Surgery

Aajonus described surgery as producing a category of damage distinct from and additional to whatever injury or disease prompted the operation, and he was insistent that this secondary surgical damage is almost always underweighted when people decide whether to operate.

The vagotomy pyloroplasty illustrates the first type of surgical cost: permanent physiological alteration of normal function. By severing the vagus nerves, his body lost the capacity to produce hydrochloric acid permanently. This meant he could not digest proteins normally for the rest of his life without compensatory work by bacteria, and doctors told him he could never eat raw food again because without hydrochloric acid to kill microbes, bacterial or parasitical invasion would be fatal. He described this as a kind of terrorization that kept him from raw foods long after his body was showing him otherwise.

The second type of cost he described is scar tissue formation from the surgical incision itself. He explained in detail why incisions go tumorous and keloid: the body is trying to seal and hold together the damaged area, and in the process creates structural scar tissue that can become very large. He discussed how the stretching of the duodenum to three times its normal size created the same kind of problem, because any tissue stretched suddenly to that degree tears at a cellular level, and the resulting cells cannot regenerate normally but become scar tissue instead.

The third type of cost is the damage from antiseptics applied during surgery. He specifically named mercurochrome, methylate, and iodine as the antiseptics most commonly used during surgical procedures, and described mercurochrome and methylate as liquid mercury compounds. He said these substances are not only antiseptic to bacteria but antiseptic to live cells, meaning they prevent cellular regeneration and division within approximately a two-inch radius of where they are applied. Because they poison cells and the body does not want to dissolve those poisoned dead cells (because dissolving them would re-release the mercury into surrounding tissue), the body builds those cells into scar tissue instead of clearing them. He noted that when he was able to persuade surgeons not to use these antiseptics, his patients recovered substantially better and actually healed rather than developing extensive scar tissue.

The fourth type of cost he described is the damage to surrounding tissue, muscle, and nerve caused by the necessary cutting required to reach internal structures. When describing his own leg injury and the surgery doctors wanted to perform, he noted that he had seen many people who underwent similar leg surgeries and emerged with one leg two to three inches shorter than the other, with a third to two thirds of the calf and thigh muscle gone, and walking permanently impaired. He attributed this not to the original injury but to the extent of cutting, muscle removal, and connective tissue severing required to reach and work on the bone. He said: "If I do that, I'm going to spend two years repairing it from the surgery. If I let my body do it, I may spend a year at the most healing that."

The fifth type of cost is the cascade of additional interventions that initial surgery tends to generate. His own case demonstrates this precisely: the vagotomy pyloroplasty led to a tumorous incision, which led to ten weeks of radiation therapy, which led to a cauterized spine, which led to bone marrow damage, which led to years of disability. Each intervention was treating the damage of the previous one rather than the original condition.

Aajonus returned to the details of his 1967 surgery many times across different workshops, and the accounts vary slightly in specific numbers but are consistent in their core content. The surgery was performed because Maalox had converted his stomach ulcer into a tumor, and the doctors described the necessary response as removing the tumor, attempting to seal the ulcer, severing all vagus nerves to the stomach, and stretching the duodenum. He said the doctors tried to stretch the duodenum to three times its size "so food would hold up there instead of the stomach" and "absorb more of the hydrochloric acid," but this logic was circular and meaningless because the vagotomy had already eliminated hydrochloric acid production. He described this as an example of medical procedure that had no coherent physiological logic: "Why did you do the vagotomy? It doesn't make any freaking sense, but that's what they did."

The surgery left him unable to digest meat in its cooked form. When he ate cooked meat after the operation, it would sit in his stomach and putrefy because bacteria were the only digestive mechanism remaining to him, and those bacteria required significant accumulation time to work. The putrefying meat would then discharge through his skin, causing massive pustulations from his scalp to his knees, described as up to an inch in diameter, covering his face, back, shoulders, thighs, and stomach. He used the comparison to the film Liar Liar repeatedly to give audiences a visual sense of scale. This reaction made him afraid of meat and drove him toward vegetarianism on a cooked-food diet of donuts, sodas, cigarettes, and processed foods, which made him progressively sicker.

After the surgery he was told categorically that he would never be able to eat raw food again. No salads, no fruit, no raw anything. Everything including water had to be sterilized or cooked. He described this as the medical framework terrorizing him away from the very foods that ultimately healed him.

Within approximately six to eight weeks of the vagotomy pyloroplasty, the surgical incision keloided. Across different tellings, Aajonus gave slightly varying measurements: the tumor mass reached between one inch and two inches wide and between three quarters of an inch and one inch high, extending from the surface of the skin all the way through to the stomach. He described the full metastasized spread as including the stomach itself, meaning by that point he had what he called full-blown metastasized cancer.

Doctors told him it had to be irradiated to prevent further spread. The ten weeks of radiation therapy he received in 1967 to 1968 used a slow-moving beam that made full passes across his trunk, with each directional pass lasting fifteen to thirty seconds, and the full session taking ten minutes per sitting. The radiation beam was angled so that it passed from the top of his spine to the tailbone with each sweep. He explained that this meant the entire spine received radiation, not just the tumor site. He returned consistently to the analogy of clay fired in a kiln: malleable clay fired at cone two to four becomes solid like rock; fired at cone ten to twelve, it becomes glass. The radiation did the equivalent to his spine, cauterizing it so that it became immovable, fusing the vertebrae, causing excruciating pain with any movement, and crippling him for years. He also noted that the radiation affected his bone marrow throughout his body.

He described his movement in this period as being unable to do more than a few degrees of flexion or extension at the spine, taking four minutes to sit in a chair because the pain of the process was so severe, and being unable to sit upright or touch his knees.

One of the other major surgical encounters Aajonus described at length involved a motorcycle accident in Thailand, specifically in Jomtien, Pattaya. He was on a heavy Harley weighing approximately 600 pounds. The accident left him with extensive skin loss from his arm, elbow (with bone shaved off), and leg, and with a knee that was swelling rapidly and which he initially believed was dislocated.

He laid on the street for approximately 45 minutes waiting for pain to subside, then returned to his hotel before deciding to go to the hospital at approximately 10:30 at night. At the hospital, the intern refused to touch him without x-rays. Aajonus agreed to exactly two x-rays, one from the front and one from the side, and he describes having set the x-ray machine parameters himself. The x-rays revealed that the tibia, described as "big as my fist," had split completely in two down its length, with the split open approximately a quarter inch in the back. The top of the tibia had also fragmented, with the pyramidal top broken off and fragments of bone and cartilage lodged up into the femur joint cavity. Both tendons on opposite sides of the knee had been torn completely from the bone at opposite ends, causing lumps the size of golf balls.

The chief osteosurgeon, called in from home at 10:30 at night, planned to cut the outside of the right leg from the ankle to the hip, separating all the muscles to reach the bone, then use six to ten metal pins or screws to reunite the tibia segments, scrape all the bone fragments and cartilage from the femur joint, reattach both torn tendons, close the leg incision, and call in a plastic surgeon to graft skin from his buttocks and left thigh to cover the arm, elbow, and leg. Doctors said that without surgery he would never walk again.

Aajonus declined all of it. He told the surgeon that if he could not walk in six weeks he would return for help. He described the surgeon wincing at what seemed to him an insane statement. Aajonus returned to his hotel room, used the raw food protocols he knew, and essentially remained in the hotel for six and a half weeks. He described having attendants help him move his leg very gently when necessary. He noted that within two months his body fat was at 22%. The tibia reunited, the bone fragments dissolved (which was the specific thing the doctors feared would not happen, worrying the fragments would stab the nerves in the joint), and the tendons reattached without surgical intervention.

He said that had he undergone the surgery, the outcome based on cases he had observed would likely have left one leg two to three inches shorter than the other, with a third or more of the calf and thigh muscle gone, and permanent disability. He emphasized: "The natural cast that my body seemed to form from my thigh muscles" did the work that would otherwise have required metal hardware and months of surgical recovery. He also made the explicit comparison: the surgery would have caused two to five times more damage than the original injury, and healing from that surgical damage would have taken seven to twenty-five years or longer based on cases he had seen, whereas refusing surgery left his body with only the actual injury to repair.

Aajonus described a woman, whom he called Barbara, who came to him with cancer of the nose. She was in her sixties. Doctors wanted to remove her entire facial structure, including the jaw and everything associated, install a plastic prosthesis, and fold her skin back over it, at a cost of $125,000. Doctors told her she would be dead within weeks if she did not have the surgery.

Aajonus told her that she would lose her nose but not her life and not her face. He estimated she would lose at most her nose before the progression could be halted, and he advised against the full prosthesis surgery, saying that because of the extent of cutting involved, removing all tissue from the skin down and placing it over plastic, she would probably live only a few weeks from the surgery itself. The veins, he noted, do not grow around plastic easily, so restoring blood flow and cellular viability would be an enormous risk.

She chose to follow his advice, put a bandage over the nose, and lived for eight more years, dying in her sleep peacefully. Her daughters called him on her birthday each year. He noted that after five, six, seven of those years she had not even lost her entire nose yet. He contrasted this with the probable outcome of the major surgery.

One of the most detailed surgical case discussions Aajonus gave involved a patient with a large neck tumor that had been growing for approximately two years and three months, becoming large enough to affect his eyes, ability to swallow, ability to chew, and eventually his respiratory tract. The patient was elderly, described at approximately 67 years old, a member of Kaiser, and had been on the Primal Diet but only partially and not long enough to handle the tumor's size purely through nutritional means.

Aajonus described working for approximately three to five weeks to persuade the chief of surgery at Kaiser Permanente in Hollywood, a Dr. DeFranco, to perform the operation in a specific way. The surgeon's initial plan was to remove the tumor along with all the lymph glands in the neck, remove the thyroid, remove the jugular vein (because the tumor was running through the center of it), take the tumor and all surrounding skin, and graft skin from the buttocks and thigh.

Aajonus objected to the lymph gland removal on a specific physiological argument: the lymph system is responsible for removing dead cells, including cancer cells, from the body. If there is cancer anywhere in the body, the lymph glands will contain cancer cells because that is their function, to collect and process them. The presence of cancer cells in a lymph gland does not make that gland cancerous; it means the gland is doing its job. If those glands are removed, the cancer cells that were being processed and cleaned out through them have nowhere to go and will migrate to the brain, lungs, breast, or other tissue. He used the analogy of removing the body's cleaning organs and then asking where the toxicity will end up: "If you remove those lymph glands, where is that toxicity going to have to go? Into his brain and create a tumor, or down into his breast and cause tumors?"

He also objected to removing the jugular vein, arguing that without proper jugular blood flow the entire left side of the patient's body would be weakened. He suggested the surgeon sculpt around the vein rather than remove it, accepting that some nerves might be lost and some facial asymmetry might result but preserving the vascular structure.

Aajonus also argued that none of the lymph glands that were not hard as rock should be removed, because hardness was the indicator of true cancerous lymph gland tissue. Soft or normal-texture lymph glands were functional tissue doing their job, not cancerous tissue, and removing them would be removing the body's cleanup mechanism.

He described the conversation as talking to the surgeon "logically" and the surgeon being compelled to agree. The final surgical outcome removed only the tumor itself, left the lymph glands in place, and preserved the jugular vein through sculpting. After surgery, the removed tumor tissue left the side of the patient's face where the tumor had been thirty years younger in appearance than the other side, because all the dead cells that had accumulated had been removed and the brain function on that side was noticeably sharper. Aajonus described talking to the patient five hours after surgery and finding him "the funniest, happiest guy."

He described this as "the first person I ever sent to surgery" and noted that this was the only patient among all those he had worked with who genuinely needed surgical intervention, because the tumor had grown to a point where the patient could not breathe, swallow, or eat, and was not strong enough on the diet to dissolve it through natural means. He said: "He'd been only on the diet, you know, a little bit. Very little. And he was an elderly fellow."

The tumor did grow back within approximately one year to one and a half years. A second surgery was performed to remove the regrowth, shown in photographs he displayed at workshops. He noted that the second surgeon refused to operate again under the same conditions, with Kaiser ultimately saying they would not allow further operations without more drastic measures including bone removal. He described the regrowth as visible in photographs and said the second incision ran all the way up and around the growth site.

Aajonus described a patient who went into surgery for an appendix that had burst. When the surgeon opened the patient, he found that the body had surrounded the entire appendix with a thick layer of fat, described as over an inch thick in a complete bubble all the way around it, completely isolating all the poison from the burst appendix. The surgeon had never seen anything like it in his career. Aajonus commented that the body had probably begun laying down that fat layer six to seven months in advance, because such a thickness could not have accumulated quickly. The fat layer had completely contained the rupture. Aajonus noted that the body would likely have healed the appendix and then reabsorbed all the fat and isolated toxin on its own, but the surgeon removed both the appendix and the fat bubble, clearing out the body's own containment and protective structure. He used this case as an illustration of what the body is capable of when properly nourished, and as an example of surgery removing beneficial tissue along with the diseased tissue.

In one workshop, Aajonus mentioned undergoing a procedure to blast apart a bladder stone. He described the stone as very large, taking two hours to break apart with the blasting instrument, while a typical stone of this type might be removed in 45 minutes. When the center of the stone was analyzed, it was found to be composed entirely of mercury, which he attributed to vaccines received in infancy. He described the entire center as black, and the fluid tested and confirmed as mercury at an extremely high concentration. Because the stone was in a fluid medium, blasting it apart released a large amount of mercury back into his system. He responded by consuming large amounts of cheese immediately, because cheese binds to and captures free mercury and other heavy metals in the digestive tract and carries them out. He noted that the iris analysis of his intestines afterward showed metal speckles throughout that had not been present before. He described this as an example where surgery was necessary but carried a significant toxic consequence that required immediate dietary management.

Aajonus described an event from when he was three years old in approximately 1950. He had put his hand into a lawn mower and cut off a finger. Doctors grafted skin from another area of his body onto the finger. The grafted tissue healed to be as hard as rock, so hard he described being able to push it through plexiglass. When he began eating raw meat approximately 27 or 28 years later, within about a week to a year of beginning raw meat consumption, all the grafted tissue blistered and fell off. New skin grew back in its place, with normal sensitivity and normal nail formation. He described this as the body recognizing the foreign grafted tissue and rejecting it once it had the nutritional resources to do so, replacing it with properly generated new tissue. He contrasted this with the conventional grafting approach, saying that skin grafting consistently results in the grafted tissue becoming scar tissue, being permanently hard and painful because it stretches differently from the original tissue, and causing ongoing discomfort.

He made the same argument about skin grafting in burn and trauma cases, describing a case of a man who had massive skin loss from a motorcycle accident (in a separate instance from his own) and had healed entirely with raw food protocols, lime juice cleaning, honey, and raw meat applied to the wound, regrowing skin completely in 14 days. He contrasted this with grafting, saying the graft turns into scar tissue and the patient is in pain permanently from it stretching.

In We Want to Live, Aajonus described having his nose shattered into seven pieces by a baseball thrown by an adult. He underwent two major surgeries over seven years to address this. The first surgery, which the surgeon told him took six hours, involved cutting and pulling the skin from his nose and clamping it to his forehead, then individually spot-gluing each fragment of bone with aerospace and dental epoxy, waiting for each piece to dry completely before gluing the next, because wet epoxy in contact with tissue softer than bone would cause severe damage. He described learning these details not from the surgeon but from a technician afterward.

In his newsletter material, Aajonus provided specific guidance for a patient dealing with recurring tracheal scar tissue following an iatrogenic injury during intubation for a hip surgery. The patient had undergone two bronchoscope laser surgeries with stretching to open the air passage, and the scar tissue consistently returned. Doctors recommended tracheal reconstruction, cutting out the scarred section and sewing the trachea back together, shortening it by approximately one inch.

His recommendation for esophageal or tracheal scar tissue situations was to first attempt a vinegar and whey gargle protocol for three to four months before considering surgery. If surgery remained necessary after that period, he advised allowing the surgeon to only scrape the uneven scar tissue rather than removing a section of the esophagus or trachea, because a shortened esophagus causes severe and lasting pain from the stomach pulling on it. He described knowing a patient who required morphine multiple times daily because of the pain caused by a shortened esophagus pulling on the stomach.

He also noted that pre- and post-surgical diet and lifestyle could prevent keloidal tissue from developing after surgery, indicating that the Primal Diet framework, if followed properly around the time of a procedure, changes the tissue response to the surgical wound.

In his newsletter, Aajonus described carrying a laminated card specifying the terms under which he would consent to medical intervention. Key provisions included: alcohol (non-wood based) could be applied to wounds externally but not internally; pain relievers and narcotics could be used only upon his conscious request; injected or intravenous anesthesia was absolutely prohibited; gaseous anesthesia was permitted only for emergency surgery under specific listed conditions; if bones appeared broken, a maximum of two x-rays could be taken, and in cases of bone fragmentation, only the least invasive surgical repairs could be performed with his conscious approval; and if dismemberment had occurred, surgical reattachment procedures were permitted, excluding tetanus injections, antibiotics, and antiseptics (with the exception that he specified elsewhere in the card's text).

This card reflects his overall framework: surgical procedures themselves were not categorically rejected in emergency situations involving clear structural necessity such as reattachment, but the antiseptics, anesthesia methods, antibiotics, and accompanying pharmaceutical interventions were the primary targets of his refusal, because those were the inputs he identified as causing additional and compounding damage beyond the surgery itself.

Aajonus was explicit that one of the primary mechanisms by which surgery causes harm beyond its immediate mechanical damage is the use of mercury-based antiseptics, specifically mercurochrome, methylate, and iodine. He categorized mercurochrome and methylate as liquid mercury used as antiseptics. These substances, he argued, do not selectively kill bacteria but kill all cells within a radius of approximately two inches from where they are applied. Because the cells killed this way are contaminated with mercury, the body refuses to dissolve and process them in the normal way, because dissolving them would re-release the mercury into surrounding tissue. Instead, the body builds these poisoned dead cells into permanent scar tissue. The result is that mercury antiseptic use during surgery creates an expanding zone of dead tissue that becomes scar tissue rather than healing normally.

He also explained why doctors use these antiseptics: they prevent white blood cells from trying to clean the area damaged by surgery. Under the mass cellular destruction that surgery involves, white blood cells normally leave the bloodstream and enter the fluid in tissue to begin dissolving and consuming the dead cells, which is the lymphatic system's proper role. But this white blood cell activity produces visible inflammation and swelling that the medical model interprets as infection or dangerous inflammation rather than normal repair activity. The antiseptics suppress this white blood cell response, which appears to the treating physician as a cleaner surgical outcome, but actually prevents the body's healing cascade from proceeding.

When he was able to persuade surgeons to omit these antiseptics from his patients' procedures, he found that recovery was substantially better and that actual healing occurred rather than extensive scar tissue formation.

Across all of his teaching on surgery, Aajonus maintained that surgery could occasionally be the correct choice, but he defined those occasions narrowly and specifically. His criteria, drawn from the cases he discussed, included the following circumstances.

First, when a tumor or growth had become mechanically obstructive to a vital function that the body could not maintain without immediate intervention. The neck tumor case is the primary example: when the patient could no longer breathe normally, swallow, or eat, and was too weak and insufficiently nourished by the diet to dissolve it through natural means, surgery was the only option that preserved life and function.

Second, when a patient had not been on the diet long enough or had not absorbed enough nutrition to mount an effective natural response. He said of the neck tumor patient: "He'd only been on the diet two and a half years. Your body doesn't have the strength or energy to dissolve that and get rid of it. Just have it removed surgically, and let your body go on with getting healthy everywhere else."

Third, when a growth was not attached to critical structures and could be removed cleanly without taking surrounding healthy tissue. He negotiated with the surgeon to remove the neck tumor without removing lymph glands, without removing the jugular vein, and without taking skin. The fact that the tumor was not attached to the jugular or the nerves was the basis for agreeing to proceed.

Fourth, in true structural emergencies such as dismemberment, where reattachment surgery was explicitly permitted in his consent card.

Fifth, in situations involving bladder stones or similar deposits that the body could not resolve and that posed a risk, where the procedure itself was relatively contained even if it released toxins that required dietary management afterward.

He was unequivocal that surgery for cancer in the lymph glands, surgical removal of lymph nodes, and elective removal of structures that the body was using to contain or process disease were inappropriate and counterproductive. He was also clear that conventional plastic surgery for trauma, skin grafting, and prophylactic reconstruction procedures carried costs that exceeded their benefits in virtually all the cases he discussed.

Aajonus described scar tissue as the body's solution to tissue that cannot be properly regenerated, either because the damage was too severe, the nutrition was insufficient, or the area was contaminated with substances such as mercury that prevent normal cellular dissolution and regeneration. Surgery produces scar tissue because it kills large numbers of cells rapidly, forces the body to deal with a mass cellular death event, and when antiseptics are present, prevents the normal lymphatic cleanup of those dead cells.

He treated keloidal tissue (tumorous but not malignant scar mass) as a specific product of surgical incision, describing his own incision keloiding in great detail. He framed the body's formation of keloid as an attempt to seal and contain the damaged area when normal healing was not proceeding, not as a pathological process but as a structural response to an impossible situation.

He noted that the Primal Diet, because it provides the nutrients needed for normal cellular regeneration and dissolution, changes the scar tissue response. In the case of his own finger, raw meat consumption allowed the body to reject and shed decades-old grafted scar tissue and replace it with normally functioning tissue. He suggested this is why pre- and post-surgical nutrition on the Primal Diet prevents keloidal development.