Here is an illustration from practical life:  Suppose necessary changes and repairs have to be made in a house.  Workmen have torn down the partitions, hangings, wallpaper, etc.  At this stage of the proceedings the owner discharges the workmen and the house is left in a condition of chaos.  Surely, this would not be rational.  It would leave the house unfit for habitation.  But such a procedure would correspond exactly to the suppression of inflammatory diseases during the stage of Destruction.  This also leaves the affected organs permanently in an abnormal, diseased condition.

That accounts for the mysterious sequelae or chronic after-effects which so often follow drug-treated acute diseases.  I have traced numerous cases of chronic affections of the lungs and kidneys, of infantile paralysis and of many other chronic ailments to such suppression.  In the following I shall describe a typical case, which came under our care and treatment a few years ago.

Suppression by Means of the Ice Bag

A few years ago several gentlemen of Greek nationality called on me with the request that I visit a friend of theirs who had been lying sick for about two months in one of our great West Side [Chicago] hospitals.  On investigation I found that the patient had entered the hospital suffering from a mild case of pneumonia.  The doctors of the institution had ordered ice packs.  Rubber sheets filled with ice were applied to the chest and other parts of the body.  This had been done for several weeks until the fever subsided.

As a matter of fact, ice is more suppressive than antifever medicines.  The continued icy cold applications chill the parts of the body to which they are applied, depress the vital functions and effectually suppress the inflammatory processes.

The result in this case, as in many similar ones which I had occasion to observe during and after the ice-bag treatment, was that the inflammation in the lungs had been arrested and suppressed during the stage of destruction, when the air cells and tissues were filled with exudates, blood serum, pus, live and dead blood cells, bacteria, etc., leaving the affected areas of the lungs in a consolidated, liver-like condition.

As a consequence of suppression in the case of this Greek patient, the pneumonia had been changed from the acute to the subacute and chronic stages and the doctors in charge had told his friends that he was now suffering from miliary tuberculosis, and would probably die within a week or two.

After receiving this discouraging information, the friends of the patient came to me and prevailed upon me to take charge of the case.  He was transferred to our institution, and we began at once to apply the natural methods of treatment.  Instead of ice packs we used the regular cold-water packs, strips of linen wrung out of water of ordinary temperature wrapped around the body and covered with several layers of flannel bandages.