=Food, not Poison.= The colon is not a cesspool but a digestive and assimilating organ.  Its content is not poison but food.  Active elimination is important not so much because delay causes autointoxication or poisoning as because too large a mass is hard to manage and irritates the intestinal wall.  The problem is not so much one of toxicology as of simple mechanics.  If Nature had put within the body five feet of tubing which could easily become a cesspool and a breeder of poison, it is not at all likely that she would have laid alongside an elaborate system of blood vessels leading not out to the kidneys but into the storehouse of the liver; and if civilized man’s changed manner of living had so upset Nature’s plans as easily to transform his internal machinery into a chronic source of danger, we may be sure that he would long ago have gone the way of the unfit and succumbed to his own poisons.

=Possible Invasions.= It is true that the intestinal tract, like the rest of the body, is open to attack by harmful bacteria.  But in a great majority of cases, these enemy bacteria are either quickly destroyed by the beneficent microbes within or are immediately cast out as unfit.  Any germs irritating to the intestinal wall cause the mucous membrane to produce an unusual flow of mucus which washes away the offending bacteria in what we call a diarrhea.[52]

[Footnote 52:  If the invading army proves obstinate and the diarrhea continues a day or so, it is wise to assist Nature by a dose of castor-oil, which gives an additional insult to the intestinal wall, spurs it on to a desperate effort, and hastens the cleansing process.  In severe cases the more promptly the castor-oil is administered the better.  Such emergency measures are very different from the habitual use of insulting drugs.]

Sometimes the wrong kind of bacteria do persist, causing anemia, rheumatism, sciatica, or neuritis.  When these disorders are not the result of infection from teeth, tonsils, or other sources of poison, but are really caused by intestinal bacteria, I have found that a diet of buttermilk (lactic acid bacteria), with turnip-tops or spinach to supply the necessary mineral salts, often succeeds in planting the right bacteria and driving out the disturbing ones.  These disorders are invasions from without, like tuberculosis or malaria, and are as likely to attack the person with easy bowel movements as the one with the most chronic constipation.

=Autointoxication.= A good deal of the talk about autointoxication is just talk.  It sounds well and affords an easy explanation for all sorts of ills, but in a large majority of cases the diagnosis can hardly be substantiated.  Uninformed writers of newspaper articles on the care of the body, or purveyors of purgatives or apparatus for internal baths are fond of dilating on the “foulness of the colon” as a leading cause of disease.  As a rule, they advise either a strict diet, some kind of cathartic, or an elaborate process of washing out the colon to clear the body of its terrible accumulation of poisons.