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
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