Calcium is an essential element in composition of the digestive juices. Even a slight malfunction of the parathyroid glands may lead to significant insufficiency of the digestive system. Poor calcium assimilation can lead to wasting diseases such as osteoporosis and other common rheumatic ailments. It is interesting to note a person with adequate calcium in his or her cells does not develop such diseases. It isn't merely a folly of old age that such extreme bone loss occurs. Bones do tend to lose their mineral deposits in old age, becoming more porous. Vitamin D deficiency and lack of exercise to properly assimilate calcium is necessary, as are healthy parathyroid glands. My health message of the day is: be good to your glands, all of them.
On another note entirely, I have the beginning of a new theory I have yet to pursue, it's only now left the proverbial ovaries, and it may be flushed in a fortnight. Was prohibition fueled by propagandists behind the movement? Was it really the conservative Protestant religiosity of tight-lipped schoolmarms and ladies auxiliaries of rural America that was the driving force behind the temperance movement's attempts to quell the promiscuity of the times, straighten up the the lower and working classes, and improve the health of Americans? It is well-known that the result of the 18th amendment was the fomentation and prosperity of organized crime families, and corruption within governing bodies.
Little known, is that one of the leaders behind Prohibition, The American Temperance Society, had reached 1.5 million members by 1826, one hundred and six years prior. I suspect that the advancement of the ATS's agenda was in no way hurt by the American Medical Association which formed officially in 1847 and American Pharmaceutical Association which formed officially only five years later. With the emergence of pharmaceutical medicine, a new wave of doctors who prescribed pills and treatments with new, hip, and extremely toxic substances despised and discredited herbal medicines (often tinctures and liniments made from alcohol) and the successful doctors of herbal medicine who promoted their usage.
These early surgeons who experimented with toxic chemicals knew there was no money in making people well, but there is a lot of money in keeping people unwell. Or, perhaps they just thought newer is better, favoring manufactured to naturally-ocurring. In either case, we do know that there's a lot to profit by making patent drugs in man-made laboratories and not from medicines people can grow on their own land. (To get a full historical picture, and therefore trajectory, the first surgeons were barbers...and blood thirsty Barbarians.) By 1920, I suspect the wealthier urban populations were going to doctors, undergoing surgeries, popping pills and generally taking new, hip medications. Were the poor urban populations like the pagans of the religious crusades of Europe four hundred years prior? In other words...Was this religious uprising of the rural prohibitions sponsored by those who wished to convert the poor agricultural population whose closeness to the land afforded them knowledge and a tradition of the usage of herbal medicine?
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