How Diseases Are Cured
Regular medical men freely confess that they do not know. Did they know its essential nature, they would cease their learned glibness about immunity. Theoretically, one "attack" of an infectious disease establishes immunity to future "attacks." In practice, they seek to borrow the "acquired immunity" of an animal and transfer it to man. Or to produce a mild and modified form of the disease so that immunity may be established. As I have so often pointed out, this is an effort to set aside the law of cause and effect.
Only some so-called infectious diseases are supposed to confer immunity. For example, Forel says: "One attack of gonorrhea in no way protects against a second infection, but rather predisposes to it, and when this disease becomes chronic exacerbations or relapses of the acute stage often occur without fresh infection." Nobody thinks that one "attack" of a cold renders one immune to future "attacks." It is well known that one may have pneumonia numerous times. The same is true of typhoid fever. The fact is that only a minority of the so-called infectious diseases are supposed to confer immunity. Of these, there is not one that people have not had two or more times. For example, there are records of men and women having had smallpox as many as five times.
Opposing truths cannot exist. Our medical, like our social and political state, is a stupendous frenzy. The former, like the latter, is built out of dualism, and shredded by multiple contradictory systems. The universal belief in dualism has evolved a chaotic medical state that is well named a "fool's paradise" instead of medical science. Our very thinking on the subjects of health and disease is dualistic. We think of health and disease as antagonistic entities at war with each other. Disease is an "attack" from without. Hence, our conception of proper treatment is to go after the attacking force with hammer and tongs, or with shot and shell - a practice that all too often cripples or kills the patient.
Where law and order reign, why should man be left in a more helpless state than all life below him? To the logical mind, this is unthinkable. It should be recognized by all that man is as well fitted to live on the earth as are the lower orders of life. His environment is really more friendly to him than he is to it. It is certainly more friendly to him than he is to himself. A true health science will teach man how to use both himself and his environment constructively - healthfully.
What does the average individual know about keeping well? Almost nothing. What does the average doctor of all the schools of so-called healing know about keeping well? About as little as the average layman. The physician lives haphazardly and his patients live as near like he does as they know how, or as their means permit. The people and their doctors are all in the same boat together with a blind man at the helm. They lack the chart and compass and drift aimlessly on a sea of ignorance and misinformation.
When a man becomes ill, he calls a physician, takes the drugs the latter prescribes, and gets well or not, as the case may be, and neither he nor the physician knows why he did the one or the other. Certainly the prescription of the physician has nothing to do with his recovery. His prescription has been aimed at masking symptoms and not at cause. He hurls his shot and shell at the "attacking" force with due courage and vigor and the only thing he destroys is the patient.
The physician has no idea, previous to any one visit, how he will find his patient, and when he finds a change in symptoms, it has no meaning to him. When a physician prescribes for a patient and leaves him he has no more idea than the man in the moon in what condition he will find his patient upon his next call. The very best of them cannot tell whether or not "complications" will develop in a given case. They are never certain that their patient will improve and cannot be sure that he will not grow worse. When the physician finds a change of symptoms in his patient, he cannot tell whether this change is due to food, drugs, fear, excitement caused by visitors, improper nursing, or to something else. He is likely to conclude that it is a "peculiarity of the disease" or an "unusual development." Every first-class physician knows that "modern medicine" cannot predict anything. Yet, if they had a true science, if they knew real causes and had a valid plan of care, they would be able to predict - prognose - with something like precision, the outcome of the diseases in the patients they treat. Their very masking of symptoms with drugs stand in their own light and prevents them from knowing the true conditions of their patients. ...
A cold is a catarrhal disease, a "catarrhal fever," and is a process of vicarious elimination. Contrary to popular belief, a cold is not something that we "catch," but it represents a process of getting rid of something we have slowly accumulated. What does cold weather have to do with the cause of colds? People "catch" colds as often in warm weather as in cold weather. An increase in temperature may precipitate a cold as often as will a decrease in temperature. They have colds as often in dry as in wet weather. Men have colds as often as women, although they dress heavier. Indeed, men have more catarrh than women, because they dress more warmly, dissipate more and eat more.
Back of every catarrh is a toxemic state. Catarrh is impossible in the absence of toxemia. Toxemia is produced by anything and everything that enervates the body. Enervation inhibits (checks) excretion (elimination) permitting the accumulation of uneliminated waste. The accumulation of body waste - end-products of metabolism - produces toxemia. Toxemia is the universal, basic cause of all so-called disease. ...
What is a self-limited disease? Disease is remedial effort. It is a process of purification and repair. When the process of compensatory elimination that is called disease, has reduced the toxemia to the toleration point, the symptoms subside spontaneously and the disease is said to be cured. But the patient is not well. He is still toxemic. The cause of the toxemia has not been removed. The toxemia will again rise above the toleration point and another crisis will develop. Crisis will follow crisis until organic change takes place. ...
If toxemia is not eliminated, if nerve energy is not restored to normal, if the causes of enervation are not removed and corrected, there can be no genuine return to health. There can be only a recession of symptoms after these have reduced the accumulated toxemia to the toleration point, perhaps slightly below, and a state of comparative comfort is again established. This state represents a very low state of health, a state of chronic toxemic saturation.
In this state, despite recurring crises, there is the slow, progressive development of the many and varied forms of chronic and degenerative pathologies, not the least of which is that condition of organismal enfeeblement, impairment and decline, which we call old age.
Source: International Natural Hygiene Society.
