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[Health Education vs. Treatment

 

Hygienic Review

Vol. XXXIV April, 1973 No. 8

Health Education vs. Treatment

Herbert M. Shelton

 

More than three million people in this country are incapacitated by

illness every day. Great numbers of these are cared for in hospitals.

New hospitals are continually being built and older ones are

enlarged. We are always preparing to care for an increasing number of

sick people; all the while the story goes out that " preventive

medicine " is such a howling success. It is obvious, however, that the

art of keeping well is not well understood and that knowledge of how

to stay well is not spreading very fast. The great amount of sickness

observed among those who are closest adherents of the schools of so-

called healing reveals that they are not receiving the right kind of

health education. If our people knew how to keep well we could do

with fewer rather than more institutions for the care of the sick.

 

But if we look at the living habits of the practitioners of the

various schools of so-called healing, we shall soon discover that

they are not doing any better in preventing disease in themselves and

in the members of their families than are the supposedly more

ignorant laymen. Not only do we see a great amount of sickness, both

acute and chronic, among medical men and the members of their

families, with relatively early passing of most medical men, among

osteopaths and their families, among chiropractors and their

families, among naturopaths and their families; but when we observe

the manner in which these men and their families live, we see that

they do not, on the whole, live any better than their patients.

 

The great majority of medical men, osteopaths, chiropractors and

naturopaths smoke or use tobacco in some other form. Great numbers of

the members of these professions drink alcoholic liquors. A sizable

percentage of them are addicted to other drugs. Most of them use tea

and coffee and drink soda fountain slops. Go into their homes and

watch them eat and you soon discover that they eat, for the most

part, a conventional fare prepared in the conventional manner and

combined as indiscriminately and haphazardly as the foods of the

laity are combined. Note that they are fat and plethoric or skinny,

just as are the people in general. They use " antacids " after eating

and take laxatives or enemas and colonic irrigations as much as their

patients. The members of their families are not examples of good

health and their length of life is often much less than that of the

lay folk.

 

In the medical profession we often see the paradox of a cancer

specialist dying of cancer, a heart specialist dying of heart

disease, a tubercular specialist with tuberculosis, an asthma

specialist with asthma, an allergist with hay fever, an alienist

becoming insane, a gastro-enterologist with peptic ulcer, a genito-

urinary specialist dying of cancer of the prostate. When the

specialists do not know enough about the causes and patho-genesis of

the diseases in which they specialize to present the evolution of

these diseases in themselves, how can they prevent or remedy them in

other people? Have we not a situation in which the ancient

advice, " physician, heal thyself, " is apropos? If a heart specialist

dies of heart disease in his forties, what can he know of the cause

and prevention, not to say the cure of heart disease? If a cancer

specialist dies of cancer at a comparatively early age, how much can

the public depend upon early diagnosis and treatment?

 

Is it not patently obvious to everyone, when such facts are

considered, that the schools of so-called healing taken collectively,

are helpless in the face of the mounting incidence of chronic

disease? Whether they remove organs or administer antibiotics, pull

legs and twist and contort the patient, bake and boil and electrocute

the patient, give herbs, peddle vitamins, or in other ways treat

symptoms and ignore causes, their approaches to the problems of

sickness are superficial, irrational and illusory. Therapeutics is

tremendously overworked and, as carried out today, amounts to a

stupendous confusion.

 

Although the allopathic profession is continually boasting of its

monopoly of medical science, it is a curing system that merely

palliates and pretends to cure without removing cause. They boast of

their great institutions of research and of the mighty work that is

being done in these. But the intelligent observer, watching the

results of this research over a period of several years, soon

discovers that these mountains labor and bring forth only a mouse a

dead one, a stillbirth. They provide more treatment for the sick, but

no better health. They devise newer and often more novel techniques

of treatment, but the sick continue to suffer and die as of yore.

Medicine makes great progress, but it is progress in the dealing art,

not in the healing art.

 

The belief in diseases and cures stands as an effective barrier to a

true education in healthful living. The medical profession is not

teaching the people how to live. In fact, as already pointed out, it

does not know how to live. The same is true of the other schools of

so-called healing. They are all busily engaged in treating the

effects of wrong life and ignoring the cause. The medical profession

has opposed every effort at improvement in living. The only

prevention they have fostered is that of immunization by means of

vaccines and serums. True, after the people have adopted something

that they opposed and it has proved to possess genuine merit, they

have championed it, called it their own and the short memories of the

people forget their original opposition. Thus they are today

receiving credit for innovations that they had nothing to do with,

except to oppose.

 

Our schools and colleges are not teaching the people how to live. Our

school textbooks are carefully censored. Not a line, not a word can

vary from standard authority. There is no possibility of a new and

revolutionary truth reaching the school child or the older scholar by

way of the educational institution. The teachers and instructors are

also kept closeted behind the iron curtain that prevents all variant

ideas from filtering into them and that prevents them from giving

expression to an idea that is not " sound. " The mind is thus enclosed

in a carapace, which, unlike that of the lobster, turtle or crab,

cannot be shed as the mind grows larger. Mental fixation is the

inevitable result of this process of intellectual canning.

 

To whom does the teaching profession turn when it wants a new

textbook? Does it turn to the man who knows; to the man who has

broken society's mental fetters and blazed new trails? It does not.

It gets its texts from men and women who are guaranteed incapables;

individuals who never had an original idea in their lives. This is

the, reason that the teaching profession is doing nothing to free the

world from its religious, medical, legal, economic, financial and

political superstitions. The " home fires " of orthodoxy must be kept

burning and all hetero-doxical ideas must be kept from the students.

This is not altogether the fault of the teachers, but of the powers

that hold the whip hand over their heads.

 

No better example of this slavery of the educational system to the

superstitions that exist around us can be found than in the high

school and college texts of biology. Biology has, from its origin,

sucked the teats of the medical profession; much of their

intellectual pap has been drawn from this source. The biologist does

not know anything about the subject of medicine. He derives all of

his " facts " and opinions from the profession. What he thinks and does

not think is a subject of no importance, for he is intellectually

enslaved by the pill rollers. His textbooks are crammed with

paragraphs and pages about pathogenic bacteria, viruses, antibodies,

allergy, serums, vaccines, immunization, curing, etc. He will discuss

the antibiotics with an air of authority and, when these have passed

to the limbo reserved for the cures that pass in the night, he will

revise his texts and discuss with an equal authority the newer cures

that have replaced the antibiotics. He is but a phonograph talking

out what has been talked into his head. It is no laughing matter that

he so often plays on a cracked record.

 

The physiological juggernauts that cloud, suppress, pervert and

distort the minds of young and old of our age are everywhere and, so

fully convinced are we that the " authorities " know what they are

talking about and doing, we dare not question the prevailing fashions

in thought. The psychologists have taught us that intelligence is the

ability to adjust ourselves, which is merely another term for the old

tyranny that demanded conformity. The nonconformist is as deadly to

the powers that be in our era as in any past era.

 

We have a large standing army of physicians and surgeons and We have

another large army of Ph.D.'s engaged in " research, " and these men

are all thinking, planning and coordinating their work, exchanging

ideas and knowledge, not only among themselves, but with similar

armies abroad; but where are the results? They are still carrying on

in the same old way searching for entitative diseases or entitative

causes, searching for cures and immunizers removing appendices,

excising tonsils, poisoning the sick, vaccinating the well, ignoring

the cause of disease and trying to cure disease without removing its

cause. After many years devoted to a wholesale slaughter of the

tonsils they have no more idea today about what causes tonsillar

enlargement than they had thirty years ago. Every year they remove

thousands upon thousands of the reproductive organs of women and not

one of them can explain the cause of a fibroid tumor or a cancer.

Indeed, with all their searching and researching, they have not yet

discovered the cause of the common cold.

 

Their only conception of cause is that germs and viruses cause all

disease. They are cutting out cancers the same as they did fifty

years ago; they follow the operation with X-rays and radium as they

have been doing for years and the undertaker is still completing the

job for them as he has been doing for years. They are " researching "

for everything except truth. The pathologist spends a lifetime

studying the endpoints of pathological processes and ends with no

more knowledge of cause than when he started. Cause is not to be

found in the morgue, but he will never grasp this simple fact.

 

We have a great army of invalids and semi-invalids who are going from

specialist to specialist, from hospital to hospital, from sanitarium

to sanitarium, from one health resort to another, from climate to

climate, from the seashore to the mountains, or vice versa, seeking,

ever seeking for health. They go from one school of curing to

another! School of curing, but they never find health. They spend

time and money in their search for health, but all in vain. What is

wrong? If the drugs and operations and sea bathing and sunshine and

mountain air and different climates and the great specialists and the

famous hospitals and clinics and sanitariums and the practitioners of

the different schools of curing cannot cure them, what is the reason?

If " modern scientific medicine " with all of its great wealth of cures-

its old drugs, its miracle drugs, its antibiotics, its gland

extracts, vitamins, X-rays, radium rays, operations, etc. fails them

and they turn to the lesser schools of curing, and these also fail

them, what shall they do?

 

The answers to all of these questions are simple ones. These people

are not getting well for the reason that the causes of their

illnesses are not being removed. Enervating habits are being

permitted to sap their functioning power. Enervating treatments are

adding their share to the depleting influences to which they are

subjected. The consequence is that they remain toxemic. They continue

to eat in a manner to maintain a constant and seething mass of

putridity in their digestive tracts. They do not need to change

climate. They do not need to go to the mountains or to the seashore.

They need to change their modes of living. They can get well as soon

as they cease to build disease. When they learn a correct way of life

and conform to it, they can have health. Until then, they are

destined to go on suffering and chasing cures until the undertaker

relieves them of the necessity of further chasing. What then, is

their greatest need? Knowledge they need to be taught the simple,

wholesome ways of life that build and maintain vigorous health.

 

Health schools and not hospitals, health teachers and not symptom-

treaters these are the needs of the people. If they will substitute

an orderly and lawful way of life for the treatment of disease,

obedience to the laws of life for plans of immunization, knowledge

for superstition, they may substitute health for disease. We need a

more radical approach to the problems that con front the sick and

less superficial and enervating palliation. Let us get at the root of

the troubles that afflict mankind and cease trying to cure effects

without removing causes.

 

Herbert M. Shelton ]