inappreciable. In most cases of illness the doctor is really a mental poultice; he is a source of comfort, confidence and consolation to the patient and his friends; but if he is honest with himself he will admit that the number of patients who would have died but for his attendance is lamentably small."