Maintaining Health | Page 6

to have great effect. So
why object to paying for health education, which is more valuable than
all the drugs in the world? Because of their attitude on this subject, the
people force many a doctor to use drugs, who would gladly practice in
a more reasonable way if it would bring the necessities of life to him
and his family. The public has to enlighten itself before it will get good
health advice. The medical men will continue in the future, as they
have done in the past, to furnish the kind of service that is popular.
A good natural healer teaches his patients to get along without him and
other doctors. A doctor of the conventional school teaches his patrons
to depend upon him. The former is consequently deserving of far
greater reward than the latter.
The law of compensation may apply elsewhere, thinks the patient, but
surely it is nonsense to teach that it applies in matters of health, for
does not everybody know that most of our diseases are due to causes
over which we have no control? That the chief cause is germs and that
we can not control the air well enough to prevent one of these horrible
monsters (about 1/25,000 of an inch long) from settling in the body and
multiplying, at last producing disease and maybe death? This is untrue,
but it is a very comforting theory, for it removes the element of
personal responsibility. People do not like to be told that if they are ill
it is their own fault, that they are only reaping as they have sowed, yet
such is the truth.
Patients often dislike to give up one or more of their bad habits. "Mr.
Blank has done this very thing for sixty or seventy years and now at the
age of eighty or ninety he is strong and active," they reply to warnings.

This is sophistry, for although an individual occasionally lives to old
age in spite of broken health laws, the average person who attempts it
perishes young. Those who do not conform to the rules are not allowed
to sit in the game to the end.
Another false feeling, or rather hope, deeply implanted in the human
breast is: "Perhaps others can not do this, but I can. I have done it
before and can do it again; it will not hurt me for I am strong and
possessed of a good constitution." The wish is father to the thought,
which is not founded on facts. The most common and the most
destructive form of dishonesty is self-deception. Those who are honest
with themselves find it easy to deal fairly and squarely with others.
The doctors of the dominant school are very distrustful of the natural
healers, in spite of the fact that the latter obtain the best results. Many
of the conditions which the regular physicians treat without satisfactory
results, the natural healers are able to remove in a few months. When
members of the dominant school of medicine find men leading patients
suffering from various skin diseases, Bright's disease, chronic digestive
troubles, rheumatism and other ills which they themselves make little
or no impression upon back to health, they are unwilling to believe that
such results can be accomplished by means of hygiene and proper
feeding. They think there is some fakery about it, for their professors,
books and experience have taught them otherwise. They consider the
views of the natural healer unworthy of serious attention and often call
him a quack, which epithet closes the discussion. They are ethical and
do not wish to be mired by contact with quacks.
The distrust of medical men for healers of the natural school is not hard
to explain. Many of the natural healers are men of education and
experience, but others lack both, and no matter how good the latter may
be at heart, they make very serious blunders. For instance: They get out
circulars, listing all prominent diseases known, stating that they cure
them. They either are so enthusiastic that they are carried away or they
are so ignorant that they do not know that there is a stage of
degeneration which will not allow of regeneration, and that when such
a stage is reached in any chronic disease the end is death.

Another handicap is that intelligent natural healers have such excellent
success that they lose their heads. They educate patients by the hundred
into health who have been given up as incurable by the conventional
physicians. In their success they forget that modesty is very becoming
to the successful and begin to boast. This hurts the cause. Let the
natural healer ever remember that he does not cure, that he is but the
interpreter and that nature is the restorer of health.