Technic and Practice of Chiropractic

by Joy Maxwell Loban

POISONS

Any substance taken into the body and not usable as food may be considered poison. Most drugs administered as medicine or used habitually are either directly poisonous and commonly so considered or are poisonous in the sense that they do not build but rather tend to injure the body. Injurious substances accidentally taken into the body; certain products included in the preparation of otherwise nutritious foods, alcohol, tobacco, etc., affect the body in varying degrees but in accordance with the same laws. Poisons may be internally generated through the action of pathogenic germs or through the failure of the body to digest food and to prevent injurious chemical changes in it. It has even been said by some that abnormal mental states so affect metabolism as to cause the formation of certain auto-toxins which injuriously affect the entire body.

However poison may make its appearance in the body its presence is associated with certain bad effects. Poison may be corrosive, destroying tissue wherever it touches; it may be stimulating, affecting the nerves so as to increase their activity, following which waste of energy there is a weakening reaction; it may be narcotic, lowering some physiologic process below normal.

If a man without subluxation—and therefore normal—have poison introduced into his body one of two effects will follow. Either the poison will be sufficient to produce death in a short time, and will do so, or the poison will be ejected from the body and the patient recover naturally and without treatment, and recover fully.

This is the statement of the ideal, not the real. The fact is that no person has yet been found without subluxation in some part of the spinal column. Occasional cases have been reported but always by Chiropractors whose statements are open to question on account of imperfect training in vertebral palpation or a known habit of unconsidered statement. And in the weakened body, whose natural protective power has been lowered, the effect is different.

The body fails to throw off all the poison normally and some of it remains in the circulation and tends to cause progressively increasing damage. In addition to the direct effect of the poison upon the tissues, the irritation of sensory nerves gives rise to a motor reaction which increases subluxation generally throughout the spine but especially in the segment in which the sensory irritation is greatest. If the poison be taken into the stomach the vertebrae affecting that organ are most affected in the resulting motor disturbances. When vaccine virus is introduced into the arm the greatest influence is upon the last two Cervicals and first Dorsal, causing increased weakening of the nerves to the arm. If the vaccination does not “take” it is because the body is so normal as to be able to take up and rapidly excrete the poison or to neutralize it with an internally generated antitoxin.

This tendency of poisons to increase subluxations already existing has caused many to conclude that new subluxations could be produced by the motor reactions from poison. The laws governing reflex action make this impossible. If a mild stimulus be applied in the segment occupied by a given, and normally aligned, vertebra, the resulting contraction will tend to appear on the same side as the irritation and would—if sufficient to subluxate the vertebra—draw it toward the irritated side. If a stronger stimulus were applied the resulting reaction would appear on both sides and with sufficient intensity on the opposite side to the irritation so that the difference between the contractions on the two sides would never be sufficient to overcome the fixity and inertia of the vertebra. If this bit of theorizing be doubted, let me add that if poisons could cause subluxation they would undoubtedly cause drawing of the vertebra toward the irritated side—which is not the way we find them in poisoning cases. Almost without variation, the subluxation is away from the affected side. Such a subluxation produces most impingement on the side of the irritation; the only kind which could follow poisons would produce its effects on the opposite side.

In acute poisoning cases which may possibly proceed to a rapidly fatal termination, while immediate adjustment may be sufficient to cause the expulsion of the poison and the recovery of the patient it is probably wisest to administer an antidote or to call a physician with a stomach pump. Just so, the pulmotor should be summoned for gas asphyxiation; but at least one case was recently encountered in which an adjustment started the heart and artificial respiration movements restored consciousness before the pulmotor could arrive. There are few, if any, acute poisoning cases in which an adjustment will not aid. Sometimes it should be assisted by other measures not strictly within the province of Chiropractic.

Chronic poisoning, such as lead poisoning from paint work, yields well to adjustments providing the secondary cause, the persistent inhalation of lead fumes, be discontinued.

Poisons may wound or injure the body whether or not it be normal; in such case they might properly be classed with trauma. But no poison causes disease except through the medium of vertebral subluxation previously produced. Some subluxation which has never been sufficient to produce active disease may be so increased by the action of poisons as to be of serious effect even though the poison has long since been eradicated from the body—for the subluxation is permanent until affected by force outside itself. In considering the etiology of any disease the possibility of its being augmented by medicines, drug habits, or dietetic errors should be weighed with other evidence.