Treatment of Cancer.

The germ theory of cancer may be dismissed as being irrational and pretty thoroughly discredited. But that it is due to faulty nutrition, assimilation and absorption may be fairly assumed, and these conditions are brought about by one or more of a variety of causes.

As regards nutrition, three ways are recognized which make for a departure from health—overnutrition, under-nutrition, and faulty nutrition. By this last is meant that, while there may not be too much or too little food taken, the material composing it is deleterious. In the first case, that of overnutrition, too much food is taken, more than the body needs for its proper maintenance.

As time goes on and this condition of things continues, the blood-making organs become tired and manufacture less perfect material from which the "builders" at some one or more selected places begin to replace with imperfect or cancer cells the more normal tissues of the affected parts.

As the eliminative absorbents fail to remove this imperfect material as fast as it is deposited, we have the growing tumor. Though less frequently, much the same conditions obtain in undernutrition. The blood-making organs themselves are poorly nourished and furnish poor material for the building of perfectly healthy cells.

By material which gives a faulty nutrition, the author means all flesh foods which, containing toxins and poisons of various kinds, are totally unfit for human consumption and have much to do, either directly or indirectly, in bringing about a condition of things that goes to the building of cancers.

If cancer is a local disease, it should not return after removal, as it usually does. On the theory that there is a general wrong condition of the blood-making, assimilative, and eliminative functions, it is readily explainable; for usually nothing is effectively done after an operation for the removal of the growth to remedy the wrongs; and not only that, but the patient's strength is seriously sapped by the operation itself, if that operation has been accomplished by knife or plaster. Thus an early recurrence is to be looked for.

It is probably true that cancer of the breast, when not too large and near the suppurative stage, can be treated with the greatest promise of success with electricity and massage, both local and general, together with a special diet from which all flesh foods are excluded; and the patient always under the physician's care.—Med. Record.

Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 2, 1908, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.