It is possible to resolve many health complaints without fasting, simply by cleansing the colon and regaining normal lower bowel function. Colonics take little personal effort and are much easier to get people to accept than fasting. So I can fully understand how perfectly honest and ethical naturopaths have developed obsessions with colon cleansing. Some healers have loudly and repeatedly (and wrongly) proclaimed that constipation is the sole cause of disease, and thus, the only real cure for any illness is colon cleansing. Even though it is possible to have a lot of successes with the simple (though unpleasant to administer) technique of colon cleansing, degenerated lower bowels are the only cause of disease. I prefer to use bowel cleansing as an adjunct to more complete healing programs. However, old classics of hygiene and even a few new books strongly make the case for colonics. Some of these books are entirely one-sided, single-cause single-cure approaches, and sound convincing to the layperson. For this reason, I think I should take a few paragraphs and explain why some otherwise well-intentioned health professionals have overly-advocated colonics (and other practices as well). Most Diseases Cure Themselves If you ask any honest medical doctor how they cure diseases, they will tell you that most acute disease conditions and a smaller, though significant percentage (probably a majority) of chronic disease conditions are self-limiting and will, given time, get better all by themselves. So for most complaints, the honest allopathic doctor sees their job as giving comfort and easing the severity of the symptoms until a cure happens. This same scenario, when viewed from a hygienist's perspective, is that almost all acute and many chronic conditions are simply the body's attempt to handle a crisis of toxemia. For two reasons the current crisis will probably go away by itself. The positive reason is that the toxic overload will be resolved: the person changes their dietary habits or the stressor that temporarily lowered their vital force and produced enervation is removed, then digestion improves and the level of self-generated toxins is reduced. The negative reason for a complaint to "cure" itself is that the suffering person's vital force drops below the level that the symptom can be manifested and the complaint goes away because a new, more serious disease is developing.