Chapter 3
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Very many lives have been sacrificed by physicians’ administering
drugs for unknown diseases. They have no real knowledge of the exact
disease which afflicts the patient. But physicians are expected to know
in a moment what to do, and unless they act at once as though they
understood the disease perfectly, they are considered by impatient
friends, and by the sick, as incompetent physicians. Therefore, to
gratify erroneous opinions of the sick and their friends, medicine must
be administered, experiments and tests tried, to cure the patient of
the disease of which they have no real knowledge. Nature is loaded
with poisonous drugs which she cannot expel from the system. The
physicians themselves are often convinced that they have used pow-
erful medicines for a disease which did not exist, and death was the
consequence.
Physicians are censurable, but they are not the only ones at fault.
The sick themselves, if they would be patient, diet and suffer a little,
and give nature time to rally, would recover much sooner without
the use of any medicine. Nature alone possesses curative powers.
Medicines have no power to cure, but will most generally hinder nature
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in her efforts. She, after all, must do the work of restoring. The sick are
in a hurry to get well, and the friends of the sick are impatient. They
will have medicine, and if they do not feel that powerful influence upon
their systems their erroneous views lead them to think they should
feel, they impatiently change for another physician. The change often
increases the evil. They go through a course of medicine equally as
dangerous as the first, and more fatal, because the two treatments do
not agree, and the system is poisoned beyond remedy.
But many have never experienced the beneficial effects of water,
and are afraid to use one of Heaven’s greatest blessings. Water has
been refused persons suffering with burning fevers, through fear that
it would injure them. If, in their fevered state, water had been given
them to drink freely, and applications had also been made externally,
long days and nights of suffering would have been saved, and many
precious lives spared. But thousands have died with raging fevers
consuming them, until the fuel which fed the fever was burnt up, the
vitals consumed, and have died in the greatest agony, without being
permitted to have water to allay their burning thirst. Water, which
is allowed a senseless building to put out the raging elements, is not
allowed human beings to put out the fire which is consuming the vitals.