Nature Cure: Philosophy & Practice Based on the Unity of Disease & CureLindlahr, Henry
Philosophy
Nature Cure: Philosophy & Practice Based on the Unity of Disease & Cure
Lindlahr, Henry
Naturopathy
Where the Old School fails by sins of commission, the Faith Schools
fail by sins of omission. Many patients are sacrificed daily through
fanatical inactivity, when their lives might be saved by a wet pack
or a cold sponge bath, by an internal bath, rational diet, judicious
fasting, scientific manipulation or some other simple yet powerful
remedy of natural healing. To permit a patient to perish in a
burning fever, depending solely upon the efficacy of prayers,
formulas and mental attitude, when wet packs and cold sponging would
in a few minutes reduce the temperature below the danger point, is
manslaughter, even though it be done in the name of religion.
Incidents like the following are common in our practice: A little
girl in the neighborhood of our institution was taken with
diphtheria. The mother, an ardent Christian Scientist, called in
several healers of her cult, but the child grew worse from day to
day, until the false membranes in the throat began to choke her to
death.
A boarder in the house, who was a follower of Nature Cure, finally
induced the mother to call upon us for advice by threatening to
notify the City Health Department. Within an hour after the
application of the whole-body packs and the cold ablutions, the
blood was sufficiently drawn away from the local congestion in the
throat into the surface of the body, so that the child breathed
easily and freely, and from then on made a splendid recovery.
Another instance: A man had been suffering from sciatic rheumatism
for fifteen years. He had swallowed poisonous drugs to no avail. For
several years he had been under Mental Science treatment, but the
suffering had grown more intense.
When he applied to us for help, we found that the right hip bone
(the innominate) had slipped upward and backward. A few manipulative
treatments replaced the bone where it belonged, and the sciatic
rheumatism was cured.
In this case, the combined concentration and prayers of all the
metaphysical healers on earth would not have succeeded in replacing
the dislocated hip bone, which required the full strength of a
trained manipulator.
Metaphysicians could not have accomplished this feat any more than
they could have moved, by their mental efforts, a hundred-pound
weight from one place to another. Mechanical lesions of that kind
(and there are many of them) require mechanical treatment.
Another factor which makes converts to metaphysical healing cults by
the hundreds and thousands is the get-rich-quick instinct in human
nature, the desire to get something for nothing, or with as little
effort as possible. Herein lies the seductive pull of old-time
drugging and of modern metaphysics. "It does not matter how you
live; when you get into trouble, a bottle of medicine or a
metaphysical formula will make it all right." That sounds very easy
and promising, but the trouble is--it does not always work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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