While not confined to women, yet women are by far more generally afflicted with constipation and hemorrhoids than are men. Their sedentary habits, tight lacing, and repugnance to water drinking make them peculiarly susceptible to the costive habit—which in turn, through engorgement of the hemorrhoidal veins, causes piles.
I mention these subjects here because the treatment for constipation and hemorrhoids is identical with that given for painful or suppressed menstruation.
The results in constipation are, in some instances, absolutely astonishing. I know of one woman, constipated for fifteen years, who never knew what it meant to have a natural movement of the bowels. She grasped the chair seat with the tips of her fingers and thumbs, putting all her strength into this grip—so as partly to desensitize the pain of tongue pressure, and thereby be able to stand a more drastic treatment. Then the tongue was firmly pressed for nine minutes in the manner before described.
Her bowels moved within fifteen minutes afterwards, and for a year or longer she has never had to take another cathartic. Another case was cleared up two years ago, and has had no return of the former trouble.
These, however, are the extraordinary and exceptional cases. For routine treatment it may be well to use the pressures for a considerable period of time, so that their stimulating effect may tend to create a “habit” in the peristaltic muscles of the bowel. For the cure cannot be considered complete until this “habit” is firmly established.
The pain, bleeding and swelling of piles is also helped by these same procedures.
The point to be most emphatically dwelt upon in connection with the treatment of these conditions is that “absent treatment,” or lick-and-a-promise namby-pambyism, isn’t of any avail. The pressures must be made by some one who has more sympathy with the patient’s ultimate good than he has for her present temporary discomfort, and who will administer a good honest treatment—preferably while the patient does all she can—by tightly clasping the hands on the interlocked fingers, or by grasping the chair or a table with the finger tips—to reduce the sensitivity of the zones operated upon.
If zone therapy is used in this manner, the results will amaze and delight. For no method yet evolved for the treatment of these disorders even remotely approximates zone therapy in point of efficacy.