Maintaining Health | Page 4

to remain well. Every one should know the signs
of approaching illness and how to abort it. The mental comfort and ease
that come from the possession of such knowledge are priceless.
Everything that is worth while must be paid for in some way and the
price of continued good health is some basic knowledge and
self-control. There are no hardships connected with rational living. It
means to live moderately and somewhat more simply than is customary.
Simplicity reduces the amount of work and friction and adds to the
enjoyment of life. The cheerfulness, the buoyancy and the tingling with
the joy of life that come to those who have perfect health more than
compensate for the pet bad habits which must be given up.
Many of the popular teachings regarding disease and its prevention are
false. The germ theory is a delusion. The fact will some day be
generally recognized, as it is today by a few, that the so-called
pathogenic bacteria or germs have no power to injure a healthy body,
that there is bodily degeneration first and then the system becomes a
favorable culture medium for germs: In other words, disease comes
first and the pathogenic bacteria multiply afterwards. This view may
seem very ridiculous to the majority, for it is a strong tenet of popular
medical belief today that micro-organisms are the cause of most
diseases.
To most people, medical and lay, the various diseases stand out clear
and individual. Typhoid fever is one disease. Pneumonia is an entirely
different one. Surely this is so, they say, for is not typhoid fever due to
the bacillus typhosus and pneumonia to the pneumococcus? But it is
not so. Outside of mechanical injuries there is but one disease, and the
various conditions that we dignify with individual names are but
manifestations of this disease. The parent disease is filthiness, and its
manifestations vary according to circumstances and individuals.

This filthiness is not of the skin, but of the interior of the body. The
blood stream becomes unclean, principally because of indigestion and
constipation, which are chiefly due to improper eating habits. Some of
the contributory causes are wrong thinking, too little exercise, lack of
fresh air, and ingestion of sedatives and stimulants which upset the
assimilative and excretory functions of the body. In all cases the blood
is unclean. The patient is suffering from autointoxication or
autotoxemia.
If this is true, it would follow that the treatment of all diseases is about
the same. For instance, it would be necessary to give about the same
treatment for eczema as for pneumonia. Basically, that is exactly what
has to be done to obtain the best results, though the variation in location
and manifestation requires that special relief measures, of lesser
importance, be used in special cases, to get the quickest and best results.
In both eczema and pneumonia the essential thing is to get the body
clean.
The practice of medicine is not a science. We have drugs that are
reputed to be excellent healers, yet these very drugs sometimes produce
death within a few hours of being taken. The practice of medicine is an
art, and the outcome in various cases depends more on the personality
of the artist than on the drugs he gives, for roughly speaking, all
medicines are either sedative or stimulant, and if the dosage is kept
below the danger line, the patient generally recovers. It seems to make
very little difference whether the medicine is given in the tiny
homeopathic doses, so small that they have only a suggestive effect, or
if they are given in doses several hundred times as large by allopaths
and eclectics.
It is true that we have drugs with which we can diminish or increase the
number of heart beats per minute, dilate or contract the pupils of the
eye, check or stimulate the secretion of mucus, sedate or irritate the
nervous system, etc., but all that is accomplished is temporary
stimulation or sedation, and such juggling does not cure. The practice
of medicine is today what it has been in the past, largely experiment
and guess-work.

On the other hand, natural healers who have drunk deep of the cup of
knowledge need not guess. They know that withholding of food and
cleaning out the alimentary tract will reduce a fever. They know that
the same measures will clean up foul wounds and stop the discharge of
pus in a short time. They know that the same measures in connection
with hot baths will terminate headaches and remove pain. They further
know that if the patient will take the proper care of himself after the
acute manifestations have disappeared there will be no more disease.
After a little experience, an intelligent natural healer can tell his
patients, in the majority