For centuries multiple large warm enemas have been used to treat colds and flu. Now they are not, replaced by antibiotics. However, large enemas and natural stimulation help with viral disease. Antibiotics do not. So to question, how many children and young adults died from our last round of bird flu that would have lived had bed rest, vitamin C, and large warm baking soda enemas been part of the protocol of treatment? A thousand, ten thousand?
We know that large enemas have been used for centuries to hasten and ease childbirth, but have been replaced by artificial oxi-tocin IV drips. Never a death from the enemas, these drips cause the deaths of more than a thousand women and their babies each year.
How many children like Betsy, in my story, die unnecessarily because enemas are no longer used as they were 50 year ago? No antibiotics, antibiotics yet to spread in medical practice, in the 1930s and early forties, all treatment of pneumonia and other infectious diseases depended on boosting the patient’s own immune system to fight off the disease, as it still does to fight off viral pneumonia.
Complete bed rest, fresh juices, and stimulating the immune system stood between the patient and death. Fresh juice, high in vitamin C, helped. In 1933 a Hungarian medical doctor, Albert Szent-Györgyi discovered Vitamin C. Before this an unknown element of treating scurvy and infectious disease was in fresh fruit fruits and vegetables: an unnamed, ununderstood element. Vitamin C was in fresh orange juice and part of building her immune system up to fight the pneumonia. We knew that now.
Not understood, yet also stimulating to natural immunity and disease resistance, frequent large warm baking-soda enemas increase the immune response to the invasion of bacteria and viruses, but involve no vitamins.
Something more basic, physiology, not biochemistry, now we have a better physiological understanding of why enemas are important in the treatment of infections, particularity systemic or respiratory infections, but do not use them. We have antibiotics. Ten minutes after reaching the hospital, one would have had a shot of the miracle antibiotic, penicillin, if antibiotics were available. Quicker, easier, more sure, antibiotics work even if your immune system is failing with bacterial infections. Three days and the patient would have been well and home. Enemas, juice, and rest are less sure and take longer.
Four times a day, till the pneumonia broke, a nurse, gave the patient a large warm baking-soda enema, then she had to hold it twenty minutes as her cecum absorbed water, filling and flushing her system, blood and all. This bothered her. After holding an enema for twenty minutes, feeling like an hour, she was allowed to spew it out into the bed pan, but unfinished the absorbed water flooded out through he kidneys in waves of urination necessitating the use of the urinal which Halley found even more inhibiting that the bed pan. She held it until the baking soda absorbed turning sick acidic tissue alkaline freeing thick mucous and till the heat of the enema warmed her gut stimulating an artificial immune response sending cellular components throughout her system looking for enemy disease cells to kill. The hot water stimulated her body to fight the infection, the absorbing of the water made her body fight the infection and the baking soda in the water alkalized her, loosening the mucous in her lungs, helping her cough it up.
The natural treatment worked for some. Her own immune system strong enough to overcome the disease, she lived. Whether it was a viral pneumonia and the enemas, fasting, and juices worked; or it was a bacterial pneumonia and the enemas, fasting, and juices worked, no one would ever know. If someone had a viral pneumonia even if she had had penicillin she would have died, but with the natural treatment she had a better chance. If it had been a bacterial pneumonia she would still have been talking.