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Spiritual Gifts, Volume 4a
Many are living in violation of the laws of health, and are ignorant
of the relation their habits of eating, drinking, and working sustain to
their health. They will not arouse to their true condition until nature
protests against the abuses she is suffering, by aches and pains in the
system. If, even then, the sufferers would only commence the work
right, and would resort to the simple means they have neglected—
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the use of water and proper diet, nature would have just the help she
requires, and which she ought to have had long before. If this course is
pursued, the patient will generally recover, without being debilitated.
When drugs are introduced into the system, for a time they may
seem to have a beneficial effect. A change may take place, but the
disease is not cured. It will manifest itself in some other form. In
nature’s efforts to expel the drug from the system, intense suffering is
sometimes caused the patient. And the disease, which the drug was
given to cure, may disappear, but only to re-appear in a new form,
such as skin diseases, ulcers, painful diseased joints, and sometimes
in a more dangerous and deadly form. The liver, heart and brain are
frequently affected by drugs, and often all these organs are burdened
with disease, and the unfortunate subjects, if they live, are invalids for
life, wearily dragging out a miserable existence. Oh, how much that
poisonous drug cost! If it did not cost the life, it cost quite too much.
Nature has been crippled in all her efforts. The whole machinery is out
of order, and at a future period in life, when these fine works which
have been injured, are to be relied upon to act a more important part in
union with all the fine works of nature’s machinery, they cannot readily
and strongly perform their labor, and the whole system feels the lack.
These organs, which should be in a healthy condition, are enfeebled,
the blood becomes impure. Nature keeps struggling, and the patient
suffers with different ailments, until there is a sudden breaking down
in her efforts, and death follows. There are more who die from the use
of drugs, than all who could have died of disease had nature been left
to do her own work.
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
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they understood the disease perfectly, they are considered by impa-
tient friends, and by the sick, as incompetent physicians. Therefore