Once well established it is difficult to cure, but it often rapidly improves under a simple diet, rested nerves, cheerful, kind thoughts, and better digestion and elimination.
The food should be thoroughly masticated. Young people are prone to eat too hastily, and thus not thoroughly mix the food with saliva. If careful attention is paid to mastication of the food, water at meals is an aid to digestion. Water should be taken freely between meals, on rising and before retiring, for its diuretic and laxative effect.
All candy, and sweets, hot breads, corn bread, pastry, soups with much fat, rich hashes and sauces, fried food, pork, and veal should be eliminated from the diet.
A badly blotched face is an embarrassment, and no restriction in the diet should be deemed a hardship as a means to an improved digestion, increased mental vigor, and improved health.
A pimple on the face should be treated as antiseptically as a boil. The pus from a pimple which has “come to a head” should not be allowed to infect the surrounding skin. Infection may take place from towels or wash cloths used by one afflicted with acne. Care should be exercised to sterilize the surrounding skin by peroxide of hydrogen or alcohol before a pimple is opened and its contents should be taken up with absorbent cotton. A pimple should never be severely squeezed as the skin will be irritated and other pimples may result.
Often the infection from one pimple is spread by the hands or by the wash cloth. Care should be taken to avoid this.
Exercise directed to the facial muscles and to the liver and digestive organs, deep breathing, plenty of oxygen by night and day, wholesome thoughts, plenty of sleep, and simple food, will eliminate or improve most skin difficulties. Care should be taken, by frequent bathing and friction baths, to aid the eliminative work of the skin.
Rheumatism
Since the medical profession is unable to determine just what rheumatism is, it is difficult to prescribe a diet. The theory so long believed that it is caused by an excess of uric acid in the system is no longer held by most of the advanced physicians. Uric acid, however, sometimes accompanies the disease.