Nature is compelled to resume her original struggle with diminished chances of success, shorn of just as much strength as she had to expend in combatting the additional enemy. She may even be compelled to shift her attack.

Jennings wrote: "A man came to me with his left hand badly inflamed and swollen, apparently on the border of suppuration. I prescribed a warm, soft poultice. Two or three days subsequently he called again with his right hand inflamed and swollen, and told me that the swelling had gone from the left hand into the right hand. The left hand had recovered its natural condition, and the right hand was less fortunate, it passed through a tedious suppurative process to its former state."--Tree of Life.

Trall says, "The effect of drug-curing or drug-killing, as the case may be--I mean drug medication--is to lock up, as it were, the causes of the disease within the system, and to induce chronic and worse diseases. The causes should be expelled, not retained. The remedial struggle--the disease--should be aided, regulated, directed, so that it may successfully accomplish its work of purification, not subdued nor thwarted with poisons which create new remedial efforts (drug diseases), and thus embarrass and complicate the vital struggle."--True Healing Art.

Observe that in reducing temperature, "relieving" pain, allaying restlessness and delirium, etc., the drugs used all accomplish their effects by reducing the functions of the body--that is by paralyzing the nerves. In doing this, they impair every function in the body. Take opium--it produces constipation (impaired bowel function), reduces secretion and excretion (impaired glandular function), etc.

By suppressing the healing efforts of nature, medicine builds complications and sequelea, and kills the sick. In general, the effects of suppression are:

(1) To lengthen the course and severity of the biogony and build complications.

(2) To lock up the poisons in the system and these, with the drug poisons added, produce chronic 'incurable' "diseases."

(3) To kill the patient. Suppression is a devastating practice regardless of the methods by which it is accomplished. As an illuminating example, a medical author says of complications in measles: "While the average case of measles runs a favorable course, the danger of the disease lies almost entirely in its complications. These are to be expected when the rash suddenly fades and the disease goes into the system, to use a popular expression. A fading of the rash is often coincident with the development of a complication.

Persistent fever after the disappearance of the rash is also highly suspicious."

It is evident that the suppression of the effort at elimination through the skin (the measles rash) results in the rise of "complications," or efforts to eliminate the causes of the "disease" through other channels. The most common "seat" of these "complications" is the respiratory tract. Inflammation in the bronchial tubes (bronchitis) and of the lungs (pneumonia) and of the pleura (pleurisy) result. The pleurisy is often accompanied with fever and night sweats. Other mucous surfaces, as the nose, eyes, eustachain tubes, ears and the glands as well may become involved in this latter effort at elimination. All these "complications" and sequelæ are the direct result of suppression and never develop in untreated cases.

The taking of drugs in repeated small doses is like the repeated use of coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, opium, etc. That is, their effects are cumulative. They are slowly, and with difficulty, eliminated from the system and are a most fruitful cause of chronic "disease." In fact, chronic "diseases" increase in direct ratio to the increase of suppressive drugs and serums. The more efficient physicians become in suppressing acute "disease," the faster chronic "disease" multiplies. Suppressive methods build the very troubles they appear to cure.

An aged woman suffered with high blood pressure. Under excitement and when suffering with gas the pressure would rise still higher, resulting in severe headache and blood-shot eyes. Then the nose would bleed and relieve her. A boy of nine had the same trouble following the wrecking of his body by vaccination. His physician seared the lining of his nose and prevented it from bleeding. One eye then began to act as a safety valve. It would bleed and relieve the pressure. But this destroyed the sight of that eye.

A "crisis"--biogony--is forced elimination, and it is followed by another and later by another, while all the time toxemia is building more pathology and old age. The phenomena called "disease" represent nature throwing off toxins, and, strange as it may appear, the prerogative of scientific doctors is to chock, obstruct, or stop it entirely, thus building more pathology. For, suppressing symptoms builds more trouble, always.

Drugs that depress the nervous system and thus check secretion, excretion, heart action, etc., prevent the healthy purification of the body and cause a retention of the toxic agents within the body and make the condition of the patient worse than ever. The temporary "relief" from symptoms secured by the substitution of the sedation of narcotics for the "irritation" of the nerves, by which the organism is preserved from destruction, is a dear bought "relief."

While it is always desirable that the functional modifications called "disease" cease and, while the subsequent normal performance of these functions evinces a return to health, no effort to force these functions to simulate their healthy action, so long as conditions exist which make the modifications necessary, is desirable. All biogony, wherever located, when reduced to its final analysis, is the consequence of harmful influences, and attention should be given to the removal of these, after which, the biogony will cease.

Too often patients recovering from a drug-treated biogony, with aching bones, stiffened joints, trembling nerves, rotting teeth, wrecked digestion, damaged kidneys, or heart, or some difficulty that will perhaps cling to them for the remainder of their lives, are informed that such sequalea are the legitimate offspring of their maladies, whereas these troubles are due to drugs and suppression. Thousands of wretched sufferers with wrecked constitutions are now dragging out a miserable existence, under the mistaken belief that their sufferings are unavoidable results of the previous sickness.

Nature, unobstructed and unwarped by interference, never leaves such ruin behind. She cures properly, or not at all. Such damaged and wrecked constitutions do not result where the poisoning system is not employed. Among barbarous people, where physicians are unknown outside of the shaman with his incantations and old crones with their herb teas, these wrecks do not occur. Such things are reserved for civilized people with their "scientific medicine."

Medical literature is full of discussions of the successive stages of "disease," the complications of "disease," sequalæ of "disease," seconddary "disease," etc., but it is lacking in any adequate discussion of the remote effects of its vaunted remedies; the direct and immediate effects of which are but a part and the least important part of their effects. It will not be disputed that the supposed remedial effects of drugs are immediately bound up with their power to produce and maintain abnormal conditions. These effects are supposed to be transient and to cease when the drug is eliminated from the system.

However, we refer here to the consequences of the continued and prolonged use of drugs. The cumulative effects of drugs, even when administered in small doses, are too well known to be ignored. Alcohol, opium, tobacco, and all of the drugs of the physician each and all produce lasting injuries.

Let me end this chapter with the following quotation from Dr. Robert Walter: "The prevailing cry of all classes is, 'We must assist nature'; and not knowing how nature works, nor what disease is, men proceed to obstruct and thwart her operations, not to aid her. If she vomits they proceed by force to stop her vomiting; if she purges the same truth applies; if we are weak we proceed to a forced strength; if we are sleepless we compel sleep without removing the occasions of the insomnia. Not knowing what nature is trying to do, we proceed to thwart her processes by any means at hand. As long as disease continues to be regarded as our enemy, so long will medical practice continue the work of destroying life in the vain endeavor to destroy "disease."--Exact Science of Health, pp. 188-9.