Even were a "cure" found that would eradicate a so-called "disease," it would still leave a state of impaired health. There is no respite from law and order; there is no therapy that can cure without removing cause; only the foolish are willing to pay and pay for foolish palliation. Secretions and excretions can return to normal only when health is restored by correcting the habits of life. The "infectious diseases" cannot be cured without removing their cause--getting rid of intestinal putrescense.

(b) Stop the absorption of any and all poisons from without. Pathology is due to poisons and so long as these are entering the body from any source they will be added to the poisons already present and thus add to and complicate the "disease." Drugs, serums and vaccines are equal offenders, in this respect, with other poisons of whatever nature. These add to the toxemia, further poisoning the body and building complications. Toxemia is the condition immediately responsible for the "disease." This is the condition the body is seeking to throw off, eliminate. This can be accomplished much sooner, much easier, if we stop adding to the toxins already in the system.

How is this done? By stopping their intake. Suppose the patient is in the habit of absorbing alcoholic drinks, or opium, or is using drugs of some nature for his trouble. Stop their use immediately. Perhaps there is a pent up wound. Clean it out and supply proper drainage. Or there is gastrointestinal putrefaction. This is a common and also the most abundant source of toxic absorption. In fact, every case of "disease" with which we deal, if not due to accident, has this as a contributory cause.

Immediate steps should be taken to cleanse the alimentary canal. All food but water should be stopped. Refer to Vol. Ill on fasting.

There is a fundamental difference between a system of practice based on the removal of effects and one dealing with primary causes. There can be no effect without a cause. Treatment directed toward the removal of an effect falls short of the ideal. The correctness of a system which by simplicity and effectiveness, outshines all others cannot be doubted.

In the final analysis there is but one cure, namely: Remove the cause. When we find what mars the cells and organs of the body, we should cut it out and not the organs. As Tilden says: "We cannot 'battle against disease,' but we can battle against cause. If the heart leaks we cannot stop a leak, but we can stop the use of tobacco, or any other overstimulation which has caused the leak. We cannot stop anemia by giving iron, but we can stop inordinate eating, which leads to intestinal decomposition, with hemal infection and inability to assimilate the tissue salts. Or, if it has been caused by grouch, we may induce the patient to give up the grouch."

Any profession that teaches people to continue practicing health-destroying habits and to look for cures, is certainly unmoral if not immoral. The very foundations of such a system are rotten. Minds capable of logical reasoning will not encourage humanity to practice enervating habits, such as over eating, smoking, and drinking, under the plea that we can't make or mar ourselves, because we are what we are through the "immutable law of heredity"--a law that has no existence. The highest welfare of the individual and that of the race are always identical.

It is through the accumulation of small injuries that constitutions are impaired or broken down long before they should break. Any or all hurtful influences impair or ruin digestion, assimilation, nutrition, and elimination. The Greek goddess, Nemesis, still keeps her eternal watch in the Universe and allows no offense to go unchastized. This should show up the futility of all the feeble gestures that are made, while the mode of living is left untouched.

Neglect of etiological facts and principles causes remedial prescriptions to degenerate into weak apologies for artificial local support that is never in reality supplied; and to a still feebler pandering to the sensibilities and irritable emotional activities of the patient. The physician avows his theory of the process of cure by his selection of remedies.

When once we recognize the damaging effects of precedent physiological abuse and neglect, we begin to realize the pressing need for the restoration of physiological integrity. It is only by understanding the aggregate power of these causes that we become impressed with the necessity of beginning at their origin to remove them, rather than attempt to neutralize effects, while causes continue in unabated force.

Whatever its form or variety, no affection can exist without these precedent conditions and the real remedy consists in the removal of these causative factors. A drunken man may be "sobered" up by a heroic dose of arsenic. The mal-exorcised demon returns with seven accomplices. "The physic-inn's mind should be cause conscious, and to remove cause, not to palliate effects, should be his function."

Tilden says: "Knowing cause, man is supplied with the remedy, namely, remove the cause and the effect (disease) passes; where it does not, it is because the organ stressed--or the part of the body subject to a crisis of Toxemia--has been broken down beyond the possibility of a return to the normal. Such contingencies we hope will be made impossible by our teachings." Again: "Why should a so-called disease be (supposed to be) cured when the cause is unknown, and, being unknown, remains to repeat crises until the organ stressed takes an organic change? It is when organic change takes place that instruments of precision discover cause!"

The human body possesses amazing recuperative powers and a large margin of safety and adaptability. Palliation, in conjunction with nature's continuous effort to return to the normal, often gives respite from discomfort, and this is mistaken for cure. In reality, pathology-building runs on, until a last crisis arrives, which all unexpectedly sweeps the patient away. To illustrate: A cancerous breast is removed; a so-called cure follows; but unfortunately the "disease returns." The truth is that "it" did not go away. Only the local manifestation was removed. The constitutional perversion was not even palliated. The X-ray treatment that usually follows is a sorry subterfuge; for how can a local irritation correct nutrition?

Pathology has no natural tendency to disappear, but, on the contrary, becomes worse and worse as time passes unless its causes are corrected or removed. As the constant dropping of water wears away the rock, so the slow and insidious causes wear away health and life.

A soap-box lecturer was once entertaining a crowd on Broadway, in New York City. He told the following story: "The superintendent of an institution for the feeble-minded sent an inmate into the basement to mop up the water from a faucet that accidentally had been left running. Later in the day the man was found mopping with the water still running full blast. 'You darned idiot, why don't you turn off the faucet,' shouted the superintendent. The simpleton grinned and replied: 'Nobody's paying me to turn 'er off. I'm gettin' two bits an hour to mop 'er up.' "