SIALOTHERAPY

Sialotherapy is a treatment of diseases with the saliva. I first time read this term in Dr. Andrés Amado Zuno Arce’s blog on the HWC. The terms sialolith or  Sialolithiasis, were known to me, meaning theformation of  concretions in the salivary gland and ducts. These are periodically shed in the mouth, in the form of various shaped little stones. A patient of mine, a lady, in her fifties, kept bringing such concretions, to show me, having escaped from the salivary ducts under her tongue. I even palpated more such concretions under her tongue.

The meaning of Sialotherapy brought to my mind my own traumatic experience of childhood. I contracted a sore on the dorsum of my nose, when I might be five to six year old. I became the victim of this uncouth and abominable treatment, by a very clumsy and large limbed woman with dirty black teeth, with denuded roots. She would come every morning, mutter some abracadabra in her mouth, and would either spit her very foul smelling saliva on the ulcer, or taking it on her fingers and apply on the wound. The offensive, nauseating smell would haunt me the whole day. I have acute sense of smell by birth.  It was mortification for me, simple and pure. The ulcer had started advancing towards the cheeks. A surgeon was called in who treated it for quite some time. 

Sialotherapy and many other such therapies, as urine therapy, had been the folklore treatments, in the Magic Age, in the human history. Sir James George Frazer in his multi volumes gigantic work: The Golden Bough, has described many such practices along with magic rituals. The history of human civilization is very bewitching, but tiresomely slow: the inertia and sloth of false beliefs and rituals restraining to accept any new knowledge or new ideas.Frazer is an enlightening and very informing study, enriching many great minds, of his times and the posterity.  Sialotherapy, to say the least, is not an alternative treatment or therapy; it is the history of therapeutics, or better say the history of medicine, which has nowfallen to oblivion since long. These (sialotherapy and Urine therapy, etc.) violate the civilized taste, and are downright crude, and scientifically quite untenable. The old lady, described above, who treated me, would have wrought havoc with my health with her so polluted and laden with pathologic germs saliva. Or, Dr.  Zuno’s sort of nebulization of the asthmatic children with the diluted saliva, collected by, but let me quote him: “take a little water in the mouth and mix it with the saliva on waking in the morning and then pour it in a Petri dish or a glass or a porcelain cup, not plastic, trying that the salivary glands are almost completely emptied in one act. One adds a little water to saliva so it can flow better because in its natural form is very thick;” and instilling it into a spray bottle for the inhalation by the pneumonic or the asthmatic patients, would play the same havoc, in spite of the praises that Zuno showers upon its ‘curative’ efficacy. It is everybody’s imagination: how the modern state of art and the fine sensibilities would ever accept and allow this!!!

Saliva can be intensely infective agent with countless oral bacteria and germs. There can be decaying molars, oral ulcers, even malignant ulcers, and canker oris. Here Dr. Zuno’s sterilization with ultra-violet rays won’t help. Moreover UV rays’ disinfection process is very recent concept and discovery. When sialotherapy came into existence there was neither germ theory nor any knowledge of bacteria. And saliva was not used as saliva, but as a magic medium.  Every secretion or excretion of the body was taboo bound. And every heeling activity was as if magical. The healer would mutter magical incantations before applying the saliva. Frazer’s volumes shed great light on this stage of history.

Such arguments as animals in nature lick their wounds, is a trite argument, amply proven to be faulty, and counterproductive, and sometimes generating new strains of infection.

Urine therapy, as compared with saliva therapy, seams to be more relevant, as it is still practiced in many parts of the world. Especially in India it is, and has been, practiced in many parts of the country. If not ones own urine, it could be of the cow, which they take as sacred. A prime minister of India, viz. Morarji Desai, drank his own morning urine, in his ripe age; and he lived to be 99. Read his one hour’s interview with ABC:

http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/29758

 He said that urine was panacea for all diseases, ‘even for the cataract, if the eyes are washed with it’. He further proclaimed that urine therapy is a “perfect” treatment for the millions of Indians who could not afford professional care at that time.

After circumcision of a child, the doctor usually instructs not to change the dressing of the wound, ‘let the child freely urinate on or in the bandage’, he says. And it usually works, which betrays the healing values of the urine. In spite of all instances favoring urine’s therapeutic value, good sense and fine taste feels reluctant in using this agent for any such purposes, and in modes prescribed. 

Even Homeopathy has gathered much superfluous mass along the years it has been rolling down the history. Radiesthesia, Auto-hemo Therapy, Isopathy, Electro -Homeopathy, Bach’s Flower Remedies, Shuessler’s Biochemistry (which he originally  baptized as Abridged Homeopathy). But Homeopathy, pure and simple, stands out as immutable as ever, a pillar of light guiding the humanity.

[Note to Dr. Zuno: ‘Dear Doctor I’ve written what I instinctively felt and practically experienced. Intention was never to hurt you: such a sweet personality that you are! After reading your mail I instructed many of my patients, the rheumatico-arthritic ones especially, to rub their own saliva on their ailing joints, at least three times daily. Few of them did not obey and the ones who did didn’t bring any happy tidings either. My habit, dear Doctor, is to accept only that is scientific and logical, all else I relegate to limbo of faith, and man’s gullibility.—Usmani]