A True Perspective Of Health And Disease

We live in a day of sensational discoveries and “miracle medicines.” Remarkable new cures and near-panaceas are frequently announced. Snake venom, artificial fever, frozen sleep, the sulfonamides, penicillin, streptothricin, blood plasma, powerful X-rays and ever more comes before us almost daily—these compete with sports, movies, politics, crime and other publicity for free newspaper space. So much is claimed for this parade of “miracle cures” and so many new discoveries are made relatively that the public is kept constantly keyed up with open-mouthed and wild-eyed expectancy. Perfect health via the medical promises seems always just around the corner.

At long last, “science” is staging a powerful and winning Blitz-Krieg against our ancient and most implacable foe—disease. With remarkable and sensational discoveries crowding so closely one upon the heels of another, the time is surely not far distant when universal health will prevail and disease will have disappeared from the human scene.

Not only is ours an age of remarkable “cures,” it is also a time of equally remarkable preventatives. We now have so much “successful” vaccines and serums that there is no longer any need for anyone ever to suffer from many of the “diseases” that were previously so common. New serums are frequently discovered. We may look forward hopefully to the time when all “disease” will be conquered.

Surgery, too, has made rapid strides. It has grown much more daring. Today it invades physiological precepts which only a few years ago it would not have touched. With the newer advances in surgery added to the new “cures” and the new serums and vaccines, we have an almost ideal combination for the “conquest of disease.” What these three groups of anti-disease weapons lack in power and effectiveness is completely compensated for by the many glandular products (hormones), and by vitamin and mineral combinations that are claimed to do so much for the sick. Surely, there is no reason to doubt that the Golden Age has arrived.

The intelligent and informed reader, however, will notice one very important defect in all these methods of “cure” and “prevention.” He or she will quickly detect a deficiency for which no amount of shouting can compensate. It is this:

None of these methods of “cure” or “prevention” are designed to affect or even touch the basic causes of disease.

Drugs may suspend vital activity such that symptoms disappear but they do not remove cause. They may kill germs but they also kill off patients. They do not clear up the systemic condition that permits bacteria to thrive and grow in parts of the body where they are not normal. “Frozen sleep” may temporarily check the growth of a tumor or cancer, but it does not and cannot remove the causes of cancer. Powerful X-rays may destroy a cancerous growth but they also destroy healthy tissue and cause further cancer while leaving intact the causes of disease. It cannot be emphasized too much that:

If a modality does not remove causes, it does not “cure”.

Serums and vaccines are admittedly capable of doing much harm, but they do not remove the causes of disease. Therefore, they do not enable us to “avoid” diseases, even those for which they are administered. We need to know that:

If they do not enable us to avoid the causes of disease, they cannot prevent disease.

Surgeons may pull a tooth, extract the tonsils, cut out the gall-bladder, excise the appendix, sever and remove the ovaries and seminal vesicles, drain the sinuses, etc. but they do not thereby remove the causes of disease. Mopping up the water from a leaky faucet does not remove the causes of the leak. Removing effects of cause likewise does not remove the cause. It is time for us to understand the following:

If surgery does not remove the causes of disease, it cannot “cure” the disease. There is no “cure” short of removal of causes.

Cutting out an organ, suppressing a symptom with a drug (medicine), destroying a growth, removing a stone—these processes touch effects only. They fail to restore health for three very vital reasons:

1. They do not remove the causes of ill health.
2. They are not the factors out of which good health is built.
3. They produce positive injury to the body.

We must look to constructive natural agencies, forces, and methods for “prevention” of disease and recovery of health. We must cease relying on destructive, unnatural or anti-natural measures, forces, agents and processes. Agents such as drugs that produce disease in the well cannot possibly produce health in the sick. Disease-producing agents and measures are not health-preserving. The popular methods of “prevention” and “cure” neither prevent nor restore health. Witness the ever-growing army of sick and suffering in spite of the ever-increasing size of our army of physicians, nurses and hospitals, and the ever-growing list of “cures” and “miracle drugs.”

To be healthy, do not indulge the causes of disease. Only madness can lead us to attempt to be free of disease by submitting to means which cause yet more disease.

To “cure” disease, remove the causes of disease. It is the worst kind of folly to attempt to cure disease by ignoring its causes and employing modalities which are in themselves causes of disease.

To build health, employ the causes of health. It is absurd to attempt to build health by employing means and measures that are known to impair and wreck health.

For over forty years this writer has helped the sick and suffering back to health and has taught them how to remain well. I have employed a system called NATURAL HYGIENE. For over forty years my health school has been host to over 40,000 people. Dr. Shelton’s Health School has been employing the health-building system of NATURAL HYGIENE with only successful results. At the Health School we have received a great preponderance of people who have suffered for years and “have tried everything” without avail. Our success in building good health in the great majority of these sufferers has been remarkable.

At the Health School we have no “cure” at all. We recognize that only nature (normal forces and processes of life) restores health. We accord to nature the conditions and the opportunity to restore health. We recognize that in nature and nature only exists the power of healing. The forces and powers of nature constitute the true panacea. Ours is a plan of living and a program of education that restores our guests to harmonious living with nature. If this plan of care seems too simple, too easy or not heroic enough, just think this over:

If this plan were ineffectual we would not have succeeded where all others had failed.

I implore you to intelligently consider the preceding statements. Lay aside your previous conditioning and prepossessions. Do some real honest-to-goodness thinking. Then, when you thoroughly understand NATURAL HYGIENE, give it a fair and honest test. Heed the ancient admonition: “Prove (test) all things, hold fast that which is good (true).”

An old adage has it that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof.” The proof of the truth of the principles presented in NATURAL HYGIENE and of the value of the practices built thereon is in making use of it. “The wise will understand.”