Appendix

The appendix registers every foreign element that has entered the body across a person's entire lifetime. This includes bacteria foreign to the individual's system, venoms from insect or animal bites, poison mushrooms and other toxic foods, industrial chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, inhaled pollutants from the air, and any other substance that the body identifies as requiring a defensive or neutralizing response. Aajonus said that this registration happens regardless of whether the substance entered through ingestion, inhalation, a wound or cut, or absorption through the skin.

Once a substance is registered in the appendix, the body possesses the full chemical resolution for that substance. The next time the same substance enters the body, the appendix triggers a hormonal and biochemical response that allows the body to begin neutralizing, counteracting, or managing the substance within twenty to forty minutes. Aajonus gave a range of response times across his various talks, and the figures varied somewhat: twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, forty-five minutes, one hour, one hour and twenty minutes, and ninety minutes at the absolute maximum. The consistent upper boundary he cited in most talks was ninety minutes as the very longest a person with a functional appendix would take to mount a full response to a recognized substance.

Without an appendix, the body has no stored registry. Every time the same foreign substance enters the body, it must be re-evaluated and re-analyzed from the beginning, as though the body had never encountered it before. Aajonus described this re-analysis process as taking between twenty-two hours at the low end and seventy-two hours at the high end, with the most commonly cited range being thirty-six to forty-eight hours. In one passage he described the delay as lengthening response time by almost fifty times compared to a person with a functioning appendix.

He emphasized that this delay is not merely an inconvenience. During the period in which the body is re-analyzing a poison or toxic agent, that substance continues to circulate and do damage. A venom with neurological effects, a contaminated food, an industrial chemical absorbed through the lungs: all of these are working on cells and tissue during the hours the body requires to figure out what to do. In contrast, the person with an appendix may have the situation largely addressed within thirty minutes.

Because his own appendix was removed at twelve, Aajonus spent decades experiencing the consequences of not having one. He described chemical sensitivity as a direct result. Traveling extensively and staying in hotels, he had to go through considerable effort to manage chemical exposure in rooms, and described how after leaving a hotel where air quality was poor he would develop a headache that resolved within half an hour of departure. He attributed this extended reactivity to the absence of a registered response in the appendix.

He also described his experience with bee stings as a direct demonstration of the appendix's function. After the appendix was removed, the first time he was stung by a bee post-surgery, it took approximately forty-eight hours to resolve the sting. He noted that under normal circumstances, with an appendix, the second exposure to bee venom after the first sting would produce a response within twenty minutes. Without the appendix, every sting was effectively a first sting, requiring full re-analysis.

By the time Aajonus had been on the raw food and primal diet for many years, he began to notice his body developing compensatory mechanisms. He described being stung by three scorpions, the first of which took twenty-four hours to fully address because it was a new venom his body had never encountered. The second scorpion sting took an hour or two. The third took twenty to thirty minutes. He interpreted this as his body having developed an alternative form of the appendix library function, storing the information somewhere else in the body, or possibly even beginning to regrow the appendix itself.

Aajonus raised the possibility that the appendix can regrow, or that the body can develop a substitute memory system in another location. He offered the example of his own tonsils, which had been removed when he was three years old. Exactly fifty years later, to the week, he grew half of one back. He described finding it himself with a flashlight and mirror after experiencing a sore throat and unusual taste. He presented this as direct evidence that the body is capable of regrowing organs and glands it has lost, given sufficient time and proper nutritional support.

He told at least one person who reported feeling pain at the scar site where their appendix had been that this might indicate the appendix was attempting to regrow. He framed this as an encouraging possibility rather than a warning sign. His position was that if you are feeding the body correctly and treating it carefully, the body will make up for limitations, either by regrowing the lost organ or by devising another way to perform its function. He stated that he did not know where in his own body the alternative memory was being stored, but that the evidence of his improving response times to scorpion venom demonstrated that something functional had developed.

Aajonus was asked directly what causes the appendix to become inflamed or infected, and his answer focused primarily on toxic heterocyclic amines, which he described as protein toxins. These compounds accumulate in the appendix and begin dissolving the appendix tissue itself, causing it to swell. White blood cells enter to attempt to remove the toxins but cannot do so effectively when the body lacks adequate nutrients. The body continues sending more blood, more circulation, and more white blood cells to the area, but without the nutritional resources to resolve the situation, the problem compounds. The appendix continues swelling, and eventually the tissue can rupture.

He also addressed the broader question of what makes the appendix become toxic in the first place. He said the appendix does not generally accept sugars, so sugar toxicity is not typically a factor. The accumulation is predominantly pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, steroids, and industrial chemicals. He noted that every injection and every course of medication a person takes is registered in the appendix, and over time this pharmaceutical accumulation can become so extensive that it irritates the cell walls to the point of inflammation and rupture. He described this as one reason the medical profession does not study the appendix: the findings would reveal the chemical burden that medical drugs place on the body.

He also described the appendix as a library for bacteria and viruses, including naturally occurring bacteria that the body needs to know how to manage. When he was asked about a case in which appendicitis appeared alongside a candida problem, he was emphatic that these were two separate situations with two separate causes and should not be conflated. The appendicitis was caused by toxic heterocyclic amines and pharmaceutical accumulation; the candida issue was a different problem related to immune resources being depleted by the primary infection, leaving insufficient capacity to keep candida in check.

Aajonus described a consistent pattern he observed in patients on the primal diet who experienced ruptured appendixes and underwent surgery. In every such case he discussed, the surgeon found the appendix completely surrounded by a thick layer of fat, at least an inch thick, forming a complete bubble around the burst appendix. This fat had contained all of the toxins released by the rupture, preventing them from contaminating the rest of the abdominal cavity.

He described the primary case study in detail: a martial artist who had been on the diet for approximately six to ten years, who was disciplined enough to own and run a martial arts school and who drank no water, eating raw food exclusively. When this man developed severe appendicitis, those around him insisted he would die if he did not go to the hospital, invoking the fear that a ruptured appendix is invariably fatal. Aajonus had told him he was already protected because he had been on the diet long enough to have built the fat reserves necessary to isolate the toxicity. Despite this advice, the man was frightened into surgery. When the surgeon went in, he found the appendix already burst and entirely surrounded by over an inch of fat in a complete bubble. The doctor stated he had never seen anything like it in his medical career. The appendix would have healed itself, and the surrounding fat would have absorbed all of the released poison. Instead, the doctor scraped out both the fat and the appendix.

Aajonus used this case as an illustration of two principles. The first is that the body, when properly nourished with raw animal fats, will instinctively protect itself from even a catastrophic event like a ruptured appendix by building a containment structure of fat months in advance, because the body must have begun accumulating that inch-plus layer of fat at least six or seven months before the rupture. The second is that surgical intervention, even when the body has already resolved the emergency, results in the destruction of the very protective tissue the body built.

He described a second, similar case involving a patient in New Jersey who lived near factories and industrial sites, whose appendix had become very large due to years of accumulated toxins from the surrounding environment. When that person went to the hospital and surgeons went in, they found the same complete surrounding of fat. Again, the appendix had burst, and the fat had absorbed all of the toxicity. The appendix was removed anyway.

Aajonus was direct about what his thirty-two studies of appendixes showed: the predominant contents were medical drugs, vaccines, and steroids. He stated that the most common substances registered were pharmaceutical in origin, representing a higher proportion of the appendix's stored material than naturally occurring biochemical compounds. He argued that this is the explicit reason the medical profession does not study the appendix. He stated that it is the only organ in the human body for which no medical studies exist, and that this absence of study is purposeful rather than accidental. If the appendix were studied and its contents analyzed, the result would demonstrate that pharmaceutical drugs and medical injections are among the most dangerous substances the body encounters, because the appendix, which is only supposed to register harmful foreign matter and generate solutions for it, is primarily full of pharmaceutical compounds.

He noted that a physician came out approximately two to three years before various workshop dates and publicly stated that the appendix is a store of bacteria, an idea Aajonus had been presenting for over twenty years. However, he was critical of how this physician framed the finding: rather than concluding that the appendix is valuable because it stores and addresses bacteria, the physician concluded that the stored bacteria are dangerous and that this finding is an additional reason to remove the appendix. Aajonus also noted that a Harvard professor whom he had addressed in a talk approximately twenty years prior had come out more recently and stated that the appendix holds the memory of all bacteria and compounds that have entered the body, again arriving at a conclusion Aajonus had reached through his own laboratory research decades earlier.

Aajonus positioned the appendix as a critical tool for immunity. He described it as the body's memory bank for disease, holding triggers that allow the body to know what particular bacteria or virus needs to be addressed and how to adjust the response to current conditions in the body. He also described the appendix as functioning as a kind of secondary tonsil system. He said that in people without an appendix, if the body has not devised another compensatory mechanism, the lymph glands may take on some of the function that would otherwise have been performed by the appendix, in the same way the tonsils can serve as backup systems when the pancreas is not available.

He briefly referenced the tonsils and spleen in comparison, noting that each organ the body loses represents a permanent reduction in a specific defensive or regulatory capacity, and that the medical profession's willingness to remove the spleen, tonsils, and appendix without understanding their functions produces cumulative harm. The appendix was described as sitting in a broader ecosystem of organs and glands all working together to manage the body's encounters with foreign and toxic material.

For someone experiencing appendicitis symptoms, Aajonus recommended a specific approach from his book We Want To Live. The protocol involved raw tomatoes blended with a minimum of five tablespoons of unheated honey and five teaspoons of fresh lemon juice, consumed every four hours until symptoms resolved. He described this combination as neutralizing the volatile toxic condition and calming the infection without antibiotics.

Alongside this, he recommended eating one tablespoon of raw unsalted butter with one tablespoon of no-salt-added raw cheese every hour to absorb toxins being discharged from the appendix. If nervousness was experienced during this process, he suggested eating French bread with avocado or another available raw fat to settle the body's systems. He also mentioned drinking two ounces of fresh raw lime or beet juice every four hours as a supportive measure.

He also offered guidance from his personal correspondence on distinguishing appendicitis from other conditions. He noted that the appendix is located approximately at the top of the pelvic level and to the right, not at the level of the umbilicus. He stated that all detoxification can produce nausea, vomiting, pain, and fever, but that if the appendix or peritonitis is involved, the fever will typically reach a higher threshold than a standard detox fever. He recommended the honey-butter combination as an initial support while evaluating whether the appendix is specifically involved.

He addressed one correspondent who described pain in the right lower abdominal area that worsened when coughing, sneezing, or blowing the nose, and noted that while these symptoms can resemble appendicitis, musculoskeletal strain from coughing can produce very similar presentations. He encouraged careful attention to the exact location of the pain relative to the pelvic bone to distinguish between the two possibilities.

In his written material, Aajonus noted that the incidence of appendicitis among raw meat-eating peoples such as the Masai, Samburu, and Fulani is virtually nonexistent. He also made the observation that raw vegetable fiber, while it may be helpful in preventing appendicitis among cooked-food eaters where slow transit and putrefaction are factors, is not a meaningful variable in raw fooders because putrefaction of food does not occur in people eating exclusively raw food.

He described looking at the irises of one patient and finding storages of heavy metals in and around the appendix, buried in scarring. His interpretation was that the caustic metals had burned the appendix walls, causing them to burst during the attempt to remove those metals. He identified inadequate fat in the lower abdomen as the underlying vulnerability, and used this case to reinforce his position that people should maintain adequate fat stores during detoxification, specifically fat in the abdominal region, as a protective buffer for the organs in that area including the appendix.

Aajonus returned repeatedly across his workshops to the specific logic the medical profession applies to the appendix, and he was consistently critical of it. The position he described is that if a doctor does not understand why an organ exists, the organ is assumed to be unnecessary. If it is occasionally associated with a painful condition, it becomes a candidate for removal. He framed this as reflecting not ignorance but stupidity, distinguishing between the two on the grounds that the information about the appendix's function was available through basic observational research, but the medical establishment declined to pursue it. He said he had been presenting his findings about the appendix's library function for over twenty years before any physician publicly confirmed a related conclusion, and even then, the conclusion was framed in a way that supported removal rather than preservation.

He also made the point that doctors are trained to be incurious about organs they cannot immediately explain or profit from treating. He noted that surgical removal of a healthy appendix happened in his own case and was explicitly stated in the surgical report as being done preventively rather than therapeutically. He was clear that this kind of reasoning, removing functioning tissue because you cannot explain its purpose and might theoretically need to deal with it later, represents a fundamental failure of the framework on which modern medicine operates.