ORTHODOX MEDICINE v. NATURE CURE.
IT cannot be doubted by anyone who has taken the trouble to inquire into the matter that the influence of orthodox medicine is steadily declining. The spread of education and the spirit of inquiry which have marked the twentieth century have led large numbers of people to examine more closely various inherited beliefs, and of recent years insistent questioning has arisen about the age-old attitude of doctors towards disease. The theory that disease is an evil and an ally of death is being denied, and the corresponding superstructure of treatment by drugs, injections, vaccines, serums, immunization and surgery is being denounced as futile and harmful.
The main reasons for the fall in prestige of medicine and medicine men and a corresponding rise in popularity of natural methods of treating disease are not hard to find. Whilst every other art, craft and profession have steadily forged ahead, medicine has remained substantially where it was at the beginning.
Its inability to stop the yearly increase in deaths from cancer, heart disease, cerebral haemorrhage, diabetes, pernicious anaemia, nephritis and other killing diseases has severely damaged any pretensions its practitioners may have to scientific knowledge; and the increasing frequency of multitudes of disorders and states of ill health and the absence of a well- defined cure for even one of them is now a matter of common comment. A writer in a popular weekly some time ago cynically remarked:.
“If engineering had advanced no further than medical science in surmounting everyday inconveniences we would still be crossing the Thames in pontoons.”.
The commercialization of the doctor is another source of serious public irritation. The old family physician with all his faults– and they were many– was usually a sympathetic and helpful observer of human suffering and could treat with a fair degree of success almost every type of case. The present-day doctor is more than often an egregious individual with a smattering of scientific procedure and information. His knowledge about disease is text-book and his interest in it financial.
Taking a birds- eye view of his daily activities he could be mistaken for a commercial traveller of a drug company. In cases where his drugs fail him or where he is nervous about treating something a specialist might insult him for meddling with, he sends an enormous number of people in pursuit of health are eventually persuaded to part company with their teeth, turbinates, tonsils, gall bladders, prostates, appendices, wombs and ovaries, and to undergo various curious and expensive operations.
If this “jerry- doctoring” cured there might be something to be said for it; but it does not cure. On the contrary, it leaves the patient usually worse off, as all that has happened is that his symptoms have been scientifically suppressed.
By far the greatest cause of the decline of medicine is the successful competition of systems of natural healing which propose a common sense philosophy of disease and give immeasurably superior results in the treatment of it. Those who profess these new theories hold that the body is a self-cleansing and self-regulating organism, and that all the phases of disease hitherto regarded as evils are really blessings as they are efforts of the body to recover, or at least to adapt itself to changed circumstances.
They believe that disease originates not from germs or miasmas or anything external to ourselves but mainly from our own faulty habits of living. Their treatment follows accordingly, and is directed to remove the cause, i.e. the faulty habits, and then to place the body in the most favourable physiological position to allow it to throw off the symptoms.
According to nature cure theory the natural state of man is health, and to preserve health he must intake natural food to renew the tissues constantly being broken down in the process of living, and he must excrete effectively all the waste products therefrom. So long as that balance is maintained everything is well, but when the intake of food is faulty or the excretion of waste matter ineffective, or, as usually is the case, both are out of order, a state of self-poisoning or autotoxaemia begins.
This deterioration then continues until the body, in an effort to protect some vital organ, secures a crisis of fever such as a cold, tonsillitis, influenza, typhoid, etc., which acts to clean up its unhealthy state and set it right again. If, however, the faulty habits of living are persisted in despite the benevolent and acute interventions of Nature, a chronic condition such as rheumatism, hypertension, kidney disease or cancer supervenes to shorten life.
It must be definitely understood, therefore, that there is but one disease — TOXAEMIA– and one process of cure — DETOXICATION. Without toxaemia no disease can occur. This, of course, contradicts the accepted medical notion which affixes the blame for many diseases to germs and accordingly activates treatment to destroy them.
For example, a corkscrew shaped micro- organism about 7 micro-millimetres long is regarded by scientific medicine as the disease syphilis, and its ill-starred possessor spends from three to five years in and out of a clinic in trying to have it destroyed with mercury, arsenic and bismuth. Yet so high an authority on venereal disease and its bacteriology as Professor J. E. R. McDonagh, in the Practitioner, January, 1921, stated:.
“The greatest error of the age is the assumption that the spirochaeta pallida is the sole cause of syphilis.”.
As a result of this error the modern scientific treatment of syphilis has added enormously to the toll of apoplexy, heart disease, paralysis, insanity and other terrible conditions. The germ theory of the origin of disease is waning in popularity. More and more physicians are realizing the importance of studying the ecology of bacteria and parasites, and are adopting the nature cure position. At the annual meeting of the Anti- Vaccination League in 1928, Dr. M. Beddow Bayly publicly said:.
“I am prepared to maintain quite definitely that in no single instance has it been proved that an organism or germ is the primal cause of a disease.”.
FASTING.
The swiftest and most powerful way to detoxicate the system is by fasting, so that all the toxic matter will be precipitated and oxidized. When one lives for a time on nothing but water, the myriads of cells which constitute the body are placed in a position to dispose of huge amounts of microscopic accretions and debris which lie in and around them, morbid tissue is revitalized, adhesions and growths are broken down, all the fluids and secretions are purified, and a strange feeling of rejuvenation is experienced.
Dr. Benedict Lust, a great American naturopath, aptly described fasting as “the great bloodless operation”, and an increasing number of both doctors and the public are making use of it, as it presents the simplest and safest way to induce at short notice tremendous beneficial changes in the physical economy.
In all acute disease fasting is imperative. In these cases the body is actively dealing with toxins, and must be left undisturbed by having to divert energy to digestion. When this state of absolute physiological rest is stringently enforced from the outset in all cases of primary fever the complications and mortality are next to nil. Scientific medical treatment, however, insists on giving serums, antipyretic drugs, heart tonics, sleeping draughts, eggs, milk, glucose, beef tea, gruel, etc.
As a result many of its unfortunate victims sink and die under the load of additional poisons, and a larger number develop complications which injure them permanently. The orthodox medico never seems to realize that it usually is is meddlesome attentions that cause orchitis after mumps, paralysis after diphtheria, peritonitis after typhoid fever, endocarditis, pericarditis and myocarditis after rheumatic fever, otitis media and nephritis after scarlet fever, and so on.
He is taught to regard the change of symptoms as new invading entities instead of being unnatural perversions of the original malady, and his text- books and journals overflow with an unlimited and meaningless mass of pathologies and treatments. Major Reginald Austin, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., a leading authority on the nature cure therapy of disease, in an article in the Medical World, June 26th, 1936, wrote on this highly important points as follows:.
“According to conventional text-books it takes six weeks to recover from rheumatic fever; typhoid fever from six to ten weeks; appendicitis from two to four weeks if not operated upon, or if it becomes chronic.
“By keeping all food, drugs, serum and vaccines away from the patient, and allowing tap water only as a drink, and warm water wash outs for the bowels, rheumatic fever cases are restored to health in two or three weeks, or less; typhoid fever cases in from seven to fourteen days; appendicitis in week, if there is no suppuration, if pus forms the patient is quite comfortable in three days, and then must wait until the abscess ruptures into the gut, or gets absorbed, in either contingency this will happen in from ten days to four weeks — usually in one to three weeks, then if the patient is fed properly for a week, there will be no sequels.
