Recompense for obedience to natural law, and punishment for its violation, are the invariable order of the universe, and are nowhere so effectively and emphatically demonstrated as in the cause and cure of the condition called disease.

Nature's protest against unsuitable building material.

There are certain laws which, if obeyed, will build the human body to its highest efficiency of energy, vitality and strength; but in order to obey these laws, one must know them, and in order to know them one must pass through the long and arduous mill of experience, or else learn from one who has done so.

Pain is a warning that something is wrong with the human mechanism, and he who tries to silence this signal with medicine will be punished for two wrongs instead of one. Nature tolerates no trifling, no deception; her laws are inexorable, her penalties inevitable.

Multitudes of people are convinced that there is something wrong with their eating. Instead of food giving them the highest degree of mental and physical strength, which it should do, it actually produces ills and bodily disorders; moreover, not knowing the cause, people have no conception of a remedy other than drugs. It is amazing when one thinks how man, for two thousand years, has treated disease. Instead of studying causes and endeavoring to remove them, he has treated symptoms and symptoms only. It is generally known that the practise of medicine consists in treating symptoms rather than causes. For example, nearly all headaches - one of our common afflictions - are caused indirectly by impaired digestion, faulty secretion and excretion, yet the drug stores and Materia Medica (the Bible of the profession), are laden with "headache cures," all of which act only upon the symptoms. The whole system of drugging people when they are sick is merely a method of quieting the signals - of killing or paralyzing the messengers. Most drugs, taken into the human body, are merely diminutive explosives, the effect of which is destructive. They are like a lash cruelly applied to a willing servant who lags from sheer exhaustion.

Treating symptoms instead of causes.

Since symptoms are really the language of Nature, if we learn to interpret them, we need never err in diagnosis, and consequently never err in getting directly at the causes, as we must do in order to "cure." A drug that could cure a disorder caused by wrong feeding would perform a miracle. It would reverse one of the fixed laics of the universe. It would produce an effect without a cause. Nature works along the lines of least resistance, and points out with unerring certainty the best, the cheapest, and the easiest way to live. Health was originally called "ease." People who did not have health were in disgrace or "diseased."