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This classifi¬cation leads one to believe that the causes of the various diseases are different and that the acute diseases develop quickly—a wrong impression. The causes of acute diseases have been in operation for a long time in most cases before the symptoms appear suddenly. It is only because these causes have created within the body certain reactions and because the body at certain times has greater ability to react to them that the acute symptoms appear.
Suppression of these symptoms or neglect of the disease (rather, of the cause of the symptoms), or wrong treatment brings about a gradual undermining of the vitality and the development of chronic disease. However, some chronic dis¬eases develop insidiously, without forerunning acute diseases, often there being insufficient vitality to create a quick reaction and acute symptoms or because there is a cause insufficient to arouse the defensive forces of the body sufficiently to produce an acute protective reaction. Subacute diseases usually are improperly or inadequately treated acute diseases, or acute diseases in those patients of insufficient reactive and recupera-tive powers to have typical acute diseases or to recover quickly from acute diseases.
Disease is a condition brought about hy wrong living in one or more of many ways. If disease is so produced the in¬dividual himself then is responsible for his illness; so the cor¬rection of disease would then seem to depend upon revision of the manner of living, upon the undoing of the haTm created, merely by discontinuing the harmful practices and putting into practice healthful factors that have been neglected.
This appears to be the only manner in which disease and its manifestations can be eradicated, or any part of them reduced or removed without reduction of the vital force. In fact, when disease is treated in this manner the vitality is not only not reduced, but it is actually increased.
Diseases are classified as acute and chronic. Acute dis¬eases are those that have a short, sharp course, with symptoms of more of less violent character and terminating after a com¬paratively brief period in health or death. Chronic diseases are those of long duration, the symptoms usually being not violent and sometimes disappearing, but tending rather to pro¬gress until they end life through disturbance of some vital organ, by reducing the general vitality, or through an acute disease to which they are said to make one pre¬disposed. There also is the group called subacute diseases, more prone to re¬covery than the chronic diseases, and having less severe symp¬toms but lasting longer than acute diseases.
Serums and vaccines do produce effects upon the body. Ignoring for the present the serious and fatal results of their use in occasional cases, any apparently beneficial effects from their use are the result of the stimulation of unnatural proc¬esses or of natural processes to a degree that must draw heavily upon the vitality. One cannot get away from the facts that their use while “scientific,” is opposed to Nature and all natural processes of health; so disease eradication by their aid cannot make the body a cleaner, healthier one, and cannot add to the total of vitality that will carry one into old age in comparative freedom from disease and give one a long
life.
A food is any material which when taken into the body serves the purposes of repair or growth, energy production and maintenance of the vital processes and in itself has no detrimental effects or inhibiting action upon any process. Only sixteen of the eighty-six or more elements found in nature normally exist and serve some purpose in the human or the animal body.
Many medicines have little or none of these sixteen ele¬ments, hence are not foods in any possible sense and do not serve any of the functions of food. Therefore, they have no part in the physical organism. Germs for the most part are the end-product or the by-product of degeneration, which is a condition just the opposite of that produced by real foods —growth, vitality, aliveness.
They cannot produce or aid any of the life processes within a physical body, hence have no re¬lation whatever to food. Therefore, germs or their products serve no purpose of foods, are totally foreign to the body, can¬not be used by the body in any natural process and can have but an unnatural effect that does not add vitality nor aid re¬sistance to the ravages of disease, stress, and the strain of age.
Aside from neglect of acute diseases, the leading cause of chronic disease is mistreatment of acute diseases, treatment that masks or suppresses symptoms and that permits the cause to run merrily on, undermining the health insidiously. Of course, the drugs themselves have their share in the causation of chronic disease, since they are foreign to the body and often are not eliminated but accumulate in some organ, there to re¬duce or alter function.
A canary placed under a bell-glass gradually exhausts the supply of oxygen in its environment and in time will succumb to oxygen starvation if a fresh supply of air or oxygen is not provided. Another canary placed in the vitiated atmosphere will be quickly killed, long before the first bird will succumb. Indians taken from the plains and housed in even poor mod¬ern dwellings quickly yield to the ravages of tuberculosis. Conditions associated with modern living affect them much more quickly, severely and disastrously than they affect those who have been reared in the conditions.
These and numerous other facts demonstrate the inure¬ment of the physical body to adverse conditions. ~No doubt we all become accustomed to conditions that are in themselves detrimental to health and to life. The vitality and resistance of the human body is remarkable, its ability to develop in¬creased resistance seems almost miraculous. But many of the conditions to which we seemingly develop pronounced re¬sistance exact their toll in reduced vitality, greater suscepti¬bility to disease manifestations and shorter life. The use of food stimulants and so called foods that have little if any food value, and especially tobacco and alcohol, may be mentioned as illustrations.
But an illustration more explanatory of our present sub¬ject is the tolerance of the body for absolutely foodless and foreign substances, such as medicines in various forms and the products of germ-cultures—serums and vaccines. When we consider for a moment, reason rationally and with unbiased mind, we must come to the conclusion that everything which Nature designed to enter the body serves the purpose of food: recognized solid and liquid food (victuals, eatables, pabulum, aliment), sunshine, water, air, and nothing more.
These physi¬cians, leaning strongly toward natural treat¬ment of disease, begin using placebos because they are forced by their patients to prescribe something tan¬gible. The pa¬tients are more willing to follow the health ad¬vice when they also have “some¬thing to take” besides the ad¬vice. The doc¬tors know that if the patients do not get some¬thing they will go to other phy¬sicians who, no doubt, will prescribe the usual strong medicines in one form or another, so these practitioners rightly feel justified in hoax¬ing their patients to this extent.
Unless it is an acute disease, quick changes in cause or symptoms cannot be brought about without the use of some unnatural and to a greater or less degree harmful agent. Even many acute diseases have more or less definite periodsto run unless the fast is rigorously enforced, so if these are shortened appreciably by any other manner of treatment than by natural and drugless means the result has been accom¬plished at a sacrifice of vitality and with the production of undesirable conditions, even though these may remain un¬recognized.
Sick people are impatient people; what they want is relief from sickness and pain. As a rule, sick people are unreason¬able people; they want quick relief regardless of the physical cost. It is the impatience and unreasonableness that make sick people unwilling to assume any responsibility for their sickness that has perpetuated medical treatment as much as have the doctors themselves, perhaps much more.
When a physician desires to reason with and to direct a sick patient along common-sense lines of conduct but does not give a bottle of medicine or a box of pills or powders, or a pre¬scription, the patient not only feels that he owes the doctor nothing, but he will call another physician who will leave out the “preaching” but who will leave something tangible—some¬thing that offers quick relief. Hence in self-defense doctors have had to prescribe medicines, perhaps some in which they had little if any faith.
Many a physician prescribes tablets and pills of varying sizes, shapes and colors, which he keeps in boxes and bottles bearing various labels, and which give his patients quick and pronounced benefit, but all of which are merely “placebos,” “blanks,” in other words plain sugar of milk without a sug-gestion of any medicine in them except the inferred mental suggestion of medicine that he gives.
In case of the other and major portion of diseases from which the human race suffers, prodigious researches have been made to discover germs as the cause of the disease. Year after year the papers announce that some one has discovered the germ of cancer, but the reports are always later discred¬ited. Many other diseases, such as scurvy and pellagra, that were once attributed to germs now are recognized as having other causes. Among definitely proved causes two of the most notable are deficient and erroneous diet.
It should therefore be clear to the rational thinker that the popular fear of disease germs is unwarranted. Germs have been stressed and exaggerated because the layman gets a con¬ception of disease that seems to shift the burden of its cause from his own habits of life to an invisible enemy. The doctors have consciously or unconsciously abetted the popular error because such view gratified those who were supposed to know how to fight the germs against which the patient could do little to help himself.
These statements are self-evident: Every jirophylactic or curative factor or agent should meet the test of naturalness to the body. Those factors which will build the highest degree of health will preserve health. Modification of these same factors will permit the body to rid itself of disease if the disease is curable. What is foreign to the body and detrimental during health, with a tendency to produce disease, is of greater detriment to the body during ill health and has a greater tendency to accentuate or multiply the manifestations of disease. Xo element, combination of elements, ingredient or concoction of ingredients, no agent whatsoever that will not aid the body to become stronger, more vital, more normally functioning as a machine, more resistant to adverse influences, has a place in the body at any time. If it cannot improve and increase health and the manifestations of vitality in a body free from disease, it cannot aid a body whose energy and vitality are reduced to increase its ability to combat disease.
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Those who maintain that drugs and vaccines are what give the patient the ability to destroy germs overlook the fact that the normal, healthy man has power in his own physiological processes to defend himself against these same germs. Even in the most virulent and contagious epidemics only a small per cent of the population contracts the disease. The majority of the population are immune. The logical method of treat¬ment therefore is to use the natural health-building forces to rebuild the powers the patient normally possesses but has tem¬porarily lost.
In the diseases in which the germs are present it is a dis¬puted question as to how much of the responsibility for the in¬jurious effect of the disease should be attributed to the pres¬ence and action of the germs and how much to prior failures of normal function that render the body subject to the growth of the germs. The advocates of the types of medical treatment which presume to destroy the germs would nat¬urally credit the germs with the whole responsibility of the destructive effects of the disease. But that obviously is not logical since the body must be in an abnormal or unhealthy state before the growth of the germs is tolerated.
Furthermore, we should call attention to the fact that the general conception of those who stress the importance of dis¬ease germs is to presume that there are germs for all diseases. But that is far from the findings of even orthodox medical sci¬ence. In the official classification of the causes of death used by the United States Census Bureau there are only forty-four diseases classed as “epidemic, endemic and infectious,” and this list is augmented by including eight varieties of tubercu¬losis. The total list of the causes of death in the Census e”as-sification numbers two hundred and thirty. Thus we see that, by this classification, less than twenty per cent, of diseases are in this class of infectious germ diseases. In some of these the specific germs have not been actually discovered but are only assumed to exist because of the infectious nature of the dis¬ease.
Establishment of the relation of germs to disease came at a time when faith in supernatural agencies as the cause of disease was finally waning. The discovery of foreign or¬ganisms in the body as the cause of disease fitted in with the old conception of disease as an external invader of the human body. In the popular mind the disease germ replaced the disease devil. Both theories were alike in causing the patient to feel that he was attacked from without by an invisible enemy instead of admitting that the disease was of his own making and due to the failure of the normal functions of the healthy body.
Various species of bacteria or disease germs are found in many, but by no means all disease conditions of the body. The popular conception is that the germs cause the disease. But there is a more fundamental cause back of the fact that the germs enter and grow in the body. If this were not true everyone would harbor all kinds of disease all the time and human life would speedily be wiped out. Only when funda¬mental disease, in the sense of the failure of function, develops first do we become susceptible to the disease germs that are always and everywhere present in our environment.
When disease germs were first discovered doctors were hopeful that medicines would be found effective in killing them. While numerous antiseptics have been discovered that can be used to kill disease germs outside the body, they are nearly all rank poisons which if taken internally in strong enough doses to kill the germs would also kill the human cells. Only two or three instances are acknowledged by scientists today in which the internal administration of drugs actually kills disease germs in the body.
Hence the discovery of disease germs, instead of more firmly establishing the art of drug medication, has served only to show that drugs fail to have the speciilc curative effects claimed for them. The normal, healthy man continuously makes his own medicine against disease germs. When this normal function fails and disease germs do enter and multiply in the body, Nature sets about restoring the body’s power to destroy the germs. If the effort is successful the germs are routed and the patient recovers. If the effort is a failure the germs continue to multiply and the patient dies.
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