Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)

by Rasmus Larssen Alsaker

One of the most difficult things about teaching health is that it is so very simple. People look for something mysterious. When told that good old mother nature is the only healer, they are incredulous, for they have been taught that doctors cure. When informed that they do not need medicine and that outside treatment is unnecessary, they find it difficult to believe, for disease has always called for treatment of some kind in the hands of the medical profession. When further told that they have to help themselves by living so that they will not put any obstacles in the way of normal functioning of their bodies, they think that the physician who thinks and talks that way must be a crank, and many seek help where they are told that they can obtain health from pills, powders and potions or from various inoculations and injections.

To live in health is so simple that any intelligent person can master the art and furthermore regain lost health in the average case, without any help from professional healers. There is plenty knowledge and all that is needed is a discriminating mind to find the truth and then exercise enough will power to live it. If a good healer is at hand, it is cheaper to pay his fee for personal advice than to try to evolve into health without aid, but if it is a burden to pay the price, get the knowledge and practice it and health will return in most cases. The vast majority of people suffering from chronic ills which are considered incurable can get well by living properly.

The more capable and frank the healer is, the less treatment will be administered. Minute examinations and frequent treatment serve to make the patient believe that he is getting a great deal for his money. Advice is what the healer has to sell, and if it is correct, it is precious. The patient should not object to paying a reasonable fee, for what he learns is good for life. People gladly pay for prescriptions or drugs. The latter are injurious if taken in sufficient quantity to have great effect. So why object to paying for health education, which is more valuable than all the drugs in the world? Because of their attitude on this subject, the people force many a doctor to use drugs, who would gladly practice in a more reasonable way if it would bring the necessities of life to him and his family. The public has to enlighten itself before it will get good health advice. The medical men will continue in the future, as they have done in the past, to furnish the kind of service that is popular.

A good natural healer teaches his patients to get along without him and other doctors. A doctor of the conventional school teaches his patrons to depend upon him. The former is consequently deserving of far greater reward than the latter.

The law of compensation may apply elsewhere, thinks the patient, but surely it is nonsense to teach that it applies in matters of health, for does not everybody know that most of our diseases are due to causes over which we have no control? That the chief cause is germs and that we can not control the air well enough to prevent one of these horrible monsters (about 1/25,000 of an inch long) from settling in the body and multiplying, at last producing disease and maybe death? This is untrue, but it is a very comforting theory, for it removes the element of personal responsibility. People do not like to be told that if they are ill it is their own fault, that they are only reaping as they have sowed, yet such is the truth.

Patients often dislike to give up one or more of their bad habits. "Mr. Blank has done this very thing for sixty or seventy years and now at the age of eighty or ninety he is strong and active," they reply to warnings. This is sophistry, for although an individual occasionally lives to old age in spite of broken health laws, the average person who attempts it perishes young. Those who do not conform to the rules are not allowed to sit in the game to the end.

Another false feeling, or rather hope, deeply implanted in the human breast is: "Perhaps others can not do this, but I can. I have done it before and can do it again; it will not hurt me for I am strong and possessed of a good constitution." The wish is father to the thought, which is not founded on facts. The most common and the most destructive form of dishonesty is self-deception. Those who are honest with themselves find it easy to deal fairly and squarely with others.

The doctors of the dominant school are very distrustful of the natural healers, in spite of the fact that the latter obtain the best results. Many of the conditions which the regular physicians treat without satisfactory results, the natural healers are able to remove in a few months. When members of the dominant school of medicine find men leading patients suffering from various skin diseases, Bright's disease, chronic digestive troubles, rheumatism and other ills which they themselves make little or no impression upon back to health, they are unwilling to believe that such results can be accomplished by means of hygiene and proper feeding. They think there is some fakery about it, for their professors, books and experience have taught them otherwise. They consider the views of the natural healer unworthy of serious attention and often call him a quack, which epithet closes the discussion. They are ethical and do not wish to be mired by contact with quacks.

The distrust of medical men for healers of the natural school is not hard to explain. Many of the natural healers are men of education and experience, but others lack both, and no matter how good the latter may be at heart, they make very serious blunders. For instance: They get out circulars, listing all prominent diseases known, stating that they cure them. They either are so enthusiastic that they are carried away or they are so ignorant that they do not know that there is a stage of degeneration which will not allow of regeneration, and that when such a stage is reached in any chronic disease the end is death.

Another handicap is that intelligent natural healers have such excellent success that they lose their heads. They educate patients by the hundred into health who have been given up as incurable by the conventional physicians. In their success they forget that modesty is very becoming to the successful and begin to boast. This hurts the cause. Let the natural healer ever remember that he does not cure, that he is but the interpreter and that nature is the restorer of health.