Gases are found throughout the small and the large intestine. These are the result of both the normal and the abnormal digestive fermentation and bacterial decomposition of the ingesta or food stuffs. Some of the gases are passed into the intestines from the blood by diffusion.
The production of gas is more copious in the upper portion of the small intestine and becomes less rapid and abundant as the large intestine is reached. As formed or found in the intestines, the gases are: carbonic acid, hydrogen, marsh, ammonia, nitrogen, sulphuretted hydrogen, and sulphate of ammonia.
Considering the large amount of abnormal gases generated in the bowels and which abnormally distend the abdominal walls for several inches and press upon the heart and lungs, and considering the small amount passed out as flatus, their entrance into the tissues of the body must be very rapid and harmful.
Stop the habitual putrefaction and mal-digestion, and then the formation of toxic feces, gases, and volatile acid will speedily cease. Then the erstwhile roly-polies will shrink in circumference four or more inches, necessitating the refitting of their garments to the new and better order of things.
Much has been written about the distention of the rectum, sigmoid flexure, and colon from the undue accumulation of feces. The fecal distention of the gut may extend along the intestine for from three to nine inches or more, which is a very grave matter indeed. But why is so much attention given to a few inches of impacted feces dilating a portion of the bowel, and none whatever to the prevention or elimination of gaseous matter that distends the whole gastro-intestinal canal to such an extent that the body is tightly inflated and the median parts of the belly bulge out like a balloon?
Cattle raisers are conversant with the gaseous inflation of their animals, and have to resort to the knife to puncture the stomach to permit the gas to escape; otherwise fatal results would soon follow. Some animals, even, like most human beings, are intemperate in eating. When they consume too much grass they suffer from flatulency and colic, and require drastic treatment.
Rather than let some worthy men and women die, ought we not at times to adopt the ranchman’s treatment for flatus? This harsh means, however, might be avoided by inventive science. Overfed, constipated, inflated man, victim of habitual flatulency, could easily have small gas valves inserted here and there along his gastro-intestinal canal—one, say, to relieve the stomach of toxic gas, another for the appendix region, and still another in the hernial region of the abdomen. Suppose overfeeders were to adopt the gas-valve fad, and discontinue the habit of using cathartics, soda, charcoal, peppermint, pepsin, whiskey, etc., as means of relief! How in the world can a drug aid digestion when taken into a foul, gaseous, and feces-clogged canal?
A chemist cannot get the definite results he seeks unless he have the right chemicals and proper vessels. Just so with the spiritual Ego and his systemic chemistry of food: he needs a clean and healthy digestive apparatus for proper assimilation and elimination. But he gets careless, allows it to get foul, and then insincerely expresses astonishment that the chemical combinations are not such as one could wish or expect. Other chemists, called doctors or druggists, come along and dose the poor victim of his own carelessness until they have ruined his apparatus completely. They have got to live, of course; and it is their business to see that he does not escape so long as they can help it.
Sometimes there is a reassertion of common sense; the poor victim becomes disgusted with himself and his credulous acceptance of the doctor’s dictation and his fatuous swilling of the druggist’s decoctions. He gets tired of chronic ill-health and bowel troubles, and, lo and behold! he does the simplest and most sensible thing in the world—a thing he ought to have done at the very start, or before he ever had the least trouble: He thoroughly washes out his alimentary canal with pure or antiseptic water. He drinks a lot of pure spring water, and he flushes his bowels with two or three enemas. Doctors and drugs are henceforth banished; he gets well! What a blessing to lose one’s faith in the magic of drugs and the majesty of doctors!