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Why every gland depends on digestion, and why the work begins at the belly
Everything so far has been preparation for one observation, and this observation is the founder's own contribution to the treatment of disease. It is short. It should be learnt by heart.
Where the raw materials come from
All glands and organs can produce their individual chemicals in the correct quantity and at the correct time only when the necessary raw materials for them are available from the end products of digestion.
In other words: the correct performance of every gland and organ depends wholly on the correct functioning of the digestive system — including the accessory organs of digestion. (Figure 3.12)
Here is the everyday picture, and it is the one to give a patient. One kitchen supplying a hundred households. If the kitchen is sound, every house eats. If it runs at half strength, no house is destroyed — but every one is a little short, and the weakest shows it first. Nobody looking at the hungriest house would say this house has a disease of its own; they would go and look at the kitchen. Which is why a slowed digestion does not produce one disease. It produces whichever disease that particular body is disposed to.
Three substances, and everything built from them
The raw materials of all the hormones are made from only three things — cholesterol, tyrosine amino acid, and proteins.
For those three to be formed properly and absorbed properly, the digestive system must be right. That is what this therapy corrects.
And with the vitamins the position is starker still: apart from vitamin K and folic acid, the vitamins are not manufactured in the body at all. They have to be obtained from food — and for that too, the digestive system must be in order.
Take three worked examples — the ones you will be asked about at the mat, each the same argument arriving from a different direction.
The thyroid. The thyroid builds its hormones on tyrosine, an amino acid which becomes available during the digestion of protein in the intestine. If digestion is not right, the material is short; if the material is short, the gland's output falls — the T₃ and T₄ on the patient's slip. And when they fall the pituitary, which is watching, shouts louder: that shout is the raised TSH she has come to ask you about. If digestion were right, tyrosine would be properly made, the thyroid's work would remain right, and we would not fall ill.
The bones. A person with thinning bones has less calcium in the bone, and less in the blood behind it, because calcium is not being absorbed. If the intestine is not working, then however many tablets are swallowed the deficiency will not be made up — the tablet passes through. Correct the intestine and calcium begins to be absorbed again; by that road even thinning of the bones can be corrected. This is the schoolteacher at the head of this article, and it is why nobody told her to buy a better brand.
Cholesterol and the liver. Cholesterol is not a villain; the body needs it, because out of cholesterol it builds the steroid hormones — the ones that let a person stand and fight a calamity or run from it. But if the liver is not working properly, cholesterol accumulates and settles on the inner walls of the arteries. They slowly narrow, the circulation is obstructed, and from that come disorders of the heart, of the kidney and much else. By correcting the function of the liver the level of cholesterol is kept right — and the very chance of those diseases arising is ended.
Two further examples belong in your pocket, because patients ask about them.
The body's own blood-thinner. In the liver and the lungs a substance called heparin is continually made, whose business is to prevent lumps and clots forming in the circulation. If clots are forming, heparin is not being made in sufficient quantity — and a clot carried to the heart can obstruct it and kill; carried to the brain, it obstructs the circulation there, and that is paralysis. By activating — stimulating — the pancreas, the liver and the lungs, heparin begins to be made again; it dissolves those lumps, and even knots dried and settled for a long time begin to come out, so that paralysis, heart disease and blockage in the heart begin to be cured.
The chemical that stops abnormal growth. The pancreas makes a hormone named somatostatin, whose work is to stop abnormal growth. By stimulating the pancreas for a special length of time, this therapy is able to end not only fibroids and cysts but even a tumour in the brain.
Now the conditions themselves. The therapy does not leave "digestion should be good" as a pious wish: it states what must be true, and then what a person must do to make it true. Both lists are examinable.
That triad is not a rhetorical flourish. The abdomen is the organ of supply — nothing enters the body's stores except through it. The kidneys throw out the fixed wastes and hold the water and salt balance. The lungs take in oxygen and put out carbon dioxide, and by how fast they do it they hold one whole side of the acid–alkali balance. Supply, drainage and air: get those three right and there is very little left for a disease to stand on.
Which brings us to the sentence that decides how a course of treatment is built.
Why the work begins at the belly
In our daily routine there are many factors under whose influence the greater part of the blood moves towards the limbs, the brain and elsewhere — and the blood flow in the organs of digestion decreases.
Sufficient blood is not obtained for the process of digestion.
Shortage of blood makes the organs of digestion sluggish, so that they become unable to digest the food and complete its absorption. Since all the glands depend on the products of digestion for their raw materials, the ill effect must fall on the working of the glands too. That gives birth to various symptoms, which in the end take the form of one disease or another.
This is the root cause of nearly every disease that afflicts the human race.
And therefore: in this therapy the greatest attention is given to setting right the stomach and the organs related to it — because in that lies the key to complete health.
The material's own image for the last step is a housewife's, and it is the best in the wiki. Just as many different dishes can be made in an ordinary kitchen out of the same few limited materials, so out of the different levels of functioning of our few organs different symptoms are produced — and different combinations of those symptoms are given the names of different diseases. Change the proportions and you get another dish. The pantry did not change. Whatever the name of the disease, it has come from the disorder of only a handful of organs.
That is the sentence for the patient who asks why you are pressing her belly when her complaint is her shoulder. Add the honest second half: your shoulder is repaired out of the same stores as everything else in you, and those stores are running short. If I only work the shoulder, I will give you a fortnight of relief and see you again in the spring.