When you order a suit of clothes from your tailor, you do not take it away from him half-finished; if you do, you will have an unsatisfactory garment.
No more should you interfere with your cure after the first signs of improvement. Continue until you have thoroughly eliminated from your system the hidden const.i.tutional taints and the drug poisons which have been the cause of your troubles. After that you can paddle your own canoe; right living and right thinking will then be sufficient to maintain perfect health and strength, physically, mentally and morally.
Is the Chronic Patient to Be Left to His Fate
Because Allopathy Says He Is Incurable?
Frequently we have been severely criticised by our friends, our coworkers or our patients for accepting certain seemingly hopeless chronic cases. They exclaim:
"You know this man has locomotor ataxy and that woman is an epileptic: you certainly do not expect to cure them," or, "Doctor, don"t you think it injures the inst.i.tution to have that dreadful-looking person around? He is nothing but skin and bones and surely cannot live much longer."
Sometimes open criticism and covert insinuation intimate that our reasons for taking in incurables are mercenary.
If we should dismiss today those of our patients who, from the orthodox and popular point of view, are considered incurable, there would not remain ten out of a hundred; and yet our total failures are few and far between. Many such seemingly hopeless cases have come for treatment month after month, in several instances for a year or more, apparently without any marked advance; yet today they are in the best of health.
Yes, it is hard work and frequently thankless work to deal with these patients. It would be much easier, much more remunerative and would bring more glory to confine ourselves to the treatment of acute diseases, for it is there that Nature Cure works its most impressive miracles. On the other hand, to achieve the seemingly impossible, to prove what Nature Cure can accomplish in the most stubborn chronic cases, sustains our courage and is its own compensation.
The word chronic in the vocabulary of the "Old School" of medicine is synonymous with "incurable." This is not strange; since the medical and surgical symptomatic treatment of acute diseases creates the chronic conditions, it certainly cannot be expected to cure them. If, by continued suppression, Nature"s cleansing and healing efforts have been perverted into chronic disease conditions, the following directions are given in the regular works on medical practice:
"When this disease reaches the chronic stage, you can no longer cure it. You may advise the patient to change climate or occupation. As for medication, treat the symptoms as they arise."
We know that the symptoms are Nature"s healing efforts; when these are promptly treated, that is, suppressed, it is not surprising that the chronic does not recover. In fact, it is the treatment which makes him and keeps him a chronic.
Why Nature Cure Achieves Results
Nature Cure achieves results in the treatment of chronic diseases because its theories and practices are entirely opposite to those just described. However, when the Nature Cure physician claims that he can cure cancer, tuberculosis, epilepsy, paralysis, Bright"s disease, diabetes or certain mental derangements, the regular physician shows only derision and contempt. He will not even condescend to examine any evidence in support of our claims.
Since, then, Nature Cure offers to the so-called incurable the only hope and the only possible means of regaining health, why not give him a chance? Many times apparently hopeless cases have responded most readily to our treatment, while more promising ones offered the most stubborn resistance. Even with the best possible methods of diagnosis, it is hard to determine just how far the destruction of vital organs has progressed, or how deeply they have been impregnated with drug poisons.
Therefore, it is often an impossibility to predict with certainty just what the outcome will be. This can be determined only by a fair trial. In the past we have treated many a case that, according to the rules and precedents of orthodox science, should be dead and buried long ago; yet these individuals are today alive and in the best of health.
Every now and then incidents like the following renew our enthusiasm and our faith in Nature Cure: Recently, we had three new cases, sent by three former patients who had been under treatment several years ago. These three had been among the worst cases ever treated in our inst.i.tution. When they came to us, one was supposed to be dying with cancer, the second was in the advanced stages of tertiary syphilis and the third, a lady, had survived several operations for the removal of the appendix and the ovaries. At the time she took up our treatment she had been advised to undergo another operation for the removal of the uterus.
These incurables had been exceedingly trying. More than once one or another had quit, discouraged and disgusted, only to return, knowing that, after all, Nature Cure was their only hope. After they left us, we lost track of them and often wondered how they were getting on. Imagine our pleasant surprise when all three were reported by the newcomers as being in good health. What if it did take months or even years to produce the desired results? What would have been the fate of these three patients if it had not been for slow Nature Cure?
Discouraged patients frequently ask: "Why do others recover so quickly when I show so little improvement? This cure seems to be all right for some diseases, but evidently it does not fit my case."
This is defective reasoning. True Nature Cure fits every case because it includes everything good in natural healing methods. In stubborn cases Nature Cure is not to blame for the slow and unsatisfactory results: the difficulty lies in the character and advanced stage of the disease.
Chapter XXIII
The Treatment of Chronic Diseases
Let us now consider the best methods for producing the healing crises referred to in the preceding chapters, that is, the best methods for treating the chronic forms of disease.
We found that acute diseases represent Nature"s efforts to purify and regenerate the human organism by means of inflammatory feverish processes, while in the chronic condition the system is not capable of arousing itself to such acute reactions. The treatment must differ accordingly.
The Nature Cure treatment of acute diseases tends to relieve inner congestion, to facilitate the radiation of heat and the elimination of morbid matter and systemic poisons from the body. In this way it eases and palliates the feverish processes and keeps them below the danger point without in any way checking or suppressing them.
While our methods of treating acute diseases have a sedative effect, our treatment of chronic diseases is calculated to stimulate, that is, to arouse the sluggish organism to greater activity in order to produce the acute inflammatory reactions or healing crises.
If the unity of diseases as demonstrated in a previous chapter is a fact in Nature, it must be possible to treat all chronic as well as all acute diseases by uniform methods, and the natural remedies must correspond to the primary causes of disease.
The Natural Methods of Treatment
Natural methods of treatment may be divided into two groups:
Those which the patient can apply himself, provided he has been properly instructed in their correct selection, combination and application. Those which must be applied by a competent Nature Cure physician.
To the first group belong diet (fasting), bathing and other water applications, correct breathing, general physical exercise, corrective gymnastics, air and sun baths, mental therapeutics.
To the second group belong special applications of the methods mentioned under group 1, and in addition to these hydropathy, ma.s.sage, manipulation, medical treatment in the form of homeopathic medicines, nonpoisonous herb extracts and the vitochemical remedies, and most important of all, the right management of healing crises which develop under the natural treatment of chronic diseases.
Diagnosis
Correct diagnosis is the first essential to rational treatment.
Every honest physician admits that the "Old School" methods of diagnosis are, to say the least, unsatisfactory and uncertain, especially in ascertaining the underlying causes of disease.
Therefore we should welcome any and all methods of diagnosis which throw more light on the causes and the nature of disease conditions in the human organism.
Two valuable additions to diagnostic science are now offered to us in osteopathy and in the Diagnosis from the Eye.
Osteopathy furnishes valuable information concerning the connection between disease conditions and misplacements of vertebrae and other bony structures, contractions or abnormal relaxation of muscles and ligaments, and inflammation of nerves and nerve centers.
The Diagnosis from the Eye is as yet a new science, and much remains to be discovered and to be better explained. We do not claim that Nature"s records in the eye disclose all the details of pathological tendencies and changes, but they do reveal many disease conditions, hereditary and acquired, that cannot be ascertained by any other methods of diagnosis.
Omitting consideration of everything that is at present speculative and uncertain, we are justified in making the following statements:
The eye is not only, as the ancients said, "the mirror of the soul,"
but it also reveals abnormal conditions and changes in every part and organ of the body. Every organ and part of the body is represented in the iris of the eye in a well-defined area. The iris of the eye contains an immense number of minute nerve filaments, which through the optic nerves, the optic brain centers and the spinal cord are connected with and receive impressions from every nerve in the body. The nerve filaments, muscle fibers and minute blood vessels in the different areas of the iris reproduce the changing conditions in the corresponding parts or organs. By means of various marks, signs, abnormal colors and discolorations in the iris, Nature reveals transmitted disease taints and hereditary lesions. Nature also makes known, by signs, marks and discolorations, acute and chronic inflammatory or catarrhal conditions, local lesions, destruction of tissues, various drug poisons and changes in structures and tissues caused by accidental injury or by surgical mutilations. The Diagnosis from the Eye positively confirms Hahnemann"s theory that all acute diseases have a const.i.tutional background of hereditary or acquired disease taints. This science enables the diagnostician to ascertain, from the appearance of the iris alone, the patient"s inherited or acquired tendencies toward health and toward disease, his condition in general and the state of every organin particular. Reading Nature"s records in the eye, he can predict the different healing crises through which the patient will have to pa.s.s on the road to health. The eye reveals dangerous changes in vital parts and organs from their inception, thus enabling the patient to avert any threatening disease by natural living and natural methods of treatment. By changes in the iris, the gradual purification of the system, the elimination of morbid matter and poisons, and the readjustment of the organism to normal conditions under the regenerating influences of natural living and treatment are faithfully recorded.
This interesting subject will be treated more fully in a separate volume (~Iridiagnosis,~ published in 1919 by Dr. Lindlahr). In this connection I shall confine myself to relating briefly the story of the discovery of this valuable science.
The Story of a Great Discovery
Dr. Von Peckzely, of Budapest, Hungary, discovered Nature"s records in the eye, quite by accident, when a boy ten years of age.
Playing one day in the garden at his home, he caught an owl. While struggling with the bird, he broke one of its limbs. Gazing straight into the owl"s large, bright eyes, he noticed, at the moment when the bone snapped, the appearance of a black spot in the lower central region of the iris, which area he later found to correspond to the location of the broken leg.
The boy put a splint on the broken limb and kept the owl as a pet.
As the fracture healed, he noticed that the black spot in the iris became overdrawn with a white film and surrounded by a white border (denoting the formation of scar tissues in the broken bone).
This incident made a lasting impression on the mind of the future doctor. It often recurred to him in later years. From further observations he gained the conviction that abnormal physical conditions are portrayed in the eyes.
As a student, Von Peckzely became involved in the revolutionary movement of 1848 and was put in prison as an agitator and ringleader. During his confinement, he had plenty of time and leisure to pursue his favorite theory and he became more and more convinced of the importance of his discovery. After his release, he entered upon the study of medicine, in order to develop his important discoveries and to confirm them more fully in the operating and dissecting rooms. He had himself enrolled as an interne in the surgical wards of the college hospital. Here he had ample opportunity to observe the eyes of patients before and after accidents and operations, and in that manner he was enabled to elaborate the first accurate Chart of the Eye.