The diagnostic error of mistaking effect for cause, however, is frequently made. Patients are treated for one of the secondary symptoms--say uric acid--with a view to abate that disorder and restore health, when treatment for the specific cause of constipation--proctitis (inflammation of the anus and rectum)--would restore the patient to his normal vigor. Pale, anemic sufferers from constipation are often told that the restoration of their blood to its normal state will effect a complete cure. No idea could be further amiss, for if the poisoned victims take coal oil, fish oil, malt compounds, iron, etc., as tonics, into a disordered stomach and unclean bowels, how can anything more than imaginary relief be obtained? Is it not evident that the chief disorder, _proctitis_, the main cause of the trouble, has in no way been reached? In other complications arising from constipation, a favorite diagnosis is one of the secondary symptoms--“atony” of the bowels, liver, or kidneys. In these cases nux vomica and various poisonous compounds are given, but here also it stands to reason that the administering of remedies for symptoms cannot effect a cure of a chronic local disease of the anus, rectum, or colon. Then, again, by way of variety, a diagnosis of “uric acid” is made for which irritant drugs are administered to increase the eliminating or excretory action of the bowels and kidneys. It is utter folly and absurdity to attempt the cleansing of the intestinal tract by laxatives, cathartics, purgatives, exercise, etc., and to make the kidneys and liver, overtaxed from foul bowel products, do still more work by giving medicines to increase the urinal and biliary secretions. It does not require a knowledge of the principles of physiology and pathology to know that no sufferer from chronic constipation can be permanently benefited if any or all of the secondary symptoms already noted be treated with the usual list of drugs and the cause ignored. Much stress is laid upon the quantity and quality of food consumed by most people, and many generalizers attribute chronic constipation, uric acid, etc., to this very thing. Surely the average person knows that too much or too little food taken at regular intervals is not conducive to good health--a view that I have found borne out by a large majority of my patients, who rarely overstepped the limits and knew when a diminution in the supply of nourishment was advisable. In the last analysis, the principal cause of ill health is lack of elimination of the excretory organs. When the bowels fail to do their proper work, the functions of the other organs of the body become correspondingly affected and impaired, and general debility ensues.