J.A.B. writes:—­I have been a reader of The Healthy Life for the last six months, and am suffering from a complaint since I was three years old.  When three years old I was attacked by scarlet fever and on getting better I had a discharge from my right ear.  This continued for several years, then it would disappear and reappear at short intervals of say a few weeks.  This last few years the discharge has disappeared for six months, only to reappear again for a week with severe pains in back over right shoulder and right side of neck.  I always feel weak and tired when discharge reappears and sometimes experience pains in the head and cannot remember anything for a few minutes.

This correspondent needs a suitable diet in order to purify his blood stream and to promote elimination of bodily poisons which are evidently affecting his ears.  He also needs suitable massage and stretching movements applied to the upper part of the spine, which is functioning badly.  Then he can supplement this by taking Turkish baths or wet sheet packs to promote a free action of the skin and thus clear away poisonous waste from the system.  The same diet as recommended to the previous correspondent should be tried.

 CONCERNING COTTAGE CHEESE.

Mrs C.E.J. writes:—­I have been making cottage cheese curdling the milk with lemon juice, as recommended in The Healthy Life.  Suppose the milk contains disease germs, would not this cheese be injurious, as the milk is not sterilised by being brought to boiling point?  I have also been drinking the whey from the same, as it as given in The Healthy Life Beverage Book.  I notice in a reply given in this month’s issue that Dr Knaggs states that the whey of the milk is the dangerous element.  Since reading this answer I have been somewhat in doubt as to drinking the whey.  I should like to know if it can be taken without harmful effects.

Ordinary unboiled milk, free from preservatives, is far less dangerous to health than boiled milk, because Nature inserts in the raw milk certain germs known as the lactic-acid-producing bacilli, which protect us from the injurious germs.  These lactic germs cause the milk to go sour and produce in this way the much-extolled soured or curdled milk.  They convert the sugar of the whey into lactic acid by a process of fermentation.  If milk is boiled it cannot go sour because the germs natural to it have been destroyed by the heat and it becomes necessary to introduce fresh lactic germs into the boiled milk as is done in the artificial production of curdled milk.  Failing this, milk will undergo, not lactic fermentation, but putrefaction, and thereby develop highly dangerous qualities.

When a person takes soured milk its lactic acid acts as a powerful germ destroyer and in a certain concentration it actually kills the lactic germs as well.  It also keeps down the disease-producing