Any substance taken into the body and not usable as food may be considered poison. Most drugs administered as medicine or used habitually are either directly poisonous and commonly so considered or are poisonous in the sense that they do not build but rather tend to injure the body. Injurious substances accidentally taken into the body; certain products included in the preparation of otherwise nutritious foods, alcohol, tobacco, etc., affect the body in varying degrees but in accordance with the same laws. Poisons may be internally generated through the action of pathogenic germs or through the failure of the body to digest food and to prevent injurious chemical changes in it. It has even been said by some that abnormal mental states so affect metabolism as to cause the formation of certain auto-toxins which injuriously affect the entire body. However poison may make its appearance in the body its presence is associated with certain bad effects. Poison may be corrosive, destroying tissue wherever it touches; it may be stimulating, affecting the nerves so as to increase their activity, following which waste of energy there is a weakening reaction; it may be narcotic, lowering some physiologic process below normal. If a man without subluxation--and therefore normal--have poison introduced into his body one of two effects will follow. Either the poison will be sufficient to produce death in a short time, and will do so, or the poison will be ejected from the body and the patient recover naturally and without treatment, and recover fully. This is the statement of the ideal, not the real. The fact is that no person has yet been found without subluxation in some part of the spinal column. Occasional cases have been reported but always by Chiropractors whose statements are open to question on account of imperfect training in vertebral palpation or a known habit of unconsidered statement. And in the weakened body, whose natural protective power has been lowered, the effect is different. The body fails to throw off all the poison normally and some of it remains in the circulation and tends to cause progressively increasing damage. In addition to the direct effect of the poison upon the tissues, the irritation of sensory nerves gives rise to a motor reaction which increases subluxation generally throughout the spine but especially in the segment in which the sensory irritation is greatest. If the poison be taken into the stomach the vertebrae affecting that organ are most affected in the resulting motor disturbances. When vaccine virus is introduced into the arm the greatest influence is upon the last two Cervicals and first Dorsal, causing increased weakening of the nerves to the arm. If the vaccination does not “take” it is because the body is so normal as to be able to take up and rapidly excrete the poison or to neutralize it with an internally generated antitoxin.