Raw Food Explained: Life Science
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2. Influenza
Influenza is essentially a magnified version of a cold. If you continue to permit so many adverse factors in your daily life that a couple of colds each year are inevitable, then a bout of flu every second or third year may also be unavoidable.
Influenza in itself is no cause for panic. Properly understood, and intelligently handled, influenza is a constructive process. The fear with which so many laymen and doctors regard the flu is due to its violent potential when it is mishandled.
2.1 Consequences of the Treatment
The severity and after-effects of any cold or flu depend upon the treatment. The terrible developments which are ascribed to flu are almost never due to the basic illness. They are the results of the universally-suppressive treatment, the consequences of the drugging.
Dr. James C. Thomson tells about his experiences during the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918: “Reports collected from naturopaths practicing in all parts of the world after the 1918 wave—the most serious in living memory—gave a death rate of under two percent, whilst around them in the same cities, among the same types of people and under almost identical conditions except for the treatment, the death rate was from seven to over thirty percent. In my own practice, I had personal charge of 87 cases. In 86 of these cases, my instructions were faithfully carried out, and in no case was there either death, complication or any lingering sequel. The majority of these patients spent two or three days in bed, felt somewhat shaky in their walking for a further day or two, and, within a week or two, actually felt better than they had before the attack. In the one remaining case my instructions were willfully ignored, and I was forced to discontinue.”
2.2 Types of Influenza
Influenza often starts out like a simple cold. Sometimes the first symptoms are vigorous, and arrive without warning,. Suddenly the patient may suffer from fever, nausea, vomiting, severe neuritic pain, severe inflammation, general muscular aching, or other distressing or violent symptoms.
Leslie Thomson (son of Dr. James C. Thomson) describes the four main types of flu. No matter how novel the identifying names given by epidemiologists or immunologists, any particular case consists of either one of these types, or a combination of two or more.
- Respiratory, which starts off with violent, paroxysmal coughing.
- Gastro-Intestinal – nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain are the immediate indications.
- Nervous – headache of unusual severity, often concomitant with pains in neck, chest and upper abdomen. Depression and sleeplessness are common accompaniments.
- Febrile – quite intense fever, sometimes accompanied by disorientation, to the extent of delirium. In this form, it is imperative that no nourishment whatever be given to the patient until the fever has subsided.
Leslie Thomson says that how individuals have lived, and the relative strength of the various vital organs—the individual physical makeup and the inherited temperament—are dominant and significant in determining the type and severity of the flu episode. Nobody needs to be “infected” by anyone else to develop flu. Flu is something which originates and is directed within the individual system. “The danger in differential diagnosis lies in the orthodox tendency to apply suitable treatment—i.e., aimed at obstructing or neutralizing the particular activity or discomfort predominating.”
2.3 Dealing with Influenza
A couple of days or more of bed rest with nothing taken in except sips of water, is all that is necessary. Plenty of fresh air should be provided, but chilling should be carefully avoided. No attempt should be made to bring down the temperature by prolonged cold bathing, or by applying ice packs, or alcohol, which can be a dangerous interference in the body’s processes.
After perhaps forty-eight hours, if the temperature is more or less normal, fresh fruit or small quantities of green salad may be offered. But the patient must continue to rest. There might be a second phase in a few days, during which food should again be withheld or reduced to a minimum. The patient should continue to rest in bed until the fever and shakiness have cleared.
2.4 Vomiting and Diarrhea
If one must vomit, or experience diarrhea, to remove irritants and morbid matter from the body, it is the height of folly to try to block it. The body does not go to the trouble of initiating these modifications in its activities unless they are essential for survival.
Dr. Immerrnan says, “When vomiting and diarrhea occur, it is because there are substances in the digestive tract that the body recognizes as troublesome, and wishes to eliminate. The material may enter the digestive tract via the liver. The liver is the great filter for the blood. It draws waste material from the blood and shunts it into the digestive tract for elimination. Sometimes this material is so toxic that the body will send it ‘upstream’ where it will only be exposed to three to four feet of tubing (stomach, esophagus), as opposed to going ‘downstream’ where it will be exposed to thirty feet of tubing (intestines). Once in the stomach, this toxic material will elicit feelings of discomfort and nausea until the stomach violently contracts and ejects the waste. Following this, there is usually a feeling of relief and improved well-being. Diarrhea fundamentally is of the same origin as vomiting. The body recognizes that there is material in the digestive tract and shouldn’t be there. In order to more rapidly eliminate this waste, diarrhea will be initiated.”
Some waste is directly transferred from the bloodstream through the walls of the intestines into the alimentary canal, and then eliminated via vomiting and diarrhea. Violent diarrhea and vomiting rapidly clear the digestive tract so that it can be temporarily put to rest, and repair, rejuvenation and cleansing are accelerated. To eat while experiencing the flu is sheer insanity.
2.5 Fever
When the body produces fever because of an internal need, why should we panic and seek by heroic means to suppress the fever at all costs? Physicians have prescribed and encouraged the use of antipyretics (fever-reducing drugs) to reduce the temperature as quickly as possible in all cases where the temperature is above the so-called normal temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). Actually, the medical profession is not universally convinced that fever is altogether harmful. Some medical men have even used fever therapy in an attempt to cure certain diseases.
The human body is delicately balanced and capable of better and safer fever induction than any artificial process of producing fever. Artificially-induced fevers can be dangerous. Artificially reducing fevers interrupts, retards or stops the healing efforts of the body.
The heat of spontaneously-induced fever is produced for the purpose of acceleration of cell activity When the organism perceives that this is necessary. When there is an emergency, the metabolism is accelerated by increasing the amount of heat available. This is controlled by the hypothalamus, which is sort of a human thermostat.
Metabolism consists of the absorption of nutrients and the excretion of wastes. The heat is necessary to accelerate the excretion of wastes which have accumulated beyond the body’s ability to tolerate them, and beyond the body’s ability to eliminate without some extraordinary modification. Heat acts as a catalyst which causes the toxins to liquefy and pass into the bloodstream, where they are transported to the organs of elimination, and thus out of the body.
Every now and then we hear from the “scientific” community that “fever may be beneficial.” An article in the St. Petersburg Times, 1/4/83, says; “For more than a century, we’ve been told to take aspirin to bring down a fever. Now, researchers aren’t so sure that’s a good idea. Now studies suggest that a moderate fever should be allowed to run its course because it may shorten the illness. Scientists have figured out that fever mobilizes the body’s defenses against infectious organisms, and, in some cases, directly inhibits their growth.”
Of course, what the studies “suggest” and what the scientists have “figured out” are not being correlated with what Hygienists have been teaching for the last 150 years.
Kenneth S. Jaffrey, in his booklet, Fever, Nature’s Own Healing Process, says, “Nobody has ever been harmed when a self-induced fever has been managed rationally.”
He quotes Vincent Priessnitz (1829), the discoverer of Nature Cure; R.T. Trall (1862), a Hygienic pioneer; and Henry Lindlahr (1920), another pioneer in the field of natural healing; as having agreed that fever is part of the healing effort, a process of purification to relieve the system of morbid matter and to repair injury to living tissues.
In 1928, Herbert M. Shelton said, “Fever is a necessary increase in body temperature designed to enable the body, or some part or parts of it, to effectively meet and destroy some foe of life that is threatening the body and to repair damages.”
In 1930, another noted Hygienist, Hereward Carrington, described the condition of fever as the result of the forcible recharging of the body with energy, as an emergency measure, to assist in freeing the body from its dangerously-diseased condition.
Eugene F. Du Bois, professor of Physiology at Cornell, University, in his monograph on fever, stated that antipyretics were abandoned in the early part of this century (although later their use was revived). Cold-tubbing in typhoid was also abandoned. Du Bois said, “Clinicians began to regard high temperature as helpful. This belief was strengthened by the realization that many pathogenic organisms (germs and viruses) were inhibited or killed at temperatures that could be tolerated by the human body.” The metabolism and chemical reactions of the body, including enzyme activity, are accelerated by a rise in temperature, thus enhancing the healing process. When fasting is employed during a fever, the metabolism and healing process are even more dramatically multiplied.
2.6 “Immunization”
Many advocates of so-called “immunization” procedures freely admit the futility of efforts to immunize against influenza. A 1977 report by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare says that the fragmented nature of the genetic material of the influenza virus is believed now to account for the agent’s unique and puzzling ability to undergo periodic changes which render available vaccines useless. Although we cannot agree with the basic premise expressed therein, the fact remains that the vaccines are admittedly useless. Obviously, the credibility of the whole immunization theory is moot, if
the particular problem can never be identified or dealt with in time—in view of the admitted futility of efforts to immunize against influenza. Yet, even after the Swine Flu Fiasco of 1976, flu vaccines are still being recommended and administered by the medical profession.
In Lesson No. 66, I went into great detail about the futility of so-called “immunization.” In January 1983 (some time after preparing Lesson No. 66), I heard Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D., on this subject. He said, “I lost my faith in immunizations around the end of the 1960s. My patients started to come back to me with the damage that I had previously inflicted on them.”
Polio disappeared in Europe without a vaccine. Dr. Mendelsohn said that Salk doesn’t like the Sabin vaccine, and Sabin doesn’t like the Salk vaccine. Dr. Mendelsohn continued, “I think they’re both right.”
He said there are hundreds of cases in the courts due to damage from whooping cough vaccine. He said, “Pediatricians are telling me that they are not immunizing their own children, but they give it to their patients!”
Dr. Mendelsohn is a practicing pediatrician. His credentials (conventional, medical, etc.) are unimpeachable. He has been practicing medicine for about thirty years. He has been national director of Project Head Start’s Medical Consultation Service, chairman of the medical licensing committee for the state of Illinois, associate professor of preventive medicine and community health in the School of Medicine of the University of Illinois, and the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine and medical instruction.
He is also a medical heretic. He believes that the greatest danger to your health is usually your own doctor. He argues that modern medicine’s methods are rarely effective, and in many instances are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to diagnose and treat. I would recommend that all students of Natural Hygiene read his book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.
In his book, Dr. Mendelsohn says the entire flu shot effort resembles a massive roulette game. He quotes Dr. John Seal, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, as saying, “We have to go on the basis that any and all flu vaccines are capable of causing Guillain-Barre Syndrome.”
A study, conducted at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Medical Center, was published in the November 19, 1981, New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers warned that flu shots can cause overreactions to drugs, producing effects similar to “overdoses” of the drugs. The researchers found the influenza vaccine can change human metabolism, hampering the liver’s ability to break down and remove drugs from the body, so that the medicines stay in the body longer.
Thus, the potential damage of drugs is multiplied as a result of the influenza vaccine.
2.7 The Paradoxical Conventional Weapons Against Disease
Both of the paradoxical conventional “weapons” against disease have the same result. Injection of noxious material directly into the bloodstream (vaccinations), and the use of drugs to kill the germs which are busily engaged in cleaning up the mess, are not only in opposition to each other, but are also in opposition to the laws of nature, and contrary to common sense.
They are in opposition to each other, because injection of noxious material initiates defensive body action against disease; drugs curtail defensive body action against disease because of the new emergency—the necessity to deal with the drugs. Injection of diseased material into the bloodstream is manifestly in opposition’ to the laws of nature, and certainly contrary to common sense.
Both vaccinations and medications not only add more poison to the already overburdened system, they frustrate nature’s attempts to help you, and they prolong and intensify your miseries. In addition, they both Have the more insidious quality of increasing your susceptibility and vulnerability to future chronic and degenerative diseases.
2.8 Frighteningly Impressive Case Histories
Leslie Thomson says, “It is not surprising that orthodox doctors have frighteningly impressive case histories to report. Delirium, peritonitis, pneumonia, neurasthenia, chronic depression, lymphatic enlargements, pulmonary degeneration, cardiac disorders, kidney disease, arthritis, middle ear deafness, and degeneration of the spinal cord, are only some of the sequelae blamed upon influenza. To us, it is undeniably logical that the more the doctor fills the patient with unwanted and unusable nutrients, and obstructs various vital processes with medication, the greater the inevitability of tragic complications.”
I have heard a dark joke, to the effect that, since the treatment of influenza still baffles the physicians but they can “successfully” treat pneumonia with antibiotics, why not let the flu develop into pneumonia and simplify the problem?
But the “humor” is becoming even grimmer, since newer announcements admit that “in recent years, drug resistant pneumonias, especially among hospital patients, have been on the increase.”
2.9 The Swine Flu Fiasco
Even more ironic is an excerpt from a brochure on flu from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare: “With identification of a new swine-like influenza virus early in 1976, NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) scientists, grantees, and contractors sprang into action. The technique of recombination was applied to hasten the growth of the vaccine virus; and, in the institute’s vaccine centers, medical investigators with years of experience became the nucleus of experts needed to evaluate the new swine flu vaccines in record time. Working closely with the Army, the Center for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration’s Bureau of Biologies, NIAID supervised a series of tests to determine the proper vaccine dosages that should give good protection with a minimum of adverse reactions.”
They talk about “springing into action,” “evaluating the new swine flu vaccines in record time,” and “determining proper vaccine dosages for good protection with minimum adverse reactions.” Nothing is said about the fiasco that resulted, or the tragic deaths from the vaccine. Nothing is said about the vaccine-induced Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
2.10 Good Health Is the Only “Immunity”
Hygienists live to have health, not to prevent certain specific diseases. Good health is immunity against influenza and all diseases. Microorganisms only surface when there is a job for them to do—they help to clean up the debris created by atrocious diet and living habits.
Raw Food Explained: Life Science
Today only $37 (discounted from $197)