“To the patient, and, indeed, to the physician who knows little of
physiology, all this will appear right: the gout is removed, and
that is what was desired. The physician, however, who is a
physiologist, will say, ‘True, that irritation which you call gout,
has left the extremities, whither it had been sent by nature to
save her noble internal parts. But look to the signs exhibited by
those parts; are they not those of augmented irritation, at least
of irritation of a degree and kind that did not exist so long as
the limbs were pained and inflamed? The fact is, that your
colchicum has set up in the viscera so intense an irritation as to
reconcentrate the mischief within; and the fit is cured, not by
ridding the body of the gouty irritation, but by driving or drawing
it in again,’ (thus baffling nature’s efforts at self relief).
‘Hence the continuance of the dyspeptic symptoms after the fit;
hence, as you will find, the recurrence of another fit ere long,
the intervals becoming less and less, until gouty pain is
incessantly in the limbs, and gouty irritation always in the
viscera.’”
When the drugging practitioner drives the inflammation from the
extremities to a more dangerous internal position, he congratulates
himself on having cured the gout; but what in reality has he done?—By
his mischievous interference with nature, he has endangered his
patient’s life and shaken his constitution; whilst the gouty
irritation, which causes the complaint, remains unsubdued, ready to be
transferred at a moment to the head or heart, the practitioner having
cleverly banished it from its original harmless position. It is in this
way also that the Allopathist cures skin diseases, driving in the
irritation which nature is struggling to drive out; this he eventually
succeeds in doing, by weakening the powers of the system, and then
fancies the disease is cured, whilst the patient pays in the long run
for these hostile operations against nature.