A well person, or no clear picture yet

From Setting the Stomach

Questions students ask

1. I am twenty-two and have just started on the formulary. Which of these ten should I learn first, and properly? Normal, Ajay Normal and NAN. Between them they cover most of what walks in, they are the parts out of which the later formulas are assembled, and NAN is the thing you give when a treatment of yours has gone wrong — which you want in your hands before you need it, not after. Learn Fast next, and Ulta Normal only when you are confident you will remember to stop it.

2. I am a housewife learning this to treat my family. My husband gets burning in the chest and takes a tablet for it. Am I allowed to treat him? Yes, and you are allowed to ask him a better question than his chemist does: after which food, and how long afterwards? If it is forty minutes after fried food or heavy protein, with sour belches, then this article says the acid is very probably normal and the meal is not moving. Give the gall bladder and liver pair first. And do not ask him to stop his tablet — that is his doctor's to change, not yours.

3. If the Fast treatment gives a better result than the Normal formula, why would anybody give the Normal formula? Because it is written into far more places than Fast is. Normal is part I of NAN, it is the formula that brings a body back after Ulta Normal, and it is the one described as suitable for anybody, including a well person. And because the Fast sweep is genuinely harder to give well: a therapist who cannot hold the spacing at eighteen to twenty places is giving a worse Normal formula, not a better Fast one.

4. I am a physician. What is being claimed for these formulas, precisely? Three separable things, and they should be kept separate. An observation: tenderness at named sites around the navel accompanies these complaints, changes from day to day, and improves with these sequences, across a very large clinical experience. A causal account of the symptom in the Chole section — that post-fatty-meal burning often reflects delayed gastric emptying rather than raised acid — which is ordinary physiology and independently correct. And a proposed route, that pressure on the limbs alters the blood and nerve supply of the relevant organs, which is the therapy's own hypothesis and has not been measured. State the first two without leaning on the third.

5. I have no science at all. What is the difference between digestion and absorption? Digestion is breaking the food into pieces small enough to be useful. Absorption is carrying those pieces through the wall of the intestine into the body. A grinding mill and a delivery van. You can have a mill running perfectly and no van, and the household still goes hungry — which is why the therapy gives one formula for the mill and another for the van, and then gives them one after the other and calls the pair NAN.

1. 6. Why does Gal get pressed on the left thigh when the gall bladder is on the right? Because pressure on the left limbs relieves pains on the right of the navel — the correspondence rule taught in How a Formula Is Built. And because a treatment point names a technique, not a place inside you. Nothing in this therapy ever claims that your foot is on somebody's gall bladder.

7. I work in a village and have no laboratory. The Vater section mentions ultrasound and a blood enzyme. Am I supposed to have those? No. You are supposed to know that they exist, so that you can say to a patient whose pain keeps returning: there is a way of finding out whether something is blocked, and it is worth doing. A therapist who can name the test that would settle a question is not less of a therapist for not owning the machine. What you must have is the referral, and the habit of using it.

8. The word max. only appears in one formula. Does it apply anywhere else? Only where it is written. Everywhere else in this article a bracketed count at a chemical point is exact. max. is a marked exception, made for a formula whose whole aim is to flush an obstruction and then stop — and marked precisely because if it were not marked, everybody would give eight every day for a month. See also → How a Formula Is Built, Table 13, for what a bracketed count ordinarily commits you to.

9. New Gal takes a long time. May I give only the last part, since that is the gall bladder work? No, and the account tells you exactly what happens if you do. That experiment was run: the Chole formula alone was given to patients with skin trouble, the itching reduced but its effect lasted only a few hours, and such people's stomach was always upset. The four parts in front of part V are there because of that result. First the stomach; only then will the gall bladder work properly.

10. I am sixty-nine and learning this for my own household. Formula No. 4 turns the patient three times in four minutes. Is there a shorter way? Not one that is this formula. What there is, is How a Formula Is Built's honest treatment of the problem: where order and comfort pull against each other, a compromise may be made, its cost is named, and it is written on the card. If turning a frail person prone and back is genuinely unsafe, that is a conversation with your teacher about what to give instead — not a licence to drop a step. See also → The Child, the Elder and the Frail, "The Child, the Elder and the Frail".

11. A woman comes with loose motions and I give Ulta Normal. Two days later she says the motions have stopped completely. Do I give it again tomorrow? No. You ask her what the stool looked like, and if it is formed like a banana you stop that day, give the Normal formula for at least one day, and write on the card that you did. Stopped completely is not the endpoint; formed is the endpoint. And note the phrase in the caution: even after the motions have become firm, giving this same treatment can cause them to complain of constipation.

12. So many of these formulas begin with (10) Medulla. If I have a diabetic patient, does that rule out half the article? It rules out what it rules out, and no more. (10) Medulla is not given to patients of diabetes and of cancer — so Chole, Vater in its standard form, CCK Normal and Formula No. 4 all need thought in a diabetic patient. What is not ruled out is Normal, Fast, Ajay Normal, NAN, Ulta Normal and Organ Clearance, which is a great deal of article. And there is a second sentence to hold beside the first: those diabetic patients to whom (10) Medulla does not feel good should not be given (10) Medulla. Both sentences stand; the more cautious governs.