Watch
The thyroid
What a thyroid report is saying
The thyroid sets the speed of the body — the master craftsman, without whose order the other workmen do not get on. All the functions of the digestive tract depend on the thyroid gland.
When the thyroid works less, T₃ and T₄ come out in less than the right quantity; after years of it the quantity in the blood is far below normal and it is called hypothyroidism, and one chief indicator is that the quantity of TSH also rises — because TSH is the order sent to the thyroid from the pituitary. A high TSH is the sound of the body shouting at a gland that is not answering.
And the part that belongs to this therapy: the thyroid gland's basic chemical is tyrosine, an amino acid, which is made in the intestine during digestion. If digestion is not right it will not be made; so T₃ and T₄ will not be made either, and TSH will rise in the blood. If digestion were right, thyroid function would remain right, and we would not fall ill.
So a thyroid report is very often a report about a stomach — and it re-reads a symptom: when the thyroid works less, the residue reaches the large intestine very late, and that person gets hard constipation, so in the treatment of constipation we must certainly stimulate the thyroid gland. Thrd raises metabolism by T₃ and T₄ and is extremely good for diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease, because these diseases come from hypothyroidism; its full list of uses belongs to Each Point in Use. What belongs here is the caution list a report puts into your hands.
Haemoglobin
Low haemoglobin is a shortage of the oxygen-carrier. Lying down, the blood such a person has is enough for the involuntary work; but on setting to work she needs more oxygen and cannot get it, and because sufficient oxygen does not reach the brain she feels giddy — with shivering, clenching of the teeth, speech stopping, and a falling temperature and pulse. Where the menstrual flow is excessive, ask what is behind it: if there is hypothyroidism, or calcium or haemoglobin is low, or a cyst or fibroid in the uterus or ovary, then bleeding is greater — and all these disturbances we can correct (Treating Women). And the haemoglobin of rheumatoid arthritis patients remains lower than normal, and when haemoglobin is low, sufficient oxygen will not reach the tissues.
What a low haemoglobin changes
The pace you expect, said at the start rather than explained in week four. Where the work goes: the red cell is made on an order — erythropoietin — from the kidney, so in chronic diseases Mu° is given to make erythropoietin, which will stimulate the bone marrow to make red blood cells, and the liver point is given in kidney failure and other chronic diseases to stimulate erythropoietin so the red cell count does not fall too low. And what is asked about: the periods, the stool, the gums, the piles — blood from anywhere, even once, even a little, goes to a doctor this week ▲ Take care , as does a very low figure with breathlessness at rest (When the Hand Must Stop).
Blood sugar
Fasting and after-food are photographs; the three-month figure is a memory. The session changes first: look at the feet before you use them — where sensation has gone, a patient cannot tell you that something is too much. ▲ Take care Then the day's plan follows the day's body: a diabetic who normally has constipation will be given a different treatment on the day when he has loose or semi-solid motions — and both treatments will be found to be effective in reducing his blood sugar. Neither was aimed at the sugar. And a point comes into play: (10) Pan stimulates insulin and is given to maintain the body's sugar level, and in heart disease or obesity to reduce triglycerides — chiefly where diabetes or heart disease arises from hypothyroidism. Where sugars climb with nothing changed, retake the history: the commonest answer is a tablet quietly reduced. We use no medicine and we do not tell anyone to stop theirs (The History That Cannot Mislead You).
Serum calcium
The word calcium makes everybody think of bone. The bones are the warehouse; the blood is the shop floor; the report counts what is on the shelves this morning.
The two directions of calcium
The quantity of calcium in the plasma should ordinarily be from 9.00 to 11.00 mg/dl.
Below 9 mg/dl: the muscles cannot work properly — and the glands cannot send out their secretion unless the muscles beside them work, so a low calcium slows glands with nothing wrong with them. If there is an extreme deficiency, even the heart can fail. To prevent it, PTH — parathormone, from the parathyroid gland — tells the osteoclasts to take calcium out of the bones and put it into the plasma.
Above 11 mg/dl: from the thyroid gland calcitonin comes out, which tells the osteoblasts to put that excess calcium into the bones, and the parathyroid stops the intestine and the osteoclasts from taking up any more, and lets calcium go out through the urine.
Calcium is absorbed by way of the hormone 1,25 DCC, and for that the presence of PTH is essential (Correcting the Two Kingdoms); if the kidneys become spoiled, 1,25 DCC will not be made, and those patients can get osteoporosis, in which the bones become so hollow that they cannot bear even a little pressure.
If there is osteoporosis, there will be deficiency of calcium in the blood too — because calcium is not being absorbed. However many calcium tablets one eats, that deficiency will not be made up: if the intestine is not working properly, calcium will not be absorbed and will not reach the blood. Correct the intestine and even a disease like osteoporosis can be cured. In the other direction, if calcium in the bones becomes excessive, we stimulate the parathyroid gland, which draws calcium out of the bones into the blood; along with it we give Heparin, which increases blood circulation, and by that increase the calcium raised in the blood is properly broken down and passes out of the body — by which relief comes in such diseases as ankylosing spondylitis or kidney stone. (Figure 12.2)
Vitamin B₁₂ and folic acid
Why a low B₁₂ is a report about the stomach
For the absorption of vitamin B₁₂ it is necessary that intrinsic factor be made in the stomach; only then, on reaching the ileum, will vitamin B₁₂ be stored in the liver. Otherwise the enzymes of the stomach and the intestine will digest it — that is, finish it off.
The stock of vitamin B₁₂ in the liver lasts five to six years, so if someone has symptoms of vitamin B₁₂ deficiency, it means that for several years it has not been getting stored in his body — and for intrinsic factor to be made properly the blood circulation in the stomach must be proper, for which we give Gas Only.
A man who eats well and shows a low B₁₂ has not been eating badly for five years. His stomach has not been taking it in. These are reports about absorption, not intake.
The deficiency has a face you see before any report: fatigue; blackness between the joints of the fingers; numbness of the feet on sitting a long time; anaemia; mouth ulcers; weakness of the nerves, the ear or the eye. Folic acid has its own family — megaloblastic anaemia, the neural tube defects, cleft lip and cleft palate, and pain at the folic acid point in a hole in the heart: ASD, VSD, PDA — with the rule that if in pregnancy the mother has a deficiency of folic acid, these defects can occur in the child (Vitamin and Gene Formulas).
A small child cannot answer; the mother can
Small children, if their pain points are checked, will not be able to say whether it hurts or not — but their mother can speak about her own pain points, can she not? And during pregnancy, whichever vitamin the mother is deficient in, the child too will certainly have a deficiency of those same things.
So in children's diseases, before deciding the treatment, always check the mother's B₁₂ and folic acid pain points, and if during pregnancy the mother had a deficiency of vitamin B₁₂ or folic acid, treat the child for that same thing — and only then will there be great progress in the child's treatment.
Kidney function
If you learn to read one report properly, learn this one — the only page in an ordinary file that will make you withhold a treatment.
What creatinine and urea are
They are waste, made all day by an ordinary working body and removed by the kidneys, which filter the blood as a sieve holds back what should not pass. When the flow of blood inside the kidneys is less than is needed, the kidneys will not be able to filter the blood properly, and there will be an accumulation in the blood of unwanted things like urea and creatinine, from which harm will come to the body.
A raised creatinine is not a disease of creatinine. It is a report that the sieve is not clearing — and the body's own answer to it, which helps to maintain the GFR, the flow of blood inside the kidneys, is taught in Water and Salt, "Water and Salt".
The coma case — a value that removed one station from a formula
A patient lay unconscious, and the treatment given was (8) Pan · (1) Gal · (2) Acid · (4) Lt. Ch. Only — in which Gal was given and Mu° was not given, because both his kidneys were spoiled, on account of which his creatinine was greatly raised. Given twice, the blood's pH changed from 7.32 to 7.4 and he came out of the coma. (Ordinarily a patient goes into coma at pH 7.1, and on its becoming pH 6.8 death occurs.)
The lesson is not the pH. It is the clause in the middle: Mu° was not given, because the creatinine was greatly raised — and the formula still worked.
Liver values, cholesterol, uric acid and the white cells
The liver reports are read because the liver decides three of the file's other values. If the liver does not work properly, accumulation of cholesterol begins and it settles on the inner walls of the arteries, from which the arteries slowly become narrow and disorders in the heart and kidneys are born — by correcting the function of the liver, this therapy keeps the level of cholesterol correct. And the chief responsibility for the metabolism of uric acid belongs to the liver: if the liver does not work properly, uric acid rises above normal — a chief cause of gout, or of pain in the joints, which makes the sour parhez a thing you will not compromise on (Food as Medicine).
That line is also a reading list: of the whole folder, the pages that most often earn their place speak about those three.
The reports that change nothing, and the discipline of saying so
The spine film at sixty, the odd exception, and the report as diagnosis
Saying it is hard for reasons that have nothing to do with medicine: the patient paid for it, believes it explains everything, and "this changes nothing" sounds, to an untrained ear, like a man who could not read it. Say it anyway.
The incidental finding on a spine X-ray in a person of sixty
A man of sixty brings a film of his lower back. The report names narrowing between two bones, roughening at the edges, a little bone grown where there was none. Every word is accurate. Almost none of it is news — that is what a sixty-year-old spine looks like, in people with pain and in people with none.
A finding present in bodies with the complaint and equally present in bodies without it does not explain the complaint. So: changed nothing — unless the film names a level your fingers had already found, which is two independent instruments agreeing (one instrument round the room twice is worth nothing — The History That Cannot Mislead You); or unless it names a thing on the caution lists, since spur and bamboo spine have come from increased calcium, and points that raise calcium into bone are therefore withheld. ▲ Take care
The same holds for an old report of a complaint that has gone, a report ordered for somebody else's question, and a value a hair outside the range in a person who feels well.
One exception teaches the rule. A knee hot to the hand, red and swollen, but with no pain at Mu°, whose film may read "OA of the knee": within one or two treatments both the heat and the swelling are reduced by G. Heparin — but this treatment is not to be given to those patients who have heart disease ▲ Take care . What chose it was not the X-ray.
A scan is read the same way, and occasionally names a thing you cannot feel. A prolapse of the uterus seen on sonography decides a treatment after which (6) WD is necessary — otherwise that woman will have still more trouble ▲ Take care (Treating Women); a blockage in the Ampoulla of Vater, which congeals the bile, can be detected by having an ultrasound done (Setting the Stomach); a hole in the heart, with its size in millimetres, gives something measurable to watch — in one child, after five to six months the sonography showed the hole reduced from 9 mm to 4 mm (Vitamin and Gene Formulas). And keep the old films: in a spina bifida patient treated for months, in the X-ray something faint began to appear at the place of L5–S1.
What is missing from the file, and how to ask for it
Asking through the doctor, as caution, for what would change the plan
Two truths sit behind this, both the therapy's own. Much has been proved by experience but it has not been possible to establish it by laboratory tests, because such tests are very expensive. And the reports are not always released: in some places the hospitals will not even give us the reports of tests that were done. That is an institution's rule, not hostility — and the patient may ask for their own records where you may not.
The findings that stop a session
The report and signs that send a patient to a doctor today
And one working rule: in the gap after each formula, ask the patient how they are feeling. If their trouble increases after any point or formula, immediately take the opinion of the chief therapist as to whether the treatment should be changed — and write this clearly on the card, so that in future that point is not given again.