It is a remedy, however, which if persisted in carries its own pains and penalties. The real remedy is a sufficient breadth of mind and education to take philosophically most of lifes troubles.
Just as depression and other psychoses lower the health and make us more liable to disease, so cheerfulness and equanimity increase the degree of health and heightens resistance to disease. The particular detoxicating forces which are evoked are probably increased nervous energy and favourable hormone secretions. These vital influences should never be overlooked in the treatment of disease, and it is the duty of the physician to heal the mind first so that its healthiness can react on the body.
But there are more advanced and esoteric planes of mental healing. A sudden eruption of emotion generated through spiritual contemplations or charged with the belief that one is about to be cured, or actually is cured, seems to be sufficient in many cases to establish astounding cures. So hard-headed and materialistic an authority on scientific medicine as Dr. Alexis Carrel, the Nobel prize winner and research worker at the Rockefeller Institute, in his book Man, The Unknown, wrote:.
“Our present conception of the influence of prayer upon pathological lesions is based upon the observation of patients who have been cured almost instantaneously of various affections, such as peritoneal tuberculosis, cold abscesses, osteitis, suppurating wounds, lupus, cancer, etc. The process of healing changes little from one individual to another. Often, an acute pain.
Then a sudden sensation of being cured. In a few seconds, a few minutes, at the most a few hours, wounds are cicatrized, pathological symptoms disappear, appetite returns. Sometimes functional disorders vanish before the anatomical lesions are repaired. The only condition indispensable to the occurrence of the phenomenon is prayer. But there is no need for the patient himself to pray, or even to have any religious faith. It is sufficient that some around him be in a state of prayer.”.
It may perhaps be doubted if the average mortal is capable of losing himself in raptures and ecstasies contemplating abstractions so as to secure the results cited by Carrel. Such amazing occurrences, however, even though rare, serve to remind us that not only are the mind and body a unity, but also that the mind possesses extra-ordinary powers in relation to health and disease. That the source, development and mode of action of these forces are completely unknown should stimulate intensive investigations, for such phenomena limit very much further our ideas about incurability.
CONCLUSION.
All the foregoing treatments represent what is best in nature cure practice of to-day. Much more could be said about most of them, but in a concise summary such as this is intended to be only the outlines of them could be ventured on. They are all based on the simple and sensible theory that our diseases come from inside ourselves, and that, when the required changes are made in our methods of eating, drinking, thinking, and living generally, our diseases both mental and physical disappear.
The motto “Heal Thyself” is, therefore, of practical importance to each one of us, for the ultimate goal of nature cure is that everyone should be sufficiently versed in its principles to be able on most occasions to be independent of its practitioners. So rapidly has nature cure grown in popularity in recent years that it is now beyond doubt that it will be the public and private therapy by the end of the century; and future generations will look back in amazement at the lunacies and barbarities that the enlightened people of this era humbly accepted as scientific medicine.
For some time now the writing has been on the wall and is being read and understood by an increasing number at the top of the orthodox medical profession. J. E. R. McDonagh, F.R.C.S., neatly summarized the matter in his Nature of Disease Journal, Vol. III, 1934, when he wrote:.
“Calling modern medicine scientific does not make it any different from what it really is. Medicine was born of magic, it has evolved from magic, and it will go the way of all products of magic. Medicine is undergoing such steadily increasing disintegration as to make it certain that the time must come when what at present holds together will undergo complete disintegration”.
No further vindication of nature cure practice is required.
