Chronic Disease Correction
In the early stages, practically all diseases respond quickly to proper treatment, and practically all acute diseases promptly disappear when the right treatment is applied. Often, how¬ever, chronic diseases, as such, cannot be treated in the earliest stages because there are no symptoms until the disease proc¬esses are well established, or because the early symptoms are ignored or misinterpreted. When chronic disease has become well advanced the ultimate outcome of treatment depends upon many factors, such as the degree of damage to vital organs or functions, the nature of the disease, specific causes and the possibility of their removal, the age of the patient, the dura¬tion of the disease and so on. Even the most effective of help¬ful measures most correctly applied are able, in some cases, merely to check the progress of the disease processes or to counteract their injurious effects.
The time to treat chronic diseases especially, but all other diseases as well, is before they have begun. To a considerable extent the same factors are used for maintaining health and preventing disease as are employed to cure disease, they being modified and adapted to the condition of the sufferer and the nature and location of the disease manifestations. But it re¬quires much more concentration of some of these factors to bring about correction of disease than it does to maintain health. Unfortunately, the average person goes merrily on his way giving no thought to the subject of health until his health is lost or greatly impaired.
What will quickly eradicate an acute or a subacute disease may merely check the progress of a chronic disease; and what would maintain reasonably good health may be inadequate to prevent development of acute disease, or in time a chronic disease. After a chronic disease has become well established or advanced, unless the vitality naturally is high, there may be no treatment that can restore the lost health to a high de¬gree. But even so, the treatments recommended in these re¬maining two volumes will do much to reduce the symptoms, hold the disease process in check and permit one to enjoy living It is true that diagnosis is less important when the chief object of treatment is to restore the general resistance of the body than when treatment is directed toward symptoms. Yet the course that may be run by certain forms of disease has become known after centuries of observation. This knowl¬edge permits treatment to be properly adapted to the condi¬tion when the condition is known with a fair degree of definite-ness. It certainly is of great advantage, even extremely im¬portant to know, for instance, that one has an organic heart disease, or nephritis, or diabetes, or locomotor ataxia, or tuber¬culosis, and so on. But many disorders, if only fairly ad¬vanced, are comparatively easy to diagnose. Among these are the above. It is in the earlier stages when there is great difficulty in establishing a diagnosis where adoption of a healthful routine and the discontinuance of specific harmful practices often are sufficient to check the progress of disease.