The Progress Of Disease: Irritation, Enervation, Toxemia

Categories: The Nature and Cause of Disease
Sources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor

Disease routinely lies at the end of a three-part chain that goes:

irritation or sub-clinical malnutrition, enervation, toxemia.

Irritations are something the person does to themselves or something

that happens around them. Stresses, in other words.



Mental stressors include strong negative emotional states such as

anger, fear, resentment, hopelessness, etc. Behind most diseases it

is common to find a prob ematic mind churning in profound confusion,

one generated by a character that avoids responsibility. There may

also be job stress or ongoing hostile relationships, often within

the family.



Indigestible foods and misdigestion are also stressful irritations,

as are mild recreational poisons such as "soft" drugs, tobacco and

alcohol. Opiates are somewhat more toxifying, primarily because they

paralyze the gut and induce profound constipation. Stimulants like

cocaine and amphetamines are the most damaging recreational drugs;

these are highly toxic and rapidly shorten life.



Repeated irritations and/or malnutrition eventually produce

enervation. The old-time hygienists defined enervation as a lack of

or decline in an unmeasurable phenomena, "nerve energy." They viewed

the functioning of vital organs as being controlled by or driven by

nerve force, sometimes called life force or elan vital.

Whatever this vital force actually is, it can be observed and

subjectively measured by comparing one person with another. Some

people are full of it and literally sparkle with overflowing energy.

Beings like this make everyone around them feel good because they

somehow momentarily give energy to those endowed with less. Others

possess very little and dully plod through life.



As vital force drops, the overall efficiency of all the body's

organs correspondingly decline. The pancreas creates less digestive

enzymes; the thymus secretes less of its vital hormones that

mobilize the immune system; the pituitary makes less growth hormone

so the overall repair and rebuilding of cells and tissues slows

correspondingly; and so forth. It does not really matter if there is

or is not something called nerve energy that can or cannot be

measured in a laboratory. Vital force is observable to many people.

However, it is measurable by laboratory test that after repeated

irritation the overall functioning of the essential organs and

glands does deteriorate.



Enervation may develop so gradually that it progresses below the

level of awareness of the person, or times of increased enervation

can be experienced as a complaint--as a lack of energy, as

tiredness, as difficulties digesting, as a new inability to handle a

previously-tolerated insult like alcohol.



Long-term consumption of poor-quality food causes enervation. The

body is a carbon/oxygen engine designed to run efficiently only on

highly nutritious food and this aspect of human genetic programming

cannot be changed significantly by adaptation. Given enough

generations a human gene pool can adapt to extracting its nutrition

from a different group of foods. For example, a group of isolated

Fijians currently enjoying long healthy lives eating a diet of

seafoods and tropical root crops could suddenly be moved to the

highlands of Switzerland and forced to eat the local fare or starve.

But most of the Fijians would not have systems adept at making those

enzymes necessary to digest cows milk. So the transplanted Fijians

would experience many generations of poorer health and shorter life

spans until their genes had been selected for adaptation to the new

dietary. Ultimately their descendants could become uniformly healthy

on rye bread and dairy products just like the highland Swiss were.



However, modern industrial farming and processing of foodstuffs

significantly contributes to mass, widespread enervation in two

ways. Humans will probably adjust to the first; the second will, I'm

sure, prove insurmountable. First, industrially processed foods are

a recent invention and our bodies have not yet adapted to digesting

them. In a few more generations humans might be able to accomplish

that and public health could improve on factory food. In the

meanwhile, the health of humans has declined. Industrially farmed

foods have also been lowered in nutritional content compared to what

food could be. I gravely doubt if any biological organism can ever

adapt to an overall dietary that contains significantly lowered

levels of nutrition. I will explain this more fully in the chapter

on diet.