The most common disease and the one that is the greatest factor in causing other diseases, is liver and gall bladder trouble. Medical science says that gall bladder trouble is brought about by some infection. Could be. Medical science also says that gall bladder infections cause neuritis, arthritis, and myocarditis, plus other heart and blood vessel conditions. There could be a doubt about the cause of these diseases, but certainly an infection is their aggravation.
If a person had some bacterial infection which made a few million of little bacteria bugs, and these bugs filtered through the intestines with the digested food, there is no doubt that the hepatic blood vessels would carry some of the bugs to the liver and gall bladder. Yes, it looks possible and sounds good. It explains a lot without telling you old gall bladderites anything. Remember, there are a few thousand of you gall bladder people who never had typhoid fever, or any other fever, unless it was just a little bilious fever introduced by irritation and a few vomiting fits in the bathroom.
Suppose we just take a little trip around this gall bladder machinery and see what makes it tick. You know, from the chapter upon the Mechanics of Constipation, that the liver squeezes soapy bile into the gall bladder. When you eat, the fullness of the stomach and its digestive activity shoves food out of the gate into the duodenal lane. You, automatically start a lot of cogs working when you eat.
The gall bladder is filled with bile, awaiting the time you eat to start food through the pipe line called the duodenum. This tube compares favorably to the piece of rubber tubing running from your engine to the radiator of your automobile. Food, passing along, causes a little valve gate to open in the side of the duodenal tube. Then the liver gives a squeeze, providing you do not just sit and sit, and eat and eat, and grow fat, without giving the liver a chance to squeeze. This liver squeeze forces the bile sac to empty its contents into the duodenal tube, and you have an aid to fat and starch digestion on its way.
Medical science says that an infection bug is absorbed from the intestines into the blood which is carried into the liver and then emptied into the gall bladder. Here the little bug irritates the gall sac until it swells up and refuses to work. That is starting at the top of the ladder. How did you get up there?
Let’s start at the bottom and work up just to see how it goes. Not one of you gall bladder people eat enough fatparticularly pork fat, or enough sour food. Deny it, if you dare. Practically all of you do have constipation and gas.
Putrifactive acid gas is a bacterial bug carrier. It kicks back into the duodenal tube. Here, the irritation of this purtifactive acid pulls the puckering stringsphincter of Oddiof the valve into the duodenal channel. Owhhh! Gate closed and somebody shutting and squeezing, trying to get through. Gall bladder colic.
Get a balloon and fill it with water. Now hold the opening to the balloon closed, then squeeze hard upon the balloon. See what I mean ? It would not hurt the balloon, but what an irritation to a bile sac.
Now suppose you had made a bum batch of bileno fat, no lye, no soap, you would have a much harder time trying to flap the liver around into squeezing a dry, waxy, oil through an irritated duct which had already been closed by bowel gas irritation.
The things which can happen to you are manifold, and here are a few: cholecystitis (irritated bile tube, billiary colic (pressure on sphincter of Oddi), cholelithiasis (gall stones). Then, if you should make matters worse, biliary fistula, empyema of gall bladder, pylecystitis, hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver, hemorrhage and carcinoma of the gall bladder. These are just a few of the dangerous complications.
You can have liver and gall bladder trouble if you want them. We’ll just do without them by eating a little fat and a lot of sour fruits, vegetables, and salads along with the rest of the meal.
Oh yes, forgot to say anything about gall bladder trouble being a part of the original cause of arthritis, but that will be taken care of in a future chapter on mineralization of the system.
We could say, before we leave you folks with bad gall bladders, if you continue to make poor bile substance you may carry around a waxy material into the large arteries and deposit some to the credit of arterioschlerosis, angina pectoris, miocarditis, and just plain heart failure.
One more thought: what you do not eat, hurts you.