Natural Hygiene

[Guest guest]

Hygienic Review

Vol. XXVIII April, 1967 No. 8

The Tyranny of Hygiene

Herbert M. Shelton

If healing is a biological process, which we can neither imitate,

duplicate nor substitute, as we contend, the proper plan of caring for

the sick will be one of supplying the most favorable conditions for the

successful operation of the healing processes. The primary requisite of

the success of the healing processes is the removal of all causes of

organic and systemic impairment. There are no short-cuts to health.

There are no speedways that take us there in a hurry. There are no ways

of " cutting corners " or " going across the lot. " You either remove the

causes of organic and functional impairment and supply the conditions of

health, or you do not get well.

Dr. C. once advised one of his physician correspondents,

P. H. , M. D., of Florence, Texas, to " be autocratic in your

determination to have them (the patients) do as you wish to have done. "

How far carried out this advice the record does not reveal; but if

we can judge the past by the present, he was inclined to go easy with

his patients and cater to their whims and compromise with their habits

of life.

" Who made you God?, " is a question that we are frequently asked when we

insist upon instructions being carried out. The undisciplined resent the

restrictions that are placed upon their living habits; the incorrigible

refuse to go even a little way in correcting their ways of life; yet it

is true, as Dr. Tilden so often stressed, that the limitations that we

place upon these unruly ones are only such as nature herself dictates.

We do not advise rest for our own profit, but because there is a

distinct need for and a natural call for rest. What good does it do to

the Hygienic practitioner for a man to give up coffee or tobacco? The

patient receives all the good out of abandoning these practices. But, in

insisting that these poison habits be discontinued, have we done

anything more than to demand that the normal rules of life be carried

out? Nature herself is the tyrant; she is the dictator. She is the one

who does the penalizing when her rules are flouted.

What or who is this nature that penalizes us for our wrongs to

ourselves? It is none other than our own body. If you try to live on

deficient food, it is your own tissues that fail to renew themselves

ideally. If you do not secure adequate rest and sleep, it is the tissues

of your own body that fail of ideal renewal. If you smoke or drink, it

is your own tissues that are damaged. The limitations you face are your

own limitations. They are set by your own constitutional capacities and

powers.

All the needs of normal physiology are present in states of disease and

require to be supplied to the end that organic and functional integrity

may be preserved or restored. No piece-meal plan of care can possibly

succeed in restoring health. Hygienic care comprehends not only a

regulation of the diet, but a synthesis and coordination of all the

factor elements of normal livings-drinking, breathing, sunning,

temperature, clothing, exercise, rest, sleep, emotional factors, etc.

Nothing short of a total regulation of the way of life can produce ideal

results.

All processes of recovery or healing are but extensions and

modifications of the processes that preserve health and the materials

and processes employed in caring for the sick must be in consonance with

physiology and compatible with all other useful measures. A sane method

of caring for the sick will not attempt to force the body to utilize

substances that are not subject to its metabolic processes.

If we demand a correction of the ways of life as the one and only means

of securing a restoration of health, we will not be patronized by the

millions who still believe that among the myriads of so-called cures

there is palliation for them and who are content with mere palliation.

There is a mighty army of invalids today who cannot get well in spite of

their travels, their patronage of the great specialists and their

submission to operations; but they are still unwilling to make a few

simple corrections in their ways of living in the interest of better health.

When one of these sufferers does condescend to break away from the cures

of science and to undertake a wholly new and, to him, untried way back

to health, he is often in a desperate condition. Much organic change has

occurred so that nothing short of the creation of a new organ can

restore full health. We don't expect such sufferers to recover full

health, but we do witness some remarkable improvements in great numbers

of these desperate cases. In the less damaged, we see great numbers of

full recoveries.

It is often in these desperate cases that we witness the most remarkable

effects of the fast. To withhold food provides relief from pain and

discomfort, enables tired and damaged organs to rest and to repair

themselves, gives the enervated organism an opportunity to excrete its

accumulated load of waste and exotic poisons and, to, in great measure,

rejuvenate itself. What is needed is a plan or mode of elimination much

more compatible with physiology than those proposed by the so-called

schools of healing and fasting meets this demand.

Even in those cases where full recovery is no longer possible, comfort

may be restored and, by teaching them how to eat and live, life may be

prolonged for months and even years. A correction of the habits of life,

even if for only a time, results in an abandonment or disappearance of

symptoms; but to build vigorous health and restore body and mind to

normal, to retrieve lost vigor and add years to life, the correction

must take place before serious organic change has occurred in some or

several of the vital organs of the body.

--

Peace be with you,

Don " Quai " Eitner

" Spirit sleeps in the mineral, breathes in the vegetable, dreams in the animal

and wakes in man. "

Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses. ~Jean

Baptiste Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire

The obstacle is the path. ~Zen Proverb

--

In compliance with the highest standards of Universal Law, this email has been

thoroughly disinfected and purified in the solar flares of the sun.

Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.

Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.

Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.11/45 - Release Date: 7/9/05