Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)

by Rasmus Larssen Alsaker

To most people, medical and lay, the various diseases stand out clear and individual. Typhoid fever is one disease. Pneumonia is an entirely different one. Surely this is so, they say, for is not typhoid fever due to the bacillus typhosus and pneumonia to the pneumococcus? But it is not so. Outside of mechanical injuries there is but one disease, and the various conditions that we dignify with individual names are but manifestations of this disease. The parent disease is filthiness, and its manifestations vary according to circumstances and individuals.

This filthiness is not of the skin, but of the interior of the body. The blood stream becomes unclean, principally because of indigestion and constipation, which are chiefly due to improper eating habits. Some of the contributory causes are wrong thinking, too little exercise, lack of fresh air, and ingestion of sedatives and stimulants which upset the assimilative and excretory functions of the body. In all cases the blood is unclean. The patient is suffering from autointoxication or autotoxemia.

If this is true, it would follow that the treatment of all diseases is about the same. For instance, it would be necessary to give about the same treatment for eczema as for pneumonia. Basically, that is exactly what has to be done to obtain the best results, though the variation in location and manifestation requires that special relief measures, of lesser importance, be used in special cases, to get the quickest and best results. In both eczema and pneumonia the essential thing is to get the body clean.

The practice of medicine is not a science. We have drugs that are reputed to be excellent healers, yet these very drugs sometimes produce death within a few hours of being taken. The practice of medicine is an art, and the outcome in various cases depends more on the personality of the artist than on the drugs he gives, for roughly speaking, all medicines are either sedative or stimulant, and if the dosage is kept below the danger line, the patient generally recovers. It seems to make very little difference whether the medicine is given in the tiny homeopathic doses, so small that they have only a suggestive effect, or if they are given in doses several hundred times as large by allopaths and eclectics.

It is true that we have drugs with which we can diminish or increase the number of heart beats per minute, dilate or contract the pupils of the eye, check or stimulate the secretion of mucus, sedate or irritate the nervous system, etc., but all that is accomplished is temporary stimulation or sedation, and such juggling does not cure. The practice of medicine is today what it has been in the past, largely experiment and guess-work.

On the other hand, natural healers who have drunk deep of the cup of knowledge need not guess. They know that withholding of food and cleaning out the alimentary tract will reduce a fever. They know that the same measures will clean up foul wounds and stop the discharge of pus in a short time. They know that the same measures in connection with hot baths will terminate headaches and remove pain. They further know that if the patient will take the proper care of himself after the acute manifestations have disappeared there will be no more disease. After a little experience, an intelligent natural healer can tell his patients, in the majority of cases, what to expect if instructions are followed. He can say positively that there will be no relapses and no complications.

How different is this from the unsatisfactory practice of conventional medicine! However, most physicians refuse to accept the valuable teachings which are offered to them freely, and one of the reasons is that the natural healers do not present their knowledge in scientific form. The knowledge is scientific but it is simple. Such objection does not come with good grace from a profession practicing an art. Life is but a tiny part science, mixed with much art.

The true scientist in the healing art is he who can take an invalid and by the use of the means at his command bring him back to health, not in an accidental manner, but in such a knowing way that he can predict the outcome. In serious cases the natural healer of intelligence and experience can do this twenty times where the man who relies on drugs does it once. The physicians who prescribe drugs are ever on the look-out for complications and relapses, and they have many of them. The natural healers know that under proper treatment neither complications nor relapses can occur, unless the disease has already advanced so far that the vital powers are exhausted before treatment is begun, and this is generally not the case. In this book many of the medical fallacies of today, both professional and lay, will be touched upon in a kindly spirit of helpfulness and ideas that contain more truth will be offered in their place. The truth is the best knowledge we have today, according to our understanding. It is not fixed, for it may be replaced by something better tomorrow. However, one fundamental truth regarding health will never change, namely, that it is necessary to conform to the laws of nature, or in other words, the laws of our being, in order to retain it.

No one can cover the field of health completely, for though it is very simple, it is as big as life. The most helpful parts of this book will be those which point the way for each individual to understand his relation to what we call nature, and hence help to enable him to gain a better understanding of himself.

By natural living is not meant the discarding of the graces of civilization and roaming about in adamic costume, living on the foods as they are found in forest and field, without preparation. What is meant is the adjustment of each person to his environment, or the environment to the person, until harmony or balance is established, which means health.