The great obstacle to a correct understanding of pathology and the problems it presents, and, consequently, the chief impediment to its removal, is the too exclusive attention paid to particular modes of its expression. There is insufficient breadth of observation and generalization. It is too often forgotten that the manifestation of pathology, whatever it may be, can never exist unsupported, and that there is necessarily something back of it, often unrecognized because unsought. The symptoms are merely the utterances of something and we commit grave mistakes in considering the symptoms as "diseases" and restricting remedial attention to these. They do not differentiate between the varying phases of vital activity or types of "abnormal" behavior, by which the living organism resists the causes of pathology, and the actual pathology itself, and, hence, most of their "therapeutic" program is directed at the vital reaction.

The different characters assumed by pathology in its progressive development do not necessarily require a corresponding difference in remedial care. Once the unity of the various phases, local and general, of pathology is realized, it will be seen that there is no sound basis for specific treatments for supposedly "specific diseases."

Treatment that is directed at the changes in the local organ ignores all the changes that exist throughout the body. Hygienists perceive that the patient's present evils, which afflict him, are not isolated and unrelated evils--they are an aggregate of evil, a system, which must be abolished collectively, and not one at a time, and replaced by the factors of good health, before a single major existing evil can be remedied. Treating the end-points and ignoring both the antecedent stages of deterioration and its causes can never lead to desirable results. Pathology is general, cause is general, "treatment" must be general.

Group medicine is the present vogue. Clinical groups, composed of specialists, for every system of the body, are formed, and the sick man or woman who goes to one of these clinics is run through the hands of fifteen or twenty specialists, each one of which examines and analyzes his department of the body. Each specialist determines the condition of the organs and parts of the body that have been made the subject of his specialty, and names the deviation from the normal which he finds. That is the "disease." After the patient has been through the hands of twenty of these specialists, he emerges from the clinic with twenty or thirty "diseases."

What have the specialists really discovered? Symptoms, effects, end-points; nothing more. The nose and throat man find rhinitis, sinusitis, and tonsillitis; the gastroenterologist finds chronic gastritis, enteritis, colitis, proctitis, cholangitis, perhaps even an ulcer; the genitourinary man finds cystitis, leoucorrhea, metritis, etc. Everyone of these local so-called "diseases" are but local expressions of a general catarrhal condition. If ulcer, cancer, nephritis, sclerosis, etc., are present these are but extensions of the same condition.

When we learn to see the ills of the body as mere stages or steps in one continuous process and not as separate and specific entities, we will be in a position to prevent all so-called disease. That process of physical decay which results in poor sight, falling hair, decayed teeth, also results in diseases of the heart and arteries, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, Bright's disease.

It is certainly a serious blunder to single out each link in a chain of successive and concomitant developments and give to each of these a different name and ascribe to each of them a different and perhaps a specific cause. We must learn to see the ills of the body as mere stages or steps in one continuous unbroken process, and not as specific entities, if we are ever to make any progress worthy the name in the prevention of "disease" and degeneration.

The group now get their heads together and decide what the outcome of your "disease" will be (a prognosis). Their opinion is based on the usual results of their own methods of treating and abusing the local states. Once the patient deserts them and their methods and turns to other methods, their prognosis ceases to have any value. Outside of their own drugged sphere doctors have no right to an opinion.

A lady visited eleven different specialists and came away with eleven different "diseases". The unfortunate part about this is not that these specialists were all wrong, but that they were all right. That is, they were all right in so far as they named the symptoms and conditions which they each found. They were all wrong, however, in as far as they considered these eleven "different diseases" as separate and distinct "diseases," depending upon separate and distinct causes, and requiring different treatment. These eleven "diseases" are merely eleven manifestations of a common basic cause. For, the fact is, there is a process of degeneration going on throughout the entire structure of the woman, even to the last tissue, and the symptoms are all indicative of this. These so-called diseases merely represent a greater local degeneration than exists generally in the system. Physicians of ' all schools fail to recognize the essential unity of the so-called diseases and to realize that they all depend on a common universal substratum, aside from the body, itself, as the basis of their support. Each disease is a fixed species, having no genetic relationship with the conditions which preceded it, or which accompany it, or which come after it. Inflammation in one organ is one "disease" and inflammation in another organ is another "disease" and each of these "diseases" is due to a specific and unitary cause. And, thus, their confusion grows more confounded. The more they seek the less they find.

Naming and classifying "diseases" is confusing and misleading. The "diseases" so named are looked upon as organized entities, whereas they are mere waves on the great sea of pathology. So many names for so-called diseases produce complexity and prevent the doctors of all schools from realizing that their many so-called "diseases" are but successive and concomitant effects of the accumulation and extension of a constantly acting genetic cause--cause always being a number of correlated factors. As shown in another chapter, all of these so-called diseases are only symptoms of toxemia and reveal which organs have had the greatest stress levied on them by the toxemia.

. The folly of labeling each stage or step in this progressive deterioration and degeneration as a separate and distinct "disease", should be apparent to all. Our failure to recognize them as parts of one general process, concomitant, coetaneous, and successive developments of the same progressive or cumulative, common causes; our failure to see in each so-called chronic or organic "disease," the culmination or summing up of a long series of causes and effects beginning in infancy, or before, and operating throughout the life of the individual, leads to the confusion, uncertainty, groping and failures of modern medicine, with its multiple causations, multiple un-unified phenomena, myriads of specific "diseases," and its supposed need for multiple remedies for "diseases."