Diabetes

Article #2: Diabetes

In spite of the optimistic expectations with which Banting’s discovery of insulin was heralded, this drug has proved to be nothing more than another palliative. It has contributed nothing towards the radical solution of the problem of diabetes. On the contrary, satisfaction with the palliation which insulin affords has tended to discourage further search for a genuine solution of the problems presented by this disease. Physicians and patients alike seem to be wholly satisfied to go on using insulin and ignoring all else.

Diabetes is on the increase in all the industrialized countries of the world and has steadily increased from the time of the discovery of insulin. The number of cases, world-wide, is estimated by medical authorities to run into many millions. World Health News, March, 1965, stated that “the incidence of diabetes is increasing all over the world and a WHO expert committee which has convened to discuss the problem considered that there is ‘unassailable evidence that overweight predisposes people to diabetes …’ Some idea of the incidence of the condition can he gained from the figures for the United States, where there are estimated to be four million cases …”

The dependence of the profession upon insulin is pathetic. It is no longer thought that insulin does any more than palliate symptoms. But there is the unfortunate fact that thousands of people have been given insulin who had nothing more than an evanescent appearance of sugar in the urine. Many of these have been kept on insulin until their pancreas underwent so much deterioration that they were unable to get off the drug. They did not have diabetes when they began the use of insulin, but they now have diabetes as a direct result of insulin dosage.

Insulin never restores health, hence its use is purely palliative. Before it came into use, physicians and patients made some effort to correct the mode of living. The diet of the diabetic was carefully regulated, even if not always well regulated, and physicians often sought for various causative factors in the life of their patients. This is no longer so. Insulin enables them to live in spite of their indiscretions. This does not mean that insulin wipes out the effects of their indiscretions, but that it palliates one of the effects of these indiscretions. The result of the use of insulin has been a steady increase in the early death rate from diabetes from the year it was introduced. This is true because both physicians and patients rely upon the drug and ignore all causes of disease.

Calling diabetes a disease of civilization, while it stresses the fact that the less civilized, whose lives are more natural and whose diets are not processed and refined and not overabundant, have little or no diabetes, does not place its finger on the true cause of the deficiency of function. Until we are willing to recognize the genuine etiological factors and correct these, we are going to continue to watch the increase in the incidence of diabetes and depend on the processing of the pancreas of animals as a means of palliation. Today we do not even feel any shame for our illegitimate dependence on cattle and swine for such palliation.

The precarious condition in which the medical profession and their diabetic patients find themselves, growing out of their dependence on slaughter houses for insulin, has caused much concern. To date no means have been found to produce insulin, artificially, and the only available supply is from slaughtered animals. As the human population continues to increase and earth’s animal population decreases, this could become serious from the standpoint of medicine. What would happen if the world became vegetarian, as it must in the future, and the slaughter of animals were discontinued? In his book. The Genetic Code, Prof. Isaac Asimov says: “Suppose though that increasing population pressure forces future generations more and more into a vegetable diet. This would mean a steady decrease in the potential supply of insulin.” He implied that as far as he could see into the future, insulin production would continue to be dependent on animals.

This uncertainty about the future insulin supply underscores the urgent need for a discovery of the cause of diabetes and for finding a means for restoring health to the diabetic patient, instead of depending upon the palliation insulin provides. As no means of restoring health exists except those that constitute Natural Hygiene, the future diabetic will be forced to depend upon Hygiene rather than the animal product.