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The Body a self-Regulating Maxchine. People understand that the ill body, regardless of what treatment may be taken, must be depended upon to cure itself. The most that any physician can do is to aid in bringing about conditions which will enable tlie body to cure itself. The most dependable way to determine the so-called curative treatment of any dis¬ease is to learn its cause. No one knows exactly what a feeling of discomfort or pain may indicate. Sometimes it may be a dangerous symptom; but often it indicates a condition, whether seemingly serious or merely disconcerting in nature, easily corrected in most in¬stances by right living.
If you fear an enemy his power over you is greatly in¬creased. It is the same with disease. If you allow fear to get the better of you when you experience the symptoms of disease, its effects upon you are far more serious. The body at all times is working for itself. It is self-regulating, hence its failures are mostly due to errors for which we, personally, are responsible. Serious diseases are frequently made worse because of the unnatural, hence inter¬fering, treatments administered.
THE NATURE OF DISEASE.—Faith in the magic of drugs is due to general ignorance of the real nature of disease. Once one begins to understand what sickness really is, one has a means of meeting most of the usual ailments when they occur, and of protecting the body against their recurrence.
Symptoms and sickness are the result of abnormal bodily conditions due to failure to obey the laws of life and health. Sickness then intervenes as a physical remonstrance. It brings about compulsory arrest of digestion. It stops the over¬loading process. The body can then eliminate the impurities which, if they continued to accumulate, finally woidd cause death. The ending of sickness in premature death is due al¬most invariably to the ignoring of the signals given by nature to stop over-feeding and other disease-producing practices.
Nature’s Signals
Sickness really may be looked upon as a means which the body adopts to remedy abnormalities within itself. When the exact status of sickness is recognized, when it is properly
treated, and the body is assisted in the eliminating, purifying and really curative processes, recovery usually is rapid and certain.
The right procedure for everyone possessing health-intelligence is to be able to recognize sickness before it appeal’s, to see it far ahead. If one will study his physical welfare sufficiently to be able to recognize its coining, illness, in most of its serious phases, can be avoided.
The ability to see the disease before it actually gets the upper hand is invaluable. It saves an incalculable amount of suffering, since it enables one to depend upon himself in practically every emergency. There is no need to reckon on the burden of sickness—you are able to circumvent it.
Remember, therefore: If you lose your appetite; if you feel dull, lazy, logy; if your bowels are inactive; if you are irritable; if your nerves are shaky; if you suffer from sleep- lessness; if you have dizzy or fainting spells—if you have the slightest signs of such symptoms, then it is your duty to try to learn the cause of your trouble.
When you are suffering from disease, fasting means feed¬ing in a sense, because it gives rest to overworked organs and enables the entire organism to adjust itself more perfectly. When the stomach is given food after it has had a rest of this kind it receives and creates a superior quality of blood. The blood-making process begins in the stbmaeh and. since it is by no means completed here, it continues throughout the small intestine. When the contents of these important organs are foul and putrescent the whole body is poisoned. If your habits of life are such that the body becomes overloaded with impurities, the time is sure to come when you must have a physical hmiseeleaning.
There is a limit to the amount of foreign elements the body can harbor and still retain sufficient strength to go about its ordinary daily duties. When you feel sluggish, tired and lazy and work of any kind is an effort, you most likely are suffering from what might be termed the first symptoms of bodily poisoning. In such cases blood does not contain the elements essential to vita! and vigorous life, or it contains such an excess of toxins or poisons as to neutralize the value of the needed elements.
If self-questioning gives you the usual reply that the trouble comes from your alimentary canal, then what is the first instruction to start you on the way to a cure?
In most cases it would be rigorous abstinence from food. especially solid food. Generally fruit /juices may be allowed, especially if acid fruits are craved.
In many cases of illness acid fruit helps to cleanse and antisepticize the alimentary canal. It especially cleanses the stomach, gives one a comfortable feeling, and encourages one to take more liquid. Such a course, followed for a day or two, or longer in many instances, will prevent much serious illness. But while it may be considered a novel method of therapy, it is, as a matter of fact, just exactly what the majority of sick people would naturally do for themselves if they followed their own normal impulses.
While no one will recommend that sick people try on them¬selves surgical operations, or difficult and complicated methods of cure which require special skill or judgment, many physicians themselves will admit that the patient is perfectly safe, and is probably doing himself a great deal of good, when he cooperates with the effort the body itself is making to eliminate poisons. The methods of drugless healing suggested in this volume offer ways and means by which the great vitaliz¬ing forces of water, sunlight, electricity and other natural agents can be safely used to assist the body in its own effort to get well.
Some of the most distinguished physicians now appreciate to the fullest extent the power of the body to heal itself. They are preaching doctrines similar to those enunciated by us thirty years ago. They are advocating adherence to natural, physio¬logical law. They do not commend doping methods that divert or drive inward the symptoms of disease. They believe in mildly stimulating the functions of the body, depending on the vital processes to remedy the symptoms associated with disease.
Progressive doctors change their methods year after year. They never really graduate. They remain students through¬out their entire lives. They are learning every’day, and their Jatients naturally secure the benefit of this vast storehouse of knowledge which they secure from a varied experience. The more experienced and learned a physician is the less rigid and conservative he is likely to be. He recognizes that the body is distinctly a self-regulating organism. The processes used by the physical organism in effecting a cure of any complaint are beyond detailed analysis. Xo physician yet can tell you much about the processes or about the workings of the physiological laboratory in which the body works out the problem of recla¬mation. Hence in offering these methods of drugless healing we are in nowise encroaching on the special province of the physician, or running contrary to the best doctors.
First AID FOR THE ILL.-—Frequently these books will fall into the hands of someone who is ill, who has not already heard of the general physical culture regimen, and who wishes spe¬cific advice about just what to do and where to begin to help himself. Even at the risk of repeating ourselves somewhat, we may say: “Begin with a fast, and with plenty of fresh air day and night. Cleanse the bowels with enemas, as suggested in this book, daily, and keep the skin perfectly clean, as sug¬gested herein, beginning with friction rubs. Drink plenty of water. Experiment with rest in bed, or with exercises, as your condition seems to warrant.” This gives you the basis of further cure. It can harm no one, whatever his disease may be,sand is almost invariably helpful. Beyond that the individual can proceed carefully, using this volume in connection with the volumes on diet and exercise and the following two volumes, trying to understand his own case and to help himself to get well.
FEAKS AND PHOBIAS TO AVOID.—In connection with any curative routine, there are certain fears and superstitions to be avoided. Among these are:
Fear of Germs.—Xo one will deny that the things one eats or uses should be clean, both for esthetic reasons and reasons of health. But many people are unduly timorous about the germs of diseases that are said to lurk everywhere about us.
The fact is that the natural antiseptics of the hody are found within the body itself. Germs cannot enter the unbroken skin. It is impermeable to them. The membraneous linings of all the body’s cavities, if unbroken, are invulnerable to them. The normal secretions of these membranes are germicidal. There is no susceptibility on the part of any healthy organ to bacterial in j ury.
Health is the great immunizing agent, and health is main¬tained by proper food, pure water, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, rest, sleep and freedom from devitalizing habits. It is im¬paired by improper food, bad water, foul air, lack of sunshine, indolence, lack of rest and sleep and all devitalizing habits, dissipations and excesses.
The lesson is obvious: get and maintain health by the eternal elements of natural hygiene and you can laugh at all the germs in the universe.
Fear of Drafts.—Cast away fears of night air, cold air, damp air, wet feet and damp clothes. These groundless fears were inherited from our ignorant ancestors.
“I shall not attempt to explain,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. ‘”why ‘damp clothes’ occasion colds rather than wet ones, be- cause I doubt the fact. I imagine that neither the one nor the other contributes to this effect, and that the causes of colds are totally independent of wet or even of cold.”
The fisherman’s boy who pad
Benjamin Franklin proposal to prevent colds and even smallpox by air baths and found that a few minutes of ex¬posure to the air would quickly relieve insomnia. “I rise almost every morning,” he says, “and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either writing or reading. This practice is not the least painful, but on the contrary agreeable, and if I return to bed afterward, before I dress myself. I make a supplement to my night’s rest of one or two hours of the most pleasant sleep that can be imagined.”
Hardy habits have an invigorating effect on the constitu¬tion. Kii’eminacy defeats its own end and subjects its slaves to sufferings unknown to the sons of the wilds. The plant that grows outdoors is hardy and strong; the hothouse plant lacks hardihood and constitutional strength.
The sick or overcoddled person will find in these volumes specific descriptions of the procedure by which he may ac¬custom himself to face and rejoice in the life-giving powers of the elements.
USE OF STIMULANTS.—The use of stimulants is a false and cheating way of getting that psychological exhilaration which should be normal to the healthy person. The so-called exhilara¬tion is a process of expenditure. A stimulant is a substance which causes the body to expend the power it possesses but which does not supply any of the power expended.
We are conscious of power only in its expenditure. Stim¬ulants waste the power they appear to give. The harm they do is precisely in proportion to tiie good they appear to do. The more they appear to strengthen the more they actually weaken. The depressing after-effect is the result of the ex¬penditure of the bodily energy and substance. The period of depression is a period of decreased activity during which less energy is expended. It is a period of rest during which some measure of repair and recuperation take place.
The longer the period of stimulation lasts the longer must the necessary after-period of depression be. The more intense the stimulation, the more profound must be the depression. This is true whether the stimulation is of one organ or of the whole body. It may be digitalis for the heart or brandy for the general organism—the depressing after-effect is inevitable in both cases.
The use of stimulants to create the natural exhilaration which should belong to the healthy person at all times is a losing game. More and more stimulants will be required for less and less effect. At best the excitement and release—the self-ex¬pansion, the illusion—are poor imitations of the normal ex¬citement and emotional release of perfect health. The blues, the sense of inferiority, the feeling that there just isn’t any¬thing in life, the inability to open up and talk and have a good time till one is artificially stimulated—all these are symptoms of something else wrong with the physique and the whole personality.
It is no use to deaden the symptoms. The thing to do is to go after the cause and to cure it. Usually it will yield to a simple routine of improved diet, and less of it. more water, exercise, internal and external cleanliness. Unless the habit of using some stimulant is deeply fixed, the improvement of health land*:*” such a regimen will do away with the taste for it. and even make stimulants obnoxious.
USE OF CATHARTICS.—Constipation dulls the brain and lowers the vitality of its victims. It is a universal complaint. No doubt much deficiency in personality may be traced to it: sluggishness, depression, a sense of failure and unfitness.
Realizing this, many people use cathartics, strong laxatives that bring quick though temporary relief; but the very remedy adopted for the cure of these troubles tends to make the com¬plaint chronic. They resort to more frequent doses until finally a daily dose is required to get the desired result.
Whenever there is need for a laxative it is certain your diet and general mode of living are wrong. You are not using a sufficient amount of roughage, you are bolting your food in¬stead of chewing it, you deny yourself time for elimination, dissipate energies so there is not enough for the normal mus¬cular activity of the intestines, etc. Absolutely the best method of remedying this serious complaint is the drinking of large quantities of water combined with a change of diet, using foods which contain the naturally laxative, essential vital elements. These foods are enumerated in the volume on Diet. Fruits are valuable for this purpose, grapes being especially recom¬mended, if the skin and seeds are not discarded. Exercises of various kinds, especially long walks, are always valuable.
Where you cannot get a diet or the exercise essential to effect a cure, the use of the enema as described in this volume is recommended.
Whatever method you adopt, avoid strong cathartics. They are death-dealing. They bring about a condition wherein you are an easy victim to chronic diseases of all kinds. They disorganize the sensitive processes of digestion and as- simulation, and where these measures are frequently used one goes from bad to worse. The best remedy is to build your body through proper exercise and a vitality-building diet.
The persistent close association of the unclothed body with sex, in some people’s minds, is most censurable. This attitude alone has caused much of the excesses that lead to vital destruction and often to degeneracy. The body is the sanctuary of the soul. In it we must live all through life. We shoidd respect it and even reverence it. The air and the sun should help, by direct contact, to make it strong and beautiful and vital in every part. But when we acquire the idea that it is vile and shameful and must be clothed and hidden because of its evil character, this helps materially to devitalize it and destroy it prematurely.
Clothing has nothing whatever to do with morals. The Turks, who are so modest that for centuries they refused to exhibit the faces of their women, are no great examples of morality. On the other hand, with some of the semi-savage tribes clothing is a matter of convenience entirely, yet their moral standard is high; in some instances adultery is punished by the death of both parties.
In most habitable regions clothing is necessary for warmth. It is not necessary for the protection of morality. The less clothing we wear, beyond what is needed for protection from cold, the better will be our health. We need the vitality which comes from direct contact with air, sunlight and water. The sun is either directly or indirectly the source of all life. The human body needs sunlight just as much as does plant life. A plant placed in a room away from the sun will die. It hasn’t the vitality to resist the influence of a sunless existence.
Civilized races have covered the body with clothing for so long a period that the skin in some instances assumes death¬like pallor. The healthy tan that comes from exposure to the sunrays is, however, enjoyed by an increasing number of people. The amount of clothing considered necessary to-day represents a truly marvelous improvement as compared with the prudery-smudged years of not long ago. But we are still encumbering our bodies with too much clothing.
While one cannot run straight in the face of convention with impunity, every person should favor those styles which make for exposure of tiic body to sun and air, the use of porous materials, and fashions that provide perfect freedom of bodily movement. Styles vary, but some are always more sensible than others. Everything, from shorts for tennis to hare legs for girls, that releases the body from superfluous clothing should be encouraged. Wherever it is possible to do so with-out offending the sensibilities of others, one should expose the whole body to sun and air. The particular parts of the body that we are careful to hide need sun and air more than any other parts, so every available opportunity should be accepted to give the entire body the benefit of sun bathing. It is a tonic of untold value.
Sun and air and water are invaluable, winter and summer,and no early shame associated with the body should prevent us from making the most of them, either in the course of re-taxation, exercise, or specific curative purposes.
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