Synopsis
Eighty-five percent of appendices removed have nothing wrong with them. “It is the operation that kills—not the disorder.” That was Dr. Ulric Williams in 1934. Nearly a century later, the New Biology Clinic has documented four to five cases of diagnosed appendicitis resolving without surgery—patients who are now thriving. Williams, Barbara O’Neill, and Tom Cowan agree: appendicitis is terrain dysfunction, not infection.
It resolves with conservative treatment. Cowan adds a speculation worth considering: the appendix may be a reservoir for microzymas, the primordial precursors from which the body generates microbial forms. If so, removing it has consequences beyond the immediate surgery.
The Statistic They Don’t Mention - Eighty-five percent.
Dr. Ulric Williams, who practiced as a surgeon in New Zealand before transitioning to naturopathy, made this claim in 1934: “Eighty-five per cent of appendices removed have nothing the matter with them. The remainder do best left alone.”
The vast majority of appendectomies remove healthy organs. The surgery isn’t treating disease. It’s treating fear.
Williams went further: “When the surgical treatment of appendicitis has ceased, the death-rate from this condition will cease also. It is the operation that kills—not the disorder.”
The deaths attributed to appendicitis are surgical deaths. The mortality comes from the intervention, not the condition.
He cited Dr. Charles Mayo—co-founder of the Mayo Clinic—on unnecessary surgery: “Dr Charles Mayo, and other authorities, have put the figure at ninety per cent” of operations that could be dispensed with.
Ninety percent. From the co-founder of one of the most prestigious surgical institutions in the world.
These aren’t fringe claims from medical outsiders. Williams practiced surgery. He watched what happened in operating rooms. He saw which patients needed their organs removed and which were wheeled into surgery because the medical system had no other response to inflammation.
The Cases That Resolved
The New Biology Clinic has documented four to five cases of diagnosed appendicitis resolving without surgery.
These weren’t borderline presentations. Dr. Tom Cowan describes patients with “all the hallmark signs and symptoms, blood tests, everything that showed that they had what they call appendicitis.” Any surgeon in the United States, he states, “absolutely would have taken their appendix out.”
Some were children. Some were adults. None had the surgery. All recovered. They report being “better off, they say, having gone through this, than they were before.”
Mainstream medicine insists appendicitis means emergency surgery. Without removal, the appendix ruptures. Peritonitis follows. Death follows.
Yet here are patients—documented at a functioning clinic—where that sequence didn’t occur. They kept their appendix. They didn’t rupture. They didn’t die. They thrived.
Cowan is careful about drawing conclusions: “I’m not exactly saying that nobody needs an appendectomy... I have a suspicion that’s probably the case, but I can’t say that for sure, because we don’t have enough cases in history to say that.”
But the cases exist. They demand explanation.
What Appendicitis Actually Is
Williams provides the explanation. His causal claim is direct: “APPENDICITIS is caused by constipation, and fermentation and putrefaction of excess starch and, or, meat.”
His epidemiological observation follows: “APPENDICITIS NEVER OCCURS IN PEOPLE OR NATIONS WHO EAT WISELY.”
Appendicitis isn’t an infection. It’s a terrain condition. The sequence: excess refined starch and meat consumption impairs digestion. Food ferments and putrefies instead of processing properly. Constipation develops—waste accumulates and stagnates. Fermentation products and putrefactive compounds concentrate. The appendix, as part of the elimination pathway, becomes inflamed while attempting to process this toxic accumulation.
Bacteria proliferate in this environment. They respond to the condition. They don’t cause it.
Barbara O’Neill reaches the same conclusion through different language. She calls the appendix “the colon’s oil can”—an organ that lubricates digestive contents passing from small intestine to colon and releases antibacterial fluid to manage toxic byproducts.
Her explanation for appendicitis: “If what’s coming out here is constantly bad, that appendix starts to overwork and it starts to swell. You’ve heard of people getting appendicitis—it’s usually just poor old appendix is just overworked.”
The overwork comes primarily from meat putrefaction. O’Neill draws a comparison: dogs have digestive tracts roughly 1.5 meters long. Meat passes through quickly. Humans have digestive tracts approximately 8.5 meters long. “So by the time it’s getting down here it’s putrifying. This is a warm environment. You just put meat in a warm environment overnight—what’s happening to it? It’s going bad.”
Add sugar—”if they have a steak say and ice cream for dessert, that sugar feeds that putrification process”—and the material reaching the appendix becomes toxic enough to overwhelm the organ designed to manage it.
The Treatment That Works
Williams’s protocol: “Conservatively treated, like most other Acute Illnesses or Healing Crises, with fasting (absolute in acute attacks); rest; cold packs; and, in acute attacks, not even laxatives or enemata—there is practically no death-rate.”
Complete fasting. Rest. Cold packs applied locally. During the acute phase, nothing that stimulates the digestive system.
The logic is direct. Appendicitis results from the body being overwhelmed by fermentation and putrefaction products. Stopping food intake halts production of new toxic material. Rest reduces metabolic demands. Cold packs manage local inflammation. The body processes the accumulation and recovers.
Williams reported outcomes across inflammatory conditions: “The effect upon the acute suppurative conditions of fasting and general eliminative procedures is often dramatic. Whitlows disappear; abscesses often absorb; poisoned hands, limbs, or feet, with acute lymphangitis and lymphadenitis, recover as if by magic... Appendicitis, salpingitis, peritonitis, and almost every other ‘itis,’ the same.”
The New Biology Clinic cases align with this. Diagnosed appendicitis. Conservative management. Resolution. Patients thriving afterward. Cowan doesn’t detail the specific protocols used in those cases, but the outcomes match what Williams described ninety years earlier.
Bacteria as Scavengers
Mainstream medicine frames appendicitis as bacterial infection—the appendix becomes obstructed, bacteria multiply in the obstructed space, infection develops.
Bacteria proliferate in devitalized tissue. They respond to conditions rather than create them.
Historical surgeons recognized this. Dr. Wilson declared that “rather than being the cause of the necrosed tissue... germs performed a benign function, changing necrosed tissue into harmless by-products that could then be removed by the body.” Dr. Geo Granville Bantock: bacteria “were not causative of disease, but were scavengers of tissue devoid of its vitality.”
Professor Hugh Cabot’s WWI surgical experience confirmed this. The key to successful wound treatment was completely excising damaged tissue. Cabot “considered the presence of germs was neither here nor there—of no great importance.” What mattered was removing devitalized tissue—the material bacteria were responding to.
Antibiotics address a secondary phenomenon. They suppress bacterial activity without addressing why tissue became hospitable to bacterial proliferation. Removing the appendix eliminates the visible site of inflammation but leaves the dietary dysfunction untouched.
Where Bacteria Come From
If bacteria respond to conditions rather than cause them—if they proliferate in devitalized tissue as scavengers, not invaders—where do they come from?
Mainstream biology treats bacteria as fixed species that enter from outside. You “catch” an infection. Bacteria invade. The body fights back.
Microorganisms arise from within. They differentiate from primordial precursors based on the body’s internal environment. The same precursor can become bacteria, fungi, or other forms depending on terrain conditions. Not fixed species but adaptive expressions. This is pleomorphism.
Antoine Béchamp called these precursors microzymas. Wilhelm Reich called them biots. Cowan describes them as “the precursors of all life, including bacteria and fungus, and probably including us.” Depending on the nutritional, emotional, and electromagnetic environment, “they will form into whatever species of bacteria or species of fungus or species of parasites... whatever is needed.”
Cowan states this directly: “That’s really how life comes about, not by anything else.”
Cowan’s Hypothesis About the Appendix
This brings Cowan to a speculation about the appendix specifically.
The mainstream view holds the appendix as a reservoir for gut microbes—”like Noah’s Ark,” storing beneficial bacteria to reseed the intestine after disturbances. Cowan is skeptical of this framing. Microbiome testing shows different organisms at different intestinal sites, changing constantly. “All that is basically pseudoscience,” he says. “We have no idea what a normal microbiome is.”
His alternative idea: “My suspicion is, all that stuff about the appendix, what it really boils down to is maybe it’s a reservoir or a safe haven for these micro zyma.”
If correct, the appendix stores the primordial precursors from which the body generates whatever microbial forms current conditions require. Removing it means losing “somewhat of these primordial... units,” making you “less able to form what you need, maybe even for the rest of your life, or at least for a while.”
This is Cowan’s suspicion, not established fact. He uses words like “maybe” and “my suspicion” deliberately. But the idea has explanatory power. If the appendix holds adaptive potential—the capacity to generate what the body needs—then removing it has consequences beyond eliminating an inflamed organ.
Williams understood appendicitis as dietary dysfunction overwhelming an elimination channel. O’Neill understood it as putrefaction overworking an essential organ. Cowan’s hypothesis adds another layer: the appendix may hold something that can’t easily be replaced.
The Economics
Williams provided context: “Operations, unfortunately, are among the most lucrative items of the orthodox stock-in-trade. They must be sold, otherwise it is improbable that people will buy. The people, rightly, fear operations. But they can be made to fear sickness more, and the fear-urge is widely employed.”
Fear of rupture. Fear of peritonitis. Fear of death. These fears drive families to accept unnecessary surgery for a condition that resolves on its own, removing an organ that performs functions mainstream medicine refused to acknowledge for a century.
Williams grouped appendectomy with tonsillectomy: “Tens of thousands of appendices, and hundreds of thousands of tonsils are removed annually without colour of real excuse.”
Tonsillectomy is now recognized as historically overperformed. The same logic applies to both organs. Tonsils and appendix are elimination channels. They become inflamed when overburdened by toxic material. Removing them eliminates a pathway the body uses to cope with dysfunction—while leaving the dysfunction in place.
The “vestigial organ” narrative—the appendix as evolutionary leftover with no function—served for decades to justify aggressive intervention. If the organ does nothing, removing it costs nothing.
That narrative is collapsing. Mainstream medicine now acknowledges the appendix as a “safe house” for beneficial bacteria. More quietly, “antibiotic-first” approaches are now studied as alternatives to immediate surgery. The question mainstream medicine is beginning to ask—can this condition resolve without removal?—terrain practitioners answered a century ago.
If Surgery Already Happened
Many readers have already had appendectomies. For them, this essay is information that arrived too late.
But not entirely too late. If Cowan’s hypothesis is correct—if the appendix serves as a reservoir for microzymas—losing it reduces adaptive capacity. What can be done?
Cowan is honest about his uncertainty: “What would I do about that? You know, I’m not so sure.”
His suggestions are tentative. Good Nourishing Traditions diet. Animal fats. Fermented foods. He notes that researcher Christopher Gardner has found high concentrations of microzymas in biochar. “Maybe Shilajit,” he adds. “There may be other forms. I’m not sure.”
His strongest recommendation: “I would certainly try the raw fat thing, especially raw butter and raw cream.”
But he’s realistic about outcomes: “Most people do fine enough with a little bit of I’m not quite the same as I was before the appendectomy.”
Full restoration may not be possible. Supporting the body is still worth doing.
O’Neill addresses the physical aftermath—scar tissue and adhesions that develop after abdominal surgery. People who had appendectomies years ago “sometimes get more problems now because of scar tissue building up.” Her recommendation: castor oil compresses applied regularly to the surgical area. Castor oil penetrates deep tissue and breaks up adhesions that would otherwise restrict function indefinitely.
The Choice
Diagnosed appendicitis that would have meant surgery. Conservative treatment instead. Resolution. Patients thriving.
These cases exist. They’re documented. They expose the mainstream model as wrong.
Mainstream medicine treats appendicitis as infection requiring emergency removal. That model makes the New Biology Clinic cases impossible—except they happened.
Appendicitis is dietary dysfunction manifesting as inflammation. The body attempts to process accumulated toxic material. Support that process—fasting, rest, cold packs—and the condition resolves. The cases aren’t anomalies. They’re expected outcomes.
Eighty-five percent of removed appendices have nothing wrong with them. The patients who recover without surgery prove that even those with genuine inflammation don’t require the knife.
Understanding what appendicitis actually is determines whether a child keeps an organ or loses it. Whether a family endures surgery or supports a healing crisis. Whether the underlying dysfunction gets addressed or merely gets its visible manifestation removed.
The operation, Williams wrote, is what kills. The cases that resolve show he was right about more than mortality. He was right about necessity.
References
Béchamp, Antoine. Microzyma theory—primordial precursors from which microbial forms differentiate based on terrain conditions.
Cowan, Tom. Wednesday Webinar, January 28, 2026. New Biology Clinic appendicitis cases, microzyma hypothesis regarding appendix function, post-appendectomy suggestions.
O’Neill, Barbara. “Caring For The Gut.” Appendix as “colon’s oil can,” meat putrefaction, digestive tract comparative anatomy.
O’Neill, Barbara. “Simple Home Remedies” and Self Heal By Design. Castor oil protocols for post-surgical scar tissue.
Reich, Wilhelm. Bion theory—primordial life-form precursors (biots).
Roytas, Daniel. Can You Catch a Cold? Historical citations from Wilson, Bantock, and Hugh Cabot on bacteria as scavengers.
Williams, Ulric. Terrain Therapy (originally Hints on Healthy Living, 1934). Appendicitis causation, conservative treatment protocol, surgical statistics, Mayo citation.
Virus Mania. Germ-free animal research on appendix/cecum dysfunction.
This post is a lightly edited copy of a Subreddit essay by Lies are Unbekoming which can be found here: https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/appendicitis-without-surgery
