There are many who believe that fear, worry, hate, grief, etc., are in themselves sufficient to produce disease in a normal organism. Shock following the demise of a loved one or some deep disgrace is occasionally alleged as a cause of death or of a rapid decline in health which terminates fatally.
The failure of Suggestive Therapeutics to cure disease except when it is largely imaginary rather argues against this theory. It is also true that proper Chiropractic adjustments not only lead to the cure of disease apparently caused by abnormal mental states but also, restoring proper blood-supply and nutrition to the brain, induce a happier mental state in the patient. Even insanity has been cured in a number of cases by Chiropractic.
We hold that worry, fear, etc., are abnormal; that they arise from the improper expression of Mind through disordered brain-cells. “Diseases of the Mind,” in the strictest sense, cannot occur, but only diseases of the physical medium through which mind is expressed and translated to the physical plane of being—the brain.
A condition of abnormal mental expression or activity, especially worry, fear or anger, probably has a two-fold effect: it rapidly wastes the body energy and, like bodily excess, renders every subluxation more effective; it is possible that it may also really produce auto-toxins, generated by abnormal brain-action and affecting the body metabolism adversely. In this way disease appears through the action of abnormal mental states as secondary causes.
They themselves are the result of subluxation of the first or second, sometimes third, Cervical, impinging the nerves which control the blood-supply to the brain and hence its nutrition. Correction of the subluxation causes them to disappear.
INFLAMMATION
Inflammation is a morbid process characterized by the presence of increased temperature and one or more of the symptoms, pain, redness, and swelling. It is distinguished from fever by being confined locally, while fever is a general functional disturbance showing elevation of temperature, increased katabolism, decreased secretion, etc.
Our clinical experience with fevers leads us to accept Metchnikoff’s conclusion that the essential phenomenon of inflammation is hyperaemia. Upon the hyperaemia depend the swelling, pain, and local increase in heat-production. Hyperaemia in turn depends upon disturbance of the vasomotor nerves either as a direct result of some local subluxation or as an indirect consequence of local irritation.
A newly acquired subluxation produces an acute irritation of the pre-ganglionic axons which connect the spinal nerves with the sympathetic ganglia. If these ganglia send out post-ganglionic axons which are vaso-motor in function, an inflammation may be produced without the intervention of any secondary cause. On the other hand, there may be a subluxation producing weakness of some part; through injury to that part or the introduction of poisons or irritants such as germ infection, sensory end-organs are affected and the motor reaction which follows increases the subluxation; this slight increase produces acute irritation of the nerve and hyperaemia, with its resultant phenomena, follows. Stated briefly, irritants produce inflammation only by acting through the medium of the spine. If the spine be normal these irritants are insufficient to produce morbid process. Local inflammation tends to develop toxins, especially if it be of bacterial origin, which may in turn affect the entire organism—an effect which will be discussed presently. Exception must be made in those traumatic cases in which hyperaemia is essential to the reparatory process, and which are attended by what may be termed a normally increased heat-production. This beneficent and reparatory condition cannot be termed disease or morbid process.
The normal temperature of the body depends upon the balance maintained between heat-production and heat-expenditure. This balance is maintained through a complicated nerve mechanism consisting of various nidi in thalamus, medulla, spinal cord and sympathetic ganglia, and a network of communicating axons of both the cerebro-spinal and sympathetic systems, controlling the amount of blood passing through any given body area at a given time, the secretion of the perspiratory glands, the internal metabolic processes, etc. Most important are the vaso-motor nerves, directly, but not originally, derived from the sympathetic, and governing the size and caliber of all blood-vessels so as to control the amount of blood flowing to and through the surface capillaries on the one hand, or the deep-seated, heat-making organs on the other. More than seventy per cent of the body’s heat expenditure is through the skin by evaporation, radiation, and direct conduction. The major portion of the heat production is in the muscles and the parenchymatous viscera, such as liver, spleen, etc., where metabolism is active.