A common pattern of symptom suppression under the contemporary medical model is this progression:  treat colds with antihistamines until the body gets influenza; suppress a flu repeatedly with antibiotics and eventually you get pneumonia.  Or, suppress eczema with cortisone ointment repeatedly, and eventually you develop kidney disease.  Or, suppress asthma with bronkiodialators and eventually you need cortisone to suppress it.  Continue treating asthma with steroids and you destroy the adrenals; now the body has become allergic to virtually everything.

The presence of toxins in an organ of secondary elimination is frequently the cause of infection.  Sinuses and lungs, inflamed by secondary eliminations, are attacked by viruses or bacteria; infectious diseases of the skin result from pushing toxins out of the skin.  More generalized infections also result from toxemia; in this case the immune system has become compromised and the body is overwhelmed by an organism that it normally should be able to resist easily.  The wise cure of infections is not to use antibiotics to suppress the bacteria while simultaneously whipping the immune system; most people, including most medical doctors, do not realize that antibiotics also goose the immune system into super efforts.  But when one chooses to whip a tired horse, eventually the exhausted animal collapses and cannot rise again no matter how vigorously it is beaten.  The wise cure is to detoxify the body, a step that simultaneously eliminates secondary eliminations and rebuilds the immune system.

The wise way to deal with the body’s eliminative efforts is to accept that disease is an opportunity to pay the piper for past indiscretions.  You should go to bed, rest, and drink nothing but water or dilute juice until the condition has passed.  This allows the body to conserve its vital energy, direct this energy toward healing the disordered body part, and catch up on its waste disposal.  In this way you can help your body, be in harmony with its efforts instead of working against it which is what most people do.

Please forgive another semi-political polemic here, but in my practice I have often been amazed to hear my clients complain that they have not the time nor the ability to be patient with their body, to rest it through an illness because they have a job they can’t afford to miss or responsibilities they can’t put down.  This is a sad commentary on the supposed wealth and prosperity of the United States.  In our country most people are enslaved by their debts, incurred because they had been enthralled by the illusion of happiness secured by the possession of material things.  Debt slaves believe they cannot miss a week of work.  People who feel they can’t afford to be sick think they can afford to live on pills.  So people push through their symptoms by sheer grit for years on end, and keep that up until their exhausted horse of a body breaks down totally and they find themselves in the hospital running up bills to the tune of several thousand dollars a day.  But these very same people do not think they can afford the loss of a few hundred dollars of current income undertaking some virtually harmless preventative maintenance on their bodies.