Health Education vs. Treatment

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Health Education

vs. Treatment

Hygienic Review

Vol. XXXIV April, 1973 No. 8

Health Education vs. Treatment

Herbert M. Shelton

More than three million people in this country are incapacitated by

illness every day. Great numbers of these are cared for in hospitals.

New hospitals are continually being built and older ones are enlarged.

We are always preparing to care for an increasing number of sick

people; all the while the story goes out that "preventive medicine" is

such a howling success. It is obvious, however, that the art of keeping

well is not well understood and that knowledge of how to stay well is

not spreading very fast. The great amount of sickness observed among

those who are closest adherents of the schools of so-called healing

reveals that they are not receiving the right kind of health education.

If our people knew how to keep well we could do with fewer rather than

more institutions for the care of the sick.

But if we look at the living habits of the practitioners of the various

schools of so-called healing, we shall soon discover that they are not

doing any better in preventing disease in themselves and in the members

of their families than are the supposedly more ignorant laymen. Not

only do we see a great amount of sickness, both acute and chronic,

among medical men and the members of their families, with relatively

early passing of most medical men, among osteopaths and their families,

among chiropractors and their families, among naturopaths and their

families; but when we observe the manner in which these men and their

families live, we see that they do not, on the whole, live any better

than their patients.

The great majority of medical men, osteopaths, chiropractors and

naturopaths smoke or use tobacco in some other form. Great numbers of

the members of these professions drink alcoholic liquors. A sizable

percentage of them are addicted to other drugs. Most of them use tea

and coffee and drink soda fountain slops. Go into their homes and watch

them eat and you soon discover that they eat, for the most part, a

conventional fare prepared in the conventional manner and combined as

indiscriminately and haphazardly as the foods of the laity are

combined. Note that they are fat and plethoric or skinny, just as are

the people in general. They use "antacids" after eating and take

laxatives or enemas and colonic irrigations as much as their patients.

The members of their families are not examples of good health and their

length of life is often much less than that of the lay folk.

In the medical profession we often see the paradox of a cancer

specialist dying of cancer, a heart specialist dying of heart disease,

a tubercular specialist with tuberculosis, an asthma specialist with

asthma, an allergist with hay fever, an alienist becoming insane, a

gastro-enterologist with peptic ulcer, a genito-urinary specialist

dying of cancer of the prostate. When the specialists do not know

enough about the causes and patho-genesis of the diseases in which they

specialize to present the evolution of these diseases in themselves,

how can they prevent or remedy them in other people? Have we not a

situation in which the ancient advice, "physician, heal thyself," is

apropos? If a heart specialist dies of heart disease in his forties,

what can he know of the cause and prevention, not to say the cure of

heart disease? If a cancer specialist dies of cancer at a comparatively

early age, how much can the public depend upon early diagnosis and

treatment?

Is it not patently obvious to everyone, when such facts are considered,

that the schools of so-called healing taken collectively, are helpless

in the face of the mounting incidence of chronic disease? Whether they

remove organs or administer antibiotics, pull legs and twist and

contort the patient, bake and boil and electrocute the patient, give

herbs, peddle vitamins, or in other ways treat symptoms and ignore

causes, their approaches to the problems of sickness are superficial,

irrational and illusory. Therapeutics is tremendously overworked and,

as carried out today, amounts to a stupendous confusion.

Although the allopathic profession is continually boasting of its

monopoly of medical science, it is a curing system that merely

palliates and pretends to cure without removing cause. They boast of

their great institutions of research and of the mighty work that is

being done in these. But the intelligent observer, watching the results

of this research over a period of several years, soon discovers that

these mountains labor and bring forth only a mouse a dead one, a

stillbirth. They provide more treatment for the sick, but no better

health. They devise newer and often more novel techniques of treatment,

but the sick continue to suffer and die as of yore. Medicine makes

great progress, but it is progress in the dealing art, not in the

healing art.

The belief in diseases and cures stands as an effective barrier to a

true education in healthful living. The medical profession is not

teaching the people how to live. In fact, as already pointed out, it

does not know how to live. The same is true of the other schools of

so-called healing. They are all busily engaged in treating the effects

of wrong life and ignoring the cause. The medical profession has

opposed every effort at improvement in living. The only prevention they

have fostered is that of immunization by means of vaccines and serums.

True, after the people have adopted something that they opposed and it

has proved to possess genuine merit, they have championed it, called it

their own and the short memories of the people forget their original

opposition. Thus they are today receiving credit for innovations that

they had nothing to do with, except to oppose.

Our schools and colleges are not teaching the people how to live. Our

school textbooks are carefully censored. Not a line, not a word can

vary from standard authority. There is no possibility of a new and

revolutionary truth reaching the school child or the older scholar by

way of the educational institution. The teachers and instructors are

also kept closeted behind the iron curtain that prevents all variant

ideas from filtering into them and that prevents them from giving

expression to an idea that is not "sound." The mind is thus enclosed in

a carapace, which, unlike that of the lobster, turtle or crab, cannot

be shed as the mind grows larger. Mental fixation is the inevitable

result of this process of intellectual canning.

To whom does the teaching profession turn when it wants a new textbook?

Does it turn to the man who knows; to the man who has broken society's

mental fetters and blazed new trails? It does not. It gets its texts

from men and women who are guaranteed incapables; individuals who never

had an original idea in their lives. This is the, reason that the

teaching profession is doing nothing to free the world from its

religious, medical, legal, economic, financial and political

superstitions. The "home fires" of orthodoxy must be kept burning and

all hetero-doxical ideas must be kept from the students. This is not

altogether the fault of the teachers, but of the powers that hold the

whip hand over their heads.

No better example of this slavery of the educational system to the

superstitions that exist around us can be found than in the high school

and college texts of biology. Biology has, from its origin, sucked the

teats of the medical profession; much of their intellectual pap has

been drawn from this source. The biologist does not know anything about

the subject of medicine. He derives all of his "facts" and opinions

from the profession. What he thinks and does not think is a subject of

no importance, for he is intellectually enslaved by the pill rollers.

His textbooks are crammed with paragraphs and pages about pathogenic

bacteria, viruses, antibodies, allergy, serums, vaccines, immunization,

curing, etc. He will discuss the antibiotics with an air of authority

and, when these have passed to the limbo reserved for the cures that

pass in the night, he will revise his texts and discuss with an equal

authority the newer cures that have replaced the antibiotics. He is but

a phonograph talking out what has been talked into his head. It is no

laughing matter that he so often plays on a cracked record.

The physiological juggernauts that cloud, suppress, pervert and distort

the minds of young and old of our age are everywhere and, so fully

convinced are we that the "authorities" know what they are talking

about and doing, we dare not question the prevailing fashions in

thought. The psychologists have taught us that intelligence is the

ability to adjust ourselves, which is merely another term for the old

tyranny that demanded conformity. The nonconformist is as deadly to the

powers that be in our era as in any past era.

We have a large standing army of physicians and surgeons and We have

another large army of Ph.D.'s engaged in "research," and these men are

all thinking, planning and coordinating their work, exchanging ideas

and knowledge, not only among themselves, but with similar armies

abroad; but where are the results? They are still carrying on in the

same old way searching for entitative diseases or entitative causes,

searching for cures and immunizers removing appendices, excising

tonsils, poisoning the sick, vaccinating the well, ignoring the cause

of disease and trying to cure disease without removing its cause. After

many years devoted to a wholesale slaughter of the tonsils they have no

more idea today about what causes tonsillar enlargement than they had

thirty years ago. Every year they remove thousands upon thousands of

the reproductive organs of women and not one of them can explain the

cause of a fibroid tumor or a cancer. Indeed, with all their searching

and researching, they have not yet discovered the cause of the common

cold.

Their only conception of cause is that germs and viruses cause all

disease. They are cutting out cancers the same as they did fifty years

ago; they follow the operation with X-rays and radium as they have been

doing for years and the undertaker is still completing the job for them

as he has been doing for years. They are "researching" for everything

except truth. The pathologist spends a lifetime studying the endpoints

of pathological processes and ends with no more knowledge of cause than

when he started. Cause is not to be found in the morgue, but he will

never grasp this simple fact.

We have a great army of invalids and semi-invalids who are going from

specialist to specialist, from hospital to hospital, from sanitarium to

sanitarium, from one health resort to another, from climate to climate,

from the seashore to the mountains, or vice versa, seeking, ever

seeking for health. They go from one school of curing to another!

School of curing, but they never find health. They spend time and money

in their search for health, but all in vain. What is wrong? If the

drugs and operations and sea bathing and sunshine and mountain air and

different climates and the great specialists and the famous hospitals

and clinics and sanitariums and the practitioners of the different

schools of curing cannot cure them, what is the reason? If "modern

scientific medicine" with all of its great wealth of cures-its old

drugs, its miracle drugs, its antibiotics, its gland extracts,

vitamins, X-rays, radium rays, operations, etc. fails them and they

turn to the lesser schools of curing, and these also fail them, what

shall they do?

The answers to all of these questions are simple ones. These people are

not getting well for the reason that the causes of their illnesses are

not being removed. Enervating habits are being permitted to sap their

functioning power. Enervating treatments are adding their share to the

depleting influences to which they are subjected. The consequence is

that they remain toxemic. They continue to eat in a manner to maintain

a constant and seething mass of putridity in their digestive tracts.

They do not need to change climate. They do not need to go to the

mountains or to the seashore. They need to change their modes of

living. They can get well as soon as they cease to build disease. When

they learn a correct way of life and conform to it, they can have

health. Until then, they are destined to go on suffering and chasing

cures until the undertaker relieves them of the necessity of further

chasing. What then, is their greatest need? Knowledge they need to be

taught the simple, wholesome ways of life that build and maintain

vigorous health.

Health schools and not hospitals, health teachers and not

symptom-treaters these are the needs of the people. If they will

substitute an orderly and lawful way of life for the treatment of

disease, obedience to the laws of life for plans of immunization,

knowledge for superstition, they may substitute health for disease. We

need a more radical approach to the problems that con front the sick

and less superficial and enervating palliation. Let us get at the root

of the troubles that afflict mankind and cease trying to cure effects

without removing causes.

Herbert M. Shelton

-- 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. ~Baptiste Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire

The obstacle is the path. ~Zen Proverb