Maintaining Health | Page 7

The natural healers must be more careful about their statements if they
would have the respect of intelligent people, and they must labor
diligently to be well informed. For their own good regular physicians
will have to be more open-minded, and recognize the fact that it is not
necessary to have a M. D. degree to accept the truth regarding healing.
Medical men are losing their hold on the public largely because they
have cultivated the class spirit.
It is a well known fact among natural healers that most cases of Bright's
disease are curable, even after they have become chronic. However, a
physician who voices this truth will probably be classed among
irresponsible dreamers by other doctors.
Antagonism of this kind breeds extremists and is therefore harmful to
the public, which pays for all the mistakes made. It is very easy to lose
one's mental balance and to begin to play on a harp with but one string.
We have a large army of Christian Scientists. If it were not for the way
in which physicians of the past mistreated the body and neglected the
mind, this sect would not exist. The doctors, with their awful doses of
nauseous and destructive drugs, went to one extreme. The reaction was
the formation of a sect that has gone to the other extreme. The Christian
Scientists are incomprehensible in spots to us mortals who believe in a
body as well as a mind, but they have a cheerful and helpful philosophy
which brings enjoyment on earth and they have done an immense
amount of good by teaching people to cease thinking and talking so
much about themselves and their ills. Among other demonstrations,
they have shown the uselessness of drugs.
Of late so many varieties of drugless healers have sprung into existence
that it is difficult to remember even their names. There are many

pathies. These have a tendency to take one part of the human being, or
one procedure of treatment, and to play this up to the elimination of all
the rest. Some do everything with the mind. Others pay no attention to
the mind. Bathing, massage, manipulating the spine, washing out the
colon, baths in mud, sunshine or water, suggestion and many other
things are separately given credit for being cure-alls. Many of these are
excellent as a part of regenerative treatment, but they are not sufficient
of themselves to give permanent results.
Most healers have too narrow vision. People come to them because
they have faith. The faith alone will produce temporary improvement,
but as soon as the interest is gone and the procedure grows old the
patient becomes worse again unless the treatment possesses genuine
merit. Osteopathy is most excellent, as a part of a healing system, but it
is not sufficient. The osteopaths find their patients relapsing over and
over again, or taking some other disease. However, they are learning, in
increasing numbers, that if they would keep their patrons well, they
have to give them education along the line of hygiene and dietetics,
with a little mental training thrown in.
Many chiropractors are learning the same thing. In some chiropractic
schools there are professors wise enough to teach their students to be
broad-minded. The true natural healer makes use of air, water, food,
exercise, mental training--in fact, all the means nature has put at his
disposal. He realizes that the best treatment is education of the patient.
In many cases a cure can be greatly hastened by proper local treatment.
It is unfortunate that the nature healers are so divided and that many
operate upon such a narrow basis. If the vast majority of them were
well informed, broad enough to make use of all helpful natural means,
and were designated by the same name, it would not take them long to
gain more public confidence and respect than they now possess. So
long as the nature healers segregate themselves and allow themselves to
be narrow, so long will they have to struggle at a disadvantage against
the more united wielders of scalpels and prescribers of drugs.
The question of choosing a health guide is sometimes perplexing. The
patient should select one in whom he has confidence, for confidence is

a great aid in restoring health. It often happens that there is no one in
the town in whom the patient has confidence, for many communities
have no competent natural healers. Then the question is whether or not
to seek advice by correspondence. In acute diseases this is generally a
bad plan, for the family often lacks the poise and equanimity necessary
to carry out directions. In chronic cases it is usually all right. Here all
that is required is correct knowledge put into practice and errors are not
as dangerous as in acute diseases. Curable