The Power of Healing - Herbert M Shelton

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The Power of Healing

Herbert M Shelton

Hygienic Review August 1964

 

Our ancestors said that sickness was of God, but there were also many among

them who asserted that it was of the Devil. The men of science say that

disease is due to the invasion of the body by foreign entities (germs and

viruses), a concept that is identical with the demon etiology of the past.

Whether disease is due to invasion of the body by one of the imps of Satan or

to its invasion by more material, if invisible organisms, the basic idea of

causation is the same. To the Hygienist sickness is a manmade state or

condition.

 

It seems an unfortunate circumstance that in every age and in every

department of human activity and learning, truth must engage in a

death-grapple with fallacies, superstitions and popular vices and defeat and

route these before it can receive a respectable hearing. Perhaps there is

something to be said for the testing of truth by such a struggle, but it does

seem to delay the progress of mankind. The vital truths of Natural Hygiene

will be accepted as certainly as were the truths that the earth is round and

not flat and that the earth turns on its axis and the sun does not go around

the earth, although there remains much error to be combated. We need not be

discouraged, although we may be excused our impatience with the slowness of

progress.

 

Two of the errors that must be overcome is that disease exists per se, and

that it is a foe of life and that healing is accomplished by forces extrinsic

to the living organism. So long as these two superstitions rule the thinking

of mankind we will keep up a fight against fictional enemies on the one hand

and a futile search for mares on the other. Once we have learned to see

disease as remedial effort and healing as a spontaneous biological process

belonging to the living organism, we can cease our futilities and devote

ourselves to rational ways of caring for the sick and to rational ways of

preventing the evolution of illness.

 

A standard text book of pathology says that " during his age-long struggle for

existence, man has developed defense mechanisms which en able him to overcome

many agents of injury occurring in his environment " While this statement well

expresses the reigning view of man and his past, and explains that his powers

of defense have been evolved, it completely fails to explain how he managed

to survive while he was developing these defense mechanisms.

 

It is my view that his defense mechanisms are endowments and not

developments, and that he possessed them from his origin. I go further and

say that it is my firm conviction that prehistoric man, possessed of greater

vigor, greater purity and acuteness of sense, and fewer perversions,

possessed more vigorous means of survival than his modern descendents. Man's

inmate abhorrence for tobacco, for example, and his repulsion against it when

it is first introduced into his body, represents the workings of a defense

mechanism of major significance. Strong psychological factors, originating

with the ancient medical man and persisting to the present, cause us to

ignore the significance of this protest, so that other means of defense have

to be requisitioned and our whole sense of abhorrence is suppressed. This may

be applied equally to the thousands of other poisons man has been induced to

take into his body as friends.

 

The absurd notion that the organismic convulsions (disease) and weaknesses

with which man suffers are of exotic origin is so crucial to the prosperity

of the medical profession that the physician is compelled, in sheer

self-defense, to contest with every weapon he can command, the verities that

the " diseases " listed in medical nosologies constitute climacteric

symptomatologies of subclinical impairments of spontaneous origin and that

these " diseases " cannot be mitigated or recovered from so long as the mode of

life that engenders them continues to be carried out. The physician must, at

all times, remain committed to the crotchet that " diseases " constitute

physiological miscarriages localized in particular organs - and that the

restitution of these organs to their original state is equivalent to the

eradication of human pathologies.

 

Having traced all human pathology primarily to the excesses and deficiencies

of which our race is universally guilty, and secondarily to the resulting

poisoning, it seems unnecessary to argue that this poisoning, unless

counteracted, would constitute so fatal an affront to the body-total as to

lead to the speedy extinction of the race. The bare fact of the current

survival of man proves that the body's inherent restoratives are continually

operative to stave of collapse.

 

The intrinsic forces of the living organism seek continually to reestablish

that fundamental physiological integrity without which individual existence

cannot endure. At the same time, the persistence of human malbionomic living

renders it equally patent that this restoration is being just as continually

annulled by the forces of disintegration set in motion by a mode of living

that violates every law of existence - forces that not only reinstate the

pathology as speedily as it is repaired, but do so in such a fashion as to

aggravate all aspects of human pathology.

 

The many and varied symptom-complexes listed in medical text-books under die

rubric of disease are restorative and resistive processes the primary intent

of which is the elimination of toxin and the healing of damaged tissues. To

the extent that medical practice bends its efforts to the elimination of

these symptoms and symptom-complexes, by any other means than the removal of

their causes, it critically interferes with the processes of recovery.

 

Since any organismic disturbance, whatever its origin or locus, constitutes a

menace to the organism's continued existence, it automatically occasions the

mobilization of the body's mechanisms of defense. The means of defense and

repair are, for the most part, mere modifications (exaggerations and

diminutions) of the ordinary or normal actions and processes of life.

Coughing and sneezing, by which foreign substances and sources of irritation

and obstruction are expelled from the air passages, are but exaggerated forms

of expiration; diarrhea is but an exaggeration of the regular bowel action;

fever is but an exaggeration of the normal temperature of the body;

inflammation is but an exaggeration of the normal circulation in a part; pain

is but an exaggeration of the normal sense of feeling; prostration is a

reduction of normal muscular action; lack of desire for food and lack of

digestion is similar to prostration. The body behaves in its relations to

substances and conditions that are opposed to its welfare, in a manner to

preserve and restore its integrity.

 

When we reduce fever, check a cough, suppress a diarrhea, " relieve " pain,

subdue vomiting, and interfere with the work of inflammation, we do battle,

not with the fictional entity that we think of as the disease that has

attacked the body, but with the forces of life. We cripple the defense

mechanism that is designed to save life and preserve integrity. If a tonsil

is enlarged, a thing that increases the defensive power of the tonsil, and we

remove it, we remove part of the body's first-line defenses. What we mistake

for an attack upon the body by a foreign foe is part of the process of

healing and defense.

 

Under the misguidance of the magician, man was led, slowly, to abandon

reliance upon his intrinsic biologic restoratives and to rely more and more

upon exotic substances and processes that further sicken the organism, under

the pretense of healing it. Even, if today he still mouths the ancient phrase

that " nature heals, " he is unwilling to rely upon the intrinsic forces of

healing to restore him to health, but prefers the magic processes of the

physician, who is but the ancient magician in a modern dress. Man has been

conditioned by the physician to believe that he can find, even invent

restoratives that_ are superior to those intrinsic biologic defenses upon

which be relied throughout the long period of prehistory. Although in his

three thousand year search for exotic restoratives, he has sacrificed himself

and uncounted millions of his fellow-creatures to his schemes of salvation,

which, never any more than means of evanescent palliation, often murderous in

their effects, have invariably and inevitably aggravated his original

impairment and pathology.

 

That man's unbiologic mode of living has not long ago returned him to the

ashes of extinction is due to the marvelous efficiency of counteracting

restoratives that operate within him, unknown to him, so that the scales of

existence are being continually loaded in favor of survival. This is to say

we have survived because we are being and have been continually healed.

Unfortunately, the therapeutic means and measures he has applied to himself

operate destructively so that his survival is always on the verge of

permanent annulment. Man's survival has been transformed into a fierce

struggle for more existence.