Most human disease is one underlying condition: an acidotic, self-poisoning (autointoxication) state produced by wrong eating, of which named diseases such as Bright's disease, diabetes, asthma, and arthritis are merely local expressions.
The mechanism claim underwriting the Hay System is that disease is not many distinct entities but one toxic, acidotic state, with the various named diseases (Hay lists Bright’s disease, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, and others together) being local expressions of the same internal poisoning. This is the intestinal-autointoxication theory of the period applied as a universal diagnosis. It is classified mechanism_only because it is a causal-mechanism assertion with no controlled support, and refuted because the autointoxication framework was rejected in the early twentieth century: putrefactive products are not absorbed from the gut in the harmful quantities the theory required (Bested, Logan and Selhub, Gut Pathogens 2013). That same review records Hay among the New York physicians who defended autointoxication in the medical press against its critics, maintaining the theory in its most sweeping form.
Appears in
Sources
- A New Health Era — Hay WH. *A New Health Era*. London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1935. 212 pp. (first published March 1935; reprinted April 1936; printed in U.S.A.). Wellcome Collection, work hhun4w83 / digitized item b29807487.
- Intestinal microbiota, probiotics and mental health: from Metchnikoff to modern advances: Part I - autointoxication revisited — Bested AC, Logan AC, Selhub EM. 'Intestinal microbiota, probiotics and mental health: from Metchnikoff to modern advances: Part I - autointoxication revisited.' *Gut Pathogens* 2013;5(1):5. doi:10.1186/1757-4749-5-5. PubMed: 23506618.