"Toxins which have stagnated in your blood, impair the filters and eliminative organs, chief of which are the kidneys, liver, bowels and skin.
These toxins are the villains - the real cause of disease; they must be eliminated if the body is to be restored to health.
Illness, then, as we know it, is nothing more or less than a terrific "attempt on the part of the body to rid itself of morbific [toxic] matter."
The liver and the kidneys are important eliminative organs. For the liver, the natural avenue of elimination, of course, is through the bowel; for the kidneys, through the bladder and urethra.
However, when the liver is congested and cannot perform its eliminative function, waste matter (toxins) is thrown into the blood stream. Similarly, when the kidneys are inflamed, toxins are also dammed up in the blood. Toxic blood must discharge its toxins or the person dies, so nature uses vicarious avenues of elimination or substitutes. The lungs, therefore, will take over the task of eliminating some of the wastes that should have gone through the kidneys, or the skin will take over for the liver....if the bile poisons in the blood come out through the skin, we get the various irritations of the skin, resulting in the many skin diseases, or through the mucous membranes (inside skin) as the various catarrhs, or through the skin as boils, carbuncles, acne, etc. Thus the skin in substituting for the liver, or a vicarious elimination is occuring through the skin.
Disease, then, as I see it is an unnatural elimination process. In order to speed along or facilitate the natural elimination process of the toxic material and return the patient to health, I found necessary either (1) complete abstention from food (fasting for a few days or longer) or (2) abstention from those foods which created the patient's toxemia."
Food Is Your Best Medicine by Henry Bieler, MD pgs 41-43
