The fallacy that drinking large quantities of olive oil, sometimes with orange juice, lemon juice or grapefruit juice, will dissolve gall stones and cause them to pass out will not down. Only recently a man came into the Health School and told me about having olive oil and grapefruit juice prescribed for him (by some naturopath) to dissolve his gallstones. A few days later a letter came from a man in St. Louis in which he says: "I have hear that olive oil and orange juice would eventually dissolve and pass them"--- gallstones.

I shall never forget the first experience I had with this old piece of humbuggery. I had a woman under my care who was convinced she had gallstones. I was equally certain that she did not have said stones. She refused to go on with my directions until she could have an X-ray examination to determine who was right.

Visiting an X-ray specialist, she found him out and upon leaving his office, she ran into an old friend of hers. She told the friend of her pains and why she had visited the X-ray man's office. The friend told her of a physician who could quickly rid her of her gallstones and she went immediately to this man. He assured her that she had gallstones and prescribed for her. This man accepted her self-made diagnosis and she, therefore, knew that he was a man who knew what he was doing. I have no doubt that he knew what he was doing, but she didn't.

A few days later the woman came to my office with enough "gallstones" to fill two gall bladders and explained that she had passed many more-she only brought part of them for me to see. Some of these stones were larger than English walnuts and stones of such size could no more pass through the bile-duct than a horse can fly.

The woman was very happy -- not only because she was now free of her stones, but, also, because she had proven that she had been right and I had been wrong in our diagnoses of her condition.

Taking one of the "stones" between my thumb and finger I crushed it. It was very soft. I smelled of it. It smelled like soap. I asked the woman to smell of it. She did. I asked, "What does it smell like?" She replied, "That's a gallstone, I passed it." I then asked, "Doesn't it smell like soap?" She said, "Yes, but it's a gallstone." When, next I said, "The doctor you went to gave you a lot of olive oil to take", she replied that he did. I then explained that the excess oil had been converted into soap in her intestine and she had merely passed little balls of soap.

She refused to believe me. She would not give up her belief that she had passed gallstones, even after it was demonstrated to her that she had passed soap. She had gallstones on her mind and she would not give up her illusion.

Oil is made up of fatty acids. In the intestine the great excess of oil she took was combined with alkaline and the result was soap. Calcium soap, sodium soap and magnesium soap are the most common forms of soap thus produced.

As the excess of oil also has a laxative effect, the victim of this form of charlatanry and humbuggery often receives temporary relief from abdominal distress. This relief convinces them, also, that their "stones" have passed.

The fact that giving large quantities of oil results in the production of soap is well known to all practitioners of all the so-called schools of healing. Any practitioner who resorts to this method of dissolving and removing gallstones is a down right faker. He is deceiving his patients and taking their money under false pretenses.

I will not deny that there may be rare instances where the practitioner is justified in resorting to this deception as a form of mental treatment, although I have never seen such a case. Cases may exist where the "gallstones" are so deeply embedded in the mind that a catharsis of this kind is the most effective way of getting them out of the mind.

If such cases exist, they must be very rare, and they do not justify the use of the method in all cases of real or fancied gallstones. As regularly carried out the practice is one of the worst forms of humbuggery. Practitioners who resort to it should be fully exposed.

Gallstones, kidney stones, liver stones, pancreas stones, etc., result from perversion of metabolism. The real cure is to restore normal metabolism. Normal metabolism will dissolve the stones. The tendency of an excess of oil is to further impair metabolism. Such treatment does no good, but may do considerable harm.