Avoid the Use of Poisonous Drugs
[
The Ministry of Healing, 126, 127
(1905).]
A practice that is laying the foundation of a vast amount of disease
and of even more serious evils, is the free use of poisonous drugs.
When attacked by disease, many will not take the trouble to search out
the cause of their illness. Their chief anxiety is to rid themselves of
pain and inconvenience. So they resort to patent nostrums, of whose
real properties they know little, or they apply to a physician for some
remedy to counteract the result of their misdoing, but with no thought
of making a change in their unhealthful habits. If immediate benefit is
not realized, another medicine is tried, and then another. Thus the evil
continues.
Drugs Do Not Cure Disease
People need to be taught that drugs do not cure disease. It is true
that they sometimes afford present relief, and the patient appears to
recover as the result of their use; this is because nature has sufficient
vital force to expel the poison and to correct the conditions that caused
the disease. Health is recovered in spite of the drug. But in most cases
the drug only changes the form and location of the disease. Often the
effect of the poison seems to be overcome for a time, but the results
remain in the system, and work great harm at some later period.
By the use of poisonous drugs, many bring upon themselves life-
long illness, and many lives are lost that might be saved by the use of
natural methods of healing. The poisons contained in many so-called
remedies create habits and appetites that mean ruin to both soul and
body. Many of the popular nostrums called patent medicines, and even
[90]
some of the drugs dispensed by physicians, act a part in laying the
foundation of the liquor habit, the opium habit, the morphine habit,
that are so terrible a curse to society.
104