Fig. 22.—Photograph of patient in Fig. [21] seventeen months after her first treatment. After three years improvement still continues.
Remember that scratching stimulates, while deep pressure with the teeth of the comb, finger nails or wires of the hair brush relaxes.
Also the next time the baby is restless and inclined to double up and yell murder, instead of doing a slippered constitutional up and down the room with him, scratch the backs of his hands. If he’s had too much to eat this may quiet him. If, however, his little “tummy” is “working,” try some pressures on his hands or feet, and see how soon the “tummy” will knock off work.
And, for the same sufficient reasons, try the same thing on yourself and the family, instead of “banging” the stomach over the head with a dose of dope.
The morning sickness of pregnancy yields quite uniformly to deep pressures on the backs of the hands, and it is much safer to try and control this nausea from the hands than it would be to resort to the severe pressures on the tongue. For these latter, if too drastic, might produce a miscarriage.
Also, while it isn’t exactly zone therapy, it might be interesting here to note that eating salted popcorn has a tendency to help correct the nausea of pregnancy, car sickness, and indigestion. Many patients of mine keep a bowl of it on a chair right alongside their beds, and commence to eat it so soon as they awake in the morning. A handful of popcorn, thoroughly chewed, seems to help pacify the otherwise rebellious stomach.
Zone therapy pressures are valuable not only in nausea and vomiting, but also in indigestion, gastric catarrh and all forms of stomach disorders. It has even been successfully employed in gastric ulcer, with dangerous hemorrhages and the other distressing symptoms of this painful malady. Dr. Reid Kellogg has cured three of these cases, one in ten treatments, the others in two or three months. Two of these patients had had an acute condition for two months—no food whatsoever passing through the pylorus (the exit of the stomach). They had been, of course, fed by the rectum.
Dr. Kellogg used the probe (Fig. [9]), low down on the posterior (back) wall of the pharynx, and used pressures over the thumb, first and second fingers of both hands with the aluminum comb.