Appendectomy

Aajonus developed a sustained and detailed position on the function of the appendix based on what he described as his own laboratory research, including electrode experiments and autopsy work on removed appendixes. His core claim was that the appendix is a library, a registry, a living archive of every foreign substance that has ever entered the body, along with the body's developed chemical response to that substance. He used several terms interchangeably: library, registry, memory, laboratory. The fundamental idea was consistent across all his workshops.

Every foreign element that enters the body, whether a bacterial agent, a venom, a poison, a food compound, a medication, or an environmental contaminant absorbed by osmosis or ingestion, gets recorded in the appendix. The appendix stores not only the identity of the substance but also the chemical resolution the body developed to neutralize or dissolve it. Aajonus described this as the body's way of avoiding re-analysis every time the same substance is encountered. When a substance enters the body for a second time and the person has a functioning appendix, the body can mount its chemical response within approximately ten to forty minutes, with the upper range he cited being about one hour and twenty minutes. Without an appendix, the body must conduct the full chemical analysis from scratch every single time the substance is encountered, a process he said takes between thirty-two and seventy-two hours depending on the complexity of the compound.

He gave a concrete example using a scorpion sting. If a person has been stung by a scorpion before and has an intact appendix, the body can begin neutralizing the venom within ten to twenty minutes of the second sting. If the same person lacks an appendix, the body may require twenty-four hours or more just to decide what to do about the venom, during which time the compound continues causing cellular damage. He described his own experience with three scorpion stings in Thailand. The first sting took twenty-four hours for his body to respond to adequately, because it was his first scorpion exposure and his body had no record of it. He described this as evidence that even without an appendix, after decades on the raw primal diet, his body had developed alternative mechanisms to compensate, though not as efficiently as a functioning appendix would have allowed.

He also described using electrodes placed at the appendix and feeding people substances including trace amounts of poisons to demonstrate that the appendix showed measurable electrical activity in response to foreign compounds. He acknowledged that no institutional body accepted his laboratory findings, but he considered the evidence he had gathered through autopsy research and live experimentation to be conclusive. In the autopsies he conducted, he said he found every microbe he was aware of represented in the appendix, along with what he identified as the corresponding antigen or chemical resolution for each.

Aajonus described the circumstances of his appendectomy in consistent detail across many different workshop settings. At twelve years old, he had already been ill for much of his childhood, experiencing colds that lasted three to five months per year and spending two to three months annually bedridden. He developed severe abdominal pain that prevented him from straightening his body. He was taken to the hospital, diagnosed with appendicitis, and taken into surgery. On at least one occasion he mentioned that he died on the operating table during this surgery and was revived, describing the experience of leaving his body and hovering above it before being pulled back.

The surgeons found the appendix in perfect condition. In spite of this finding, they removed it, with the stated justification in the surgical report being that it might cause problems in the future. This was, in Aajonus's telling, precisely what he had with peritonitis: a perforated and bleeding intestine that had been damaged by poisons from earlier tetanus shot injections, which had migrated into his intestinal tract. The actual condition went unaddressed.

Following the surgery, Aajonus remained hospitalized for four to five days receiving injections every two to three hours, sometimes four hours apart, which he described as unusual and therefore somewhat welcome relief. By the end of that period he was in severe pain, could not lie comfortably in any position, could not sleep more than twenty to thirty minutes at a stretch between injection interruptions, had black and blue marks and yellow marks all over his body, and was described by his own account as being close to death. He eventually took the hypodermic tray from the nurse and knocked it away to refuse further injections. Within twenty-four hours of the injections stopping, he said he had enough strength to leave the hospital.

He also described that a male nurse at the hospital berated him for showing pain four days after his appendectomy, comparing him unfavorably to another patient who had recovered within a day and a half. This nurse pushed hard on Aajonus's lower abdomen, causing him to scream, while suggesting he was faking or exaggerating symptoms. Aajonus's interpretation was that the continued pain and fever were entirely consistent with having peritonitis rather than appendicitis, and that the doctors and nurses simply refused to consider that their diagnosis had been wrong.

He also described the long-term consequence of so many injections over those days as potentially the origin of his subsequent blood and bone cancer, attributing this to the extreme cold he felt from that point forward and the toxic chemical load deposited into his tissue through repeated injections.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to what it meant, medically and physiologically, to live without an appendix. His central claim was that the loss of the appendix placed a person at significant ongoing disadvantage whenever any foreign substance entered the body, whether through food, the environment, injury, infection, or any other route.

Without an appendix, every new exposure to a previously encountered substance requires the body to conduct a full re-analysis taking thirty-six to seventy-two hours. During that window, the substance can cause cellular or systemic damage that would otherwise have been prevented or minimized. He described this as placing people without appendixes in "grave danger" from ordinary exposures that an intact appendix would have resolved in under an hour.

He used his own experience with bee stings as a specific example. After his appendix was removed, a bee sting would cause a reaction lasting forty-eight hours. In a person with an intact appendix who had been stung before, the body's response after re-exposure should take no more than twenty minutes. The difference between twenty minutes and forty-eight hours of unmitigated exposure to bee venom represented, in his framing, a meaningful degree of cellular injury that accumulated over a lifetime.

He also said that the loss of the appendix was compounded if the person had also had their tonsils removed. In such cases, the lymph glands might compensate somewhat, functioning as an alternative registration system, but less effectively and with longer response times in the range of twenty-four to thirty-six hours or more. He framed the tonsils and the appendix as part of a broader immune memory and regulatory network that the medical profession systematically dismantled without understanding what it was doing.

He expressed a degree of hope about partial regeneration. He said that at fifty years to the week after his tonsils were removed, he grew back approximately half of one tonsil. He raised the possibility that his appendix might similarly be attempting to regenerate, noting that he sometimes felt pain at the location of the appendix scar when eating certain foods. He did not claim to know definitively whether the appendix was regrowing but left open the possibility.

Aajonus described in detail a case involving a martial artist who had been on the primal diet for approximately six years at the time of the incident. This man owned and ran a martial arts school, was highly disciplined, and consumed no water whatsoever while working out and teaching all day. He had been on the diet for approximately ten years by the time Aajonus described the case in later workshops.

The martial artist developed severe appendicitis. Despite Aajonus's counsel that the man did not need to go to the hospital, the pain was so severe and the fear so intense that the man went in for surgery. The doctors told him his appendix had already burst or was about to burst, and he was frightened into consenting to the procedure.

When surgeons opened him up, they discovered that his body had completely surrounded the ruptured appendix with a thick layer of fat more than one inch thick in all directions, forming what Aajonus described as a complete bubble or envelope around the appendix. The attending surgeon stated he had never seen anything like it in his career. All of the toxic fluid from the burst appendix was contained entirely within that fat layer. None of the poison had contaminated the surrounding body cavity.

Aajonus's interpretation was that the body had anticipated the appendix rupture. He reasoned that for the fat layer to have been one inch thick completely surrounding the appendix, the body must have begun building that fat mass at least six to seven months in advance, anticipating that the appendix would eventually burst and preparing a containment system accordingly. The body had used fat as a protective barrier and arrest mechanism precisely because fat is the tissue most capable of absorbing and sequestering toxins.

The doctors removed both the appendix and the surrounding fat, including the very fat layer that had contained the poison. The fat that was doing the therapeutic work was scraped away. Aajonus described this as emblematic of how the medical profession removes the body's own corrective systems without recognizing what those systems are doing. He said the man's appendix would likely have healed on its own, the fat would have continued absorbing and neutralizing the poison, and the entire crisis would have resolved without surgery if the man had remained on the diet and stayed out of the hospital.

He described this case multiple times across workshops and used it consistently to illustrate two points: first, that the primal diet allows the body to build sufficient fat reserves to handle acute crises including ruptured appendixes, and second, that surgery is typically performed in ways that remove the body's own intelligent response rather than supporting it.

In a written correspondence, Aajonus described examining the irises of a person who had experienced appendicitis and an appendectomy. He reported finding storages of heavy metals in and around the appendix in the iris reading, buried within what appeared as scarring in the iris map. His interpretation was that caustic heavy metals had accumulated in the appendix tissue and had burned through the appendix walls, causing the burst that necessitated the removal.

He stated that this pattern indicated the person had not had enough fat in the lower abdomen. Fat in the abdominal region serves, in his framework, as a buffer zone that absorbs and contains toxic metals before they can concentrate sufficiently to burn through tissue. This was his stated reason for wanting people, particularly those going through active detoxification periods, to maintain what he called a big belly. Abdominal fat was not a cosmetic concern but a protective tissue reservoir.

Aajonus addressed a question from a person who had undergone an appendectomy and was researching a conventional claim that lower dietary fiber intake increases the risk of appendicitis. The conventional argument was that fiber decreases fecal viscosity, reduces transit time, and discourages the formation of fecaliths, which are hardened fecal masses that can obstruct the appendiceal lumen.

Aajonus rejected the framing that lack of fiber was causative or even partially causative of appendicitis. He stated that every person he personally knew who had developed appendicitis had been eating vegetables, meaning they had fiber in their diet. He did not dismiss fiber entirely in cooked-food contexts, acknowledging that raw vegetable fiber might help cooked-food eaters by preventing the slow transit and high putrefaction that characterizes digested cooked food, since cooked food lacks the vitamins and enzymes needed for proper and timely breakdown.

However, he drew a sharp distinction for raw food eaters. He stated that putrefaction of food never occurs in raw fooders. He pointed to the Masai, Samburu, and Fulani peoples as evidence, noting that appendicitis is essentially nonexistent among those populations, who consume predominantly raw animal products and no particular emphasis on vegetable fiber. He also noted that as long as juice is not completely filtered through thick cloths, primal diet followers retain adequate vegetable fiber from their juicing practice without needing to eat raw fibrous vegetables for that purpose.

In a written response to a person experiencing pain in the right lower abdominal region near the top of the pelvic bone, Aajonus referenced a specific protocol for appendicitis described in his book We Want To Live on page 225. He instructed the person to continue consuming a honey and butter combination and to also consume a tomato mixture he identified in that section of the book as appropriate for appendicitis.

He noted the anatomical location: the appendix sits approximately at the top of pelvic level and to the right. He distinguished this from pain to the right of the umbilicus, which he considered less likely to be appendix-related. He also stated that all detoxification can cause nausea, vomiting, pain, and fever, but that if the appendix or peritonitis is involved, the fever will characteristically reach a particular threshold, implying that fever level and pattern serve as a diagnostic indicator within the framework.

In a separate correspondence, Aajonus was informed about a woman who had advanced cancer of the appendix that had spread throughout her body. Her doctors had removed her appendix, spleen, part of her liver, part of her diaphragm, her rectum, her colon, her large intestine, and additional organs. Aajonus received this information through a practitioner who had sent the woman for food guidance. The case is mentioned only briefly in the source material without an extended protocol discussion in the available passages, but it is notable as an instance in which appendix cancer served as the origin site for a widespread surgical removal cascade affecting multiple organs simultaneously, consistent with Aajonus's repeated position that once the medical profession begins removing organs it does not stop.

Aajonus occasionally noted a taxonomic question about whether the appendix should be classified as an organ or a gland. He concluded it should be considered both. As an organ it has physical structure and houses biological material. As a gland it performs a regulatory or secretory-adjacent function in the sense that it holds and presumably can release or signal the chemical resolutions stored within it. He described putting electrodes at the appendix during feeding experiments and measuring responses, which he said demonstrated that the appendix actively participates in the body's biochemical assessment of incoming substances rather than being a passive storage site.

He compared its function conceptually to that of the tonsils in their role as a registration system for pathogens. In the absence of tonsils, he said, the lymph glands compensate but do so less effectively and with longer response times. The same compensatory logic applied to people without an appendix: other systems can take over portions of the function but not with the speed or precision that the appendix provided.

Aajonus consistently recommended that people avoid appendectomy if at all possible, particularly those who had been on the primal diet long enough to have built adequate fat reserves. His reasoning was direct: the body, given proper nutrition including adequate fat, can contain and resolve even a ruptured appendix through its own mechanisms. The martial artist case was his primary illustration of this principle.

He told people experiencing what appeared to be appendicitis symptoms that the fat surrounding the appendix in a well-nourished person would contain any rupture, and that the body would continue processing and neutralizing the toxic material within the fat over time without spreading infection through the body cavity. He framed the medical terror around ruptured appendixes, the idea that rupture means imminent death, as what he called "fraud propaganda" and "terrorism," meaning the deliberate use of fear to coerce people into consenting to surgery that may not be necessary and that removes not only the appendix but also the protective fat the body has built around it.

He advised carrying a medical directive card at all times, laminated, specifying the limits of what any emergency intervention could include, such as restrictions on IV anesthesia, antibiotics, and antiseptics, with allowance only for gaseous anesthesia in true emergencies. This was his general recommendation for all people on the primal diet who might find themselves in a medical emergency, including appendicitis scenarios.