We live continually under the depressing fear of disease and death, though we seldom realize this.

We would even indignantly deny this imputation, and insist that we are not afraid to die, though most of us are willing to admit the fear of developing disease that may make of us a less efficient machine than we now are.

We ever fear those things that we do not understand, for the very reason that we have learned to expect catastrophe from sources not anticipated.

If we fully understand what disease is, how it originates, if we are familiar with the only avenues through which this can come to us, then what have we to fear except ourselves?

Patients afflicted with neurasthenia, when everything is feared and misunderstood, are frequently afraid to be left in contact with a revolver or knife lest they do themselves harm; if normal these things would not suggest self-destruction.

We look about us and see the apparently well and strong taken out of what seems to be health, and precipitated into a serious illness, perhaps dying, as a result of something that to us is a great mystery, and we naturally think our own chances not so good as we could wish.

These fears sometimes grow so big that we develop a state of hypochondria, or self-fear, self-analysis, an ingrown dread of some mysterious thing that is going wrong with our insides.

These hypochondriacs are to be pitied, for their troubles are to them very real, yet they have probably not so far developed into recognizable disease.

Sanatoriums are well filled with these people, and they go from one specialist to another, from one clinic to another, one region or sanatorium to another, told everywhere that there is nothing wrong, . because there is as yet no organic change evident in the body.

An attorney of the writer's acquaintance was in just this state, flunking every hard case that came to him because he felt unable to handle it successfully, losing what was once the best law practice in his city because of this fact, yet no one able to find anything wrong with him.

He even went to a world famous clinic, believing that in this wonderful clinic surely they could tell him why he was so ill, yet here again they told him that he was as sound as a button.

He should have been pleased, reassured with this verdict, but he wasn't for he knew he was sick, and it merely deepened his conviction that doctors do not know much anyway.

It was about this time that in despair he took up the study of foods along these lines of acid-alkali balance, and it then dawned on him that he was suffering from acidosis, and by eating of vital basic foods he soon regained his lost pep and confidence, and his practice reflected this in a very short time, so that again he enjoys the distinction of being the leading attorney in his city.

Everywhere he went he was handed the same advice, not to work so hard, and always he replied that for four years he had been flunking his work, had been taking long vacations, playing golf, staying much outdoors, yet he would return from a vacation just as tired as when he left, and his work was no easier for him when he again entered his office.

This was bound to be true, for he took with him on vacation the same habits of eating; he brought them all back with him; he took his fatigue and blues and depression with him; he brought these same end-results back with him, and so he would have continued to do, had he not been of the thinking, analytical type of mind and figured out his whole trouble himself.

In a sense this is prevention and in another it is cure, for the thing that was troubling him was acidosis and this was cured, and not only so but bound to stay cured, cured radically as we say.

Yet this cure was in reality prevention, for there was on the way, and at no great distance, disease, for the bars were down, the system susceptible to any sort of germ invasion or infection, and his changed habits of eating eradicated the cause, thus preventing the development of disease.

The specialists can now give him the laugh, and say "I told you there was nothing the matter with you," but wasn't there after all much the matter with him?

From his standpoint he is in position to give the specialists the laugh, for now he can point to his renewed vigor and be sure that these wise men overlooked something that really ailed him.

This was stopping the little leak before it developed into a big leak.

Prevention is better than cure, just as it is better to stop the little leak before so much water has entered the boat that it is in danger of sinking.

The writer has known a number of other thousands of cases, of which the above is typical, who had traveled for years from one supposed authority to another, always to be told the same thing: "There's nothing the matter with you."

All the time these people knew that one does not degenerate from a strong man or woman that knew no fear of tomorrow into a whining, fearful pessimist without something radically wrong going on inside, for such declines are more often not traceable to some outside effect than otherwise, and such change does come from very definite states of the interior of a man.

These cases go on for years, gradually developing the most hopeless outlook, going from bad to worse, filling the sanatoria, too often the insane asylums, too often by far the suicide's grave, and all because no one understood that one can actually be sick without evident organic changes or definite pathology.

These cases start with a period of unaccountable fatigue, their first step in degeneration, and as a rule the stronger they are the more depressing is this sensation, for they have once been strangers to it, and its coming takes out of them something that before was their prime activating motive for work.

Is it any wonder that irritability develops here, that one gets as cross as a bear, that he forms the idea that the whole world is against him?