Medical Fads and Fancies 31 
leasing nerve pressure, and the like, but through loosen- 
ing up the muscles, improving their blood supply and 
relaxing them by massage. Our patient’s physiological 
balance may thus be so favorably influenced that his in- 
digestion becomes greatly better, because getting relief 
from the load of suffering and irritation due to his back- 
ache suddenly so relieves his general nervous irrita- 
tion that his digestive organs function without protest, 
even though really below par. 
The matter of the modern theory of focal infection 
was mentioned as an illustration of a subject in which 
the public often concludes a not flattering view of the 
medical profession. A situation sometimes develops in 
which the patient is advised from various medical 
sources to have tonsils removed, sinuses drained, gall- 
bladder excised, and large numbers of good-looking teeth 
drawn for the cure of some apparently entirely foreign 
condition, as a chronic arthritis—rheumatism if you 
will—in I am afraid to venture what proportion of cases 
without beneficial results. Yet there are few deductions 
founded on better evidence or more logical reasoning 
than this same theory, whose practical application at 
times effects most spectacular cures. The theory im- 
plies that certain conditions such as chronic arthritis, 
most heart diseases, neuritis, appendicitis, gall-bladder 
disease, colitis, stomach and duodenal ulcer, and so on, 
originate from organisms gaining a foothold first in 
some other portion of the body, and later being car- 
ried to these secondarily affected parts by the blood 
or lymphatics. But if many diseases originate in this 
way the number of places in the body where organisms 
may find lodgment and establish themselves as possible 
primary foci is even greater. A person may suffer from 
chronic arthritis that we have every reason to believe 
