Health and the Death of Excuses
By Philip Schalow
Early in the development of chiropractic, the D.D. and B.J. Palmer’s major thesis was that the health of the individual was not subject to environmental influences, but to internal factors. There is the example of the workers in the same mill, on the same bench. One comes down with an illness the other remains healthy. The point of the story is that if your nervous system is in communication with your cells, health exists; if not disease can be established.
Later in the development of the Palmer clinic, W. P. Hall, D. C., describes the clinic as an environment that is conducive to health and healing; there is a quiet garden, there are spaces for resting, there is refreshing organ music every day. There is an atmosphere that inspires and builds courage (1). Somewhere in this apparent contradiction that the environment does not, but then does have an influence on health, we have to find a harmonizing truth.
In the last forty years of the twentieth century, Americans established a strong push toward controlling pollution. Perhaps beginning with nuclear fallout from Hiroshima people began to consider the environmental consequences of our effluent. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” raised the issue of the influence of pesticides on all of life. The facts were incontrovertible; DDT was killing wildlife and having a significant effect on the development of species. Given the grim reality of the euphemism for pollution, “environmental stress”, how are we to understand Chiropractic’s viewpoint placing the cause of disease within the individual? Is the cause inside the person or outside the person?
An elderly woman is admitted to the hospital with liver failure(2). A case history shows that she has suffered from cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol excess and that for the past several months she has been taking 5-6 tablets of acetaminophen daily for back pain. She was diagnosed with acute liver failure as a result of acetaminophen toxicity with underlying alcoholic cirrhosis. She survived the acute incident as a result of carefully diagnosed and corrected nutrition. Two things are clear from this case; 1) she ruined her liver by drinking and by use of acetominophen, and 2) the use of strategic nutrition reversed her inexorable slide to the grave for the time being, reviving her liver function. As a result of environmental forces (the toxicity of the alcohol and acetominophen) this woman nearly died.
Several studies appearing in Europe are concerned with the effects of pollutants on the immune system (3). People living in a cedar forest had a lower concentration of IgG, a marker for inflammation, than people living near a busy highway far from the forest. People working in a composting facility also had a lower concentration of IgG than people working in a garbage facility. Pollutants, especially cadmium, are shown to cause the immune system to mount an inflammatory response without the involvement of an antigen. The message here is that you may be demonstrating allergic reactions and their negative effects but chiropractic adjustments or other physical interventions won’t help until the cadmium, the environmental “stress”, is removed from the patient’s body.
Clinical controlled research at Palmer clinic has shown that the liver is apparently the most susceptible organ to environmental changes (4). The tests showed how conductivity of organs varied with use and environmental stimuli. It has been shown that PCB’s will cause liver cancer (among other things) in people with a genetic variant in one of the liver enzymes involved in metabolism of both PCB’s and estrogen (5). This supports the concept that a liver genetically predisposed is unable to clear the body of toxic substances. There is a theory that by causing mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidizing agents are produced in inappropriate quantities and destroy nerve cells(6).