Vital Action vs. Drug Action

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Vital Action vs.

Drug Action

Hygienic Review

Vol. IV April, 1943 No. 8

Vital Action vs. Drug Action

Herbert M. Shelton

Dr. Trall was in the habit of talking much about what he called the

"law of vitality." If he ever tried to define or formulate this law I

have been unable to find the definition or formulation. However, he

frequently gave examples of its operation, especially in explaining the

modus operandi of drugs, or so-called medicines.

It was the medical theory of the time, and the theory is not quite

dead, that drugs, by virtue of their "inherent affinity" for some part,

organ or structure of the living body, act on or make "impressions" on

such part, organ or structure, and this affinity, or action, or

impression, was termed its "property". Drugs were supposed to possess

inherently in themselves certain special properties or affinities

(which constitute their "remedial virtues," or in which these virtues

reside), for certain parts, organs, structures, or tissues, of the

living organism, and these supposed or assumed properties were termed

"elective" and "selective" because they were supposed to be "exerted"

on or to "have an effect on" some parts or organs in preference to

others. They were supposed to act "preferentially", that is, to select

or elect the part upon which they act. Thus:

Emetics were said to act on the stomach, because they have a "special

affinity" for that organ.

Cathartics were said to act on the bowels, in virtue of an "elective

affinity" for these organs.

Diaphoretics were presumed to "select" the skin as a place of action.

Diuretics "selected" the kidneys as the theatre of their "operative

effects."

Nervines and narcotics were said to "exert their influences" especially

on the brain and nervous system.

Stimulants, tonics and antiphlogistics were said to make "affinities

preferentially on the muscular and circulatory" systems.

One needs only a slight acquaintance with the most recent standard

works on materia medica to know that these classifications of drugs and

ideas of their "actions" are far from being merely interesting bits of

medical history.

Drugs are said to have both local and general effects. They are still

said to have "selective action." A standard text-book of materia medica

tells us that "no drug effects all the organs or tissues of the body.

The ability of a drug to affect chiefly certain organs or tissues is

called selective action. Thus strichnine usually acts chiefly upon the

cells of the spinal cord, morphine upon the cells of the brain, etc."

Some drugs are supposed to aid other drugs. This is called their

synergistic action. Some drugs are supposed to antagonize others. This

is called their antagonistic action. Drugs are supposed to have

different effects in diseased and in healthy conditions. Their effects

in disease are called their therapeutic actions; their effects in

health are called their physiological actions. They are supposed to act

differently in different quantities, and the effects resulting from an

"overdose" are called their poisonous or toxicological actions. Empiric

action is the "effect that results from the use of a medicine (drug) in

disease but which has not been corroborated by laboratory experiments."

When the drug has other effects than those the doctor desires, these

are called its side actions. Drugs that are excreted slowly, so that

they tend to accumulate in the body if repeatedly given, are said to

have cumulative actions.

It will be noticed that all actions are attributed to the drugs. The

drugs act on the liver, or stomach, or bowels, or kidneys, or skin, or

glands, or nerves, or muscles, etc. As an instance of this, the

text-book of materia medica previously quoted from tells us that

"verifuges are drugs which expel worms."

Now, vermifuges don't expel anything. Vermifuges are expelled and if

the worms are expelled with them, they are expelled in the same way and

by the same actions that the vermifuges are expelled. It was this idea

that drugs act and the body is acted upon that Trall fought all his

life. He insisted, and rightly, that it is the body that acts and the

drug that is acted upon. He proclaimed the obvious fact that the truth

about the so-called "action of remedies" is the exact contrary to what

medical men teach.

He declared "it is the living system which acts" and not the lifeless

drug. He declared also that "the 'property' is in the living system;

and that property is not 'affinity' but antagonism." Medical authors he

said, by their theories and terms "endow these dead (lifeless),

inorganic, and actionless substances (actionless except in the

mechanical or chemical sense) with instinct, if not with intelligence."

"Such teachings reverse the order of Nature. There is no affinity

between poisons and the living system." He affirmed that any "relation

of affinity" in "any approved or conceivable sense of the word between

a vital structure and a poison," since it would result in the ruin or

destruction of the vital structure, "would be in derogation of the very

first law of Nature, that of self-preservation." Hence "there cannot,

in the very nature of things, be any relation but that of absolute and

eternal antipathy between vital organs and poisons."

He did not mean, either, that the drug had a special antipathy for the

vital organism, but that the vital organism had an antipathy for all

poisons. Physicians explained that drugs acted on tissues and organs

for which they had special affinities, while the body "responded" to or

"reacted" to the drug. He replied that the action was all on the part

of the body while the drug does "just nothing at all." The drug is

"just as quiescent, inert, inactive, actionless, affinityless and

propertyless, in the mouth, nose, throat, lungs, stomach, bowels,

blood, and brain, of a human being, as it is in the box, bottle, paper

etc., in which it came. "And it would remain quiescent in the vital

domain forever if the vital organs would let it alone. But this they

will not do. This they cannot do. So long as they possess life,

vitality, so long they will and must war upon all noxious matters."

Living matter is active, and lifeless matter is passive, in their

relations to each other. Living matter acts on lifeless matter to expel

it or to render it harmless, and not contrariwise, as is popularly

taught and believed. We may attempt to state Trall's "law of vitality"

thus: "Whenever action occurs in the living organism, as the result of

extraneous influence, the action must be ascribed to the living thing

which has the power of action and not to the lifeless thing whose

leading characteristic is intertia." This formulation was made by Dr.

Robt. Walter, one of Trall's most distinguished pupils, and called by

him the ''Law of Action."

To illustrate this law, suppose an emetic is given to a patient. The

drug is in a bottle and the bottle sits on the "medicine" shelf.

Neither the drug nor the bottle can get off the shelf. The doctor,

nurse or attendant must take it down, uncork the bottle, pour the drug

into a spoon and carry the spoon to the patient's mouth. Up to this

point, at least the drug has done nothing. All the action has been by a

living organism.

At this point the patient takes the drug into his mouth, he swallows

it, it is carried down the esophagus to the stomach by the peristaltic

action of the muscles of the esophagus. Up to this point the drug has

still done nothing. The act of taking the drug into the mouth is not

drug action. The act of swallowing is not drug action. The action is

still action by the living organism.

Soon vomiting ensues. The drug is ejected — or does the drug eject

itself? Which is it that acts, the stomach or the drug? Which is

ejected? The drug is cast out, the stomach remains. It is evident that

the expulsive effort by which the drug is vomited is as much action by

the living organism as was the action by which the drug was- swallowed.

When vomiting follows a dose of ipecac, this does not mean that the

drug has acted (or is acting) beneficially upon the stomach to enable

it to eject something else; it indicates that the stomach "recognizing"

the presence of a foe of life, acts to eject the ipecac. Epsom salts,

C. C. pills, calomel, milk of magnesia, etc., do not act on the bowels

to move these or to enable them to move. The bowels do not eject the

drugs because of any beneficial action the drugs may be supposed to

have, but because they "recognize" in them foes of life. The actions of

the body in the presence of poisons are not due to any supposed

affinity between its organs and the drug, but to the eternal antagonism

that exists in these organs against the drugs. (The "affinity" of drugs

is chemical, not organic.) Their action in relation to drugs are first,

last and all the time, true to the instinct of self-preservation.

There is no modus operandi of "medicines." They don't operate by any

method. They are operated on. The drugs do not act at all. The living

body acts — acts on or against them to expel them.

The power of selective action also belongs to the body, not to the

drug. Emetics are not drugs that act on the stomach to produce vomiting

— they are drugs that are acted on by the stomach to expel them — the

expulsive process is vomiting.

Purgatives, cathartics, laxatives, do not act on the bowels to produce

diarrhea, the bowels expel the drugs by means of diarrhea. Diuretics do

not act on the kidneys, but are expelled by the kidneys. Drugs are

expelled through such channels and by such means as produce the least

wear and tear on the system.

What, then, are those "physiological actions" of poisons we read about

in materia medica? They are figments of the medical imagination. Drugs

do not have physiological actions. Poisons are pathogenetic — disease

producing. They are never anything else. Medical men "might as well

talk of the living principles of death, or of the eternal laws of

non-existence" as to talk of the "physiological action" of poisons.

There are no such things as physiological poison or pathological

health.

The only legitimate study of drugs in their relation to the body is

that of toxicology. The local, general, synergistic, antagonistic,

therapeutic and physiological "actions" of drugs are myths, equally

with their "empiric actions." That they accumulate in the body, that

they occasion "side actions" that they poison and injure, we do not

deny. We only deny that they ever do anything else.

The integrity of the vital structures can be maintained only by

preventing chemical union between the elements of the living structures

and elements external to them. It is precisely because this chemical

action must be prevented that the body must act to rid itself of drugs,

chemicals, dye stuffs, etc., that are foolishly introduced into it to

"cure" it of disease —that is, to "cure" it of its actions and

processes designed and- instituted to rid it of other deleterious

substances.

The vital organs, therefore, resist and expel all foreign substances

from the organic domain with an intensity proportioned to the chemical

affinities existing between the elements within and the elements

without the living structures. All so-called morbid or abnormal vital

actions relate to the expulsion of injurious substances from the body

and the repair of damages. They are as truly vital actions as the

regular, normal or physiological actions.

"What difference does it make," asks some reader, "whether the drugs

act on the body or the body acts on the drugs, so long as actions and

effects result?"

It makes all the difference in the world. When we understand that the

action is vital action and that it is accomplished by a waste of vital

power and, as is frequently the case, by a determination of power to

one organ when it is urgently needed elsewhere, we can see that the

drug must inevitably produce harm. Using drugs to provoke action — the

action of violent resistance — not only disturbs the whole vital

machinery and takes its attention off the task in hand, but it

inevitably expends the funds of life. It draws fearfully upon the

capital stock of energy and, even if it does not result fatally, it

prolongs the disease or prevents complete recovery, leaving the patient

with chronic disease.

It makes a vast difference in results whether the drug acts to vomit

itself or purge itself or urinate itself, or the body is forced to

waste its energies and divide its efforts in ejecting the drug. If it

is drug energy that is expended in the vomiting or purging, the body's

energies are conserved; but if it is the body's energies that are

expended, a more profound enervation is produced, hence a crippling of

the healing processes results. If the body is busily engaged in freeing

itself of the toxins that cause disease and is forced to divert part of

its energy and attention from this work to that of expelling poisonous

drugs, recovery is retarded, even if it is not prevented altogether.

If coughing is checked by the depression of the nerves of respiration

that follows the taking of certain drugs; if diarrhea is checked by the

depression of the nerves of the bowels which follows the taking of

certain drugs, then, the very substances in the respiratory tract or

bowels that the coughing and diarrhea were intended to remove are left

in these structures to produce the very harm their removal would have

prevented. Suppression of the body's efforts at elimination and

self-defense is the most frequent cause of death.

Herbert M. Shelton

-- Peace be with you,

Don "Quai" Eitner

"Spirit sleeps in the mineral, breathes in the vegetable, dreams in the animal and wakes in man."

Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses. ~Baptiste Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire

The obstacle is the path. ~Zen Proverb