My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why. The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long as it remains in the body?