There are numerous varieties of fruits in our country. The citrus fruits, such as oranges, grapefruits and pineapples, are superb as health builders. The fresh raw fruits can be used therapeutically to cure the chronic diseases that today are considered very serious as to causes and treatment.
The fresh raw fruits are the most delicious natural food products. They are really the best nutriments for mankind. If people only knew how to plan meals with fruits as basic courses!
Fruits should also be used fresh and raw rather than cooked, canned or frozen. Most of the fresh raw fruits consist of 90 per cent or more of water. The fruit sugars and flavors are pure, easily digestible, and contribute to the health of the organism. Fruits are also rich in vitamins and minerals when they are fresh and raw.
A number of fruits will be briefly enumerated. Apples, pears and avocados are available throughout the year, as well as oranges, grape-fruits, pineapples and lemons- In the summer there are additional varieties of delicious and wholesome fruits such as peaches, apricots, grapes and all sorts of berries.
Grapes have been used in this country and in Europe as a sort of cure-all for various diseases. It is not scientifically correct to make a panacea out of any one fruit. There is an objection to the consuming of several pounds of grapes a day by one person. The grape sugar cannot always be digested and assimilated. The body may therefore be overloaded with sugar and the excessive sugar in the blood and
tissues may produce a number of detrimental effects on the organism. A mixed fruit dietary, properly planned in relation to individual requirements, can be a very potent influence in regenerating a very sick person.
Unfortunately, there are wrong ideas and concepts prevalent in the much respected orthodox medical field regarding the relation between fresh raw fruits and diseases such as ulcer, and general undefined but distressing stomach and intestinal symptom-complexes.
The most important attribute of fresh raw fruits is the fact that they furnish stimulating chemicals to the stomach, the liver, the gall bladder, and the intestines and colon. In orthodox medicine there is one or another type of “digestant” often prescribed. Hydrochloric acid, gastric enzymes, pancreatic enzymes, “bile salts,” and other kinds of drug preparations are used for stomach and intestinal diseases with-out any success. Yet both big and small medical men are stubbornly resistant to the good methods that have been developed by the practitioners of non-drug medicine.
It is often the privilege of progressive physicians, who practice along natural lines, to treat some of the medically and surgically uncured. This writer has been privileged to treat very sick individuals after they were pronounced “incurable” by their medical and surgical specialists.
Furthermore, during my student days, I was fortunate in meeting the great internist, Dr. J. H. Tilden, while in search of knowledge that was better than the conventional. Dr. Tilden’s writings, as well as his institution, the Tilden Health School, where I was able to observe his great work from 1923 to 1925, opened to me a clear vista of rational thinking and practice in the healing arts and sciences. From the year 1923 until my graduation as a doctor of osteopathy in 1930, I was able to study the medical textbooks with intense concentration because I also had the illuminating Tilden writings with which to compare the conventional methods and concepts.
From the first day of my practice in 1931, I was able to accept the challenging problems of very sick patients and to treat them successfully because the Tilden teachings gave me a sounder foundation than I could get from the orthodox medical textbooks prescribed in the college curriculum. There is much conventional knowledge in standard medical textbooks. Pathology as a science is described exceedingly well. Any student who thoroughly studies his textbooks, as well as his required laboratory work, can learn much regarding the diseases of the body. The therapeutic approach in orthodox medicine is inadequate. Medical leaders and teachers do not even apply the fundamental principles that their textbooks in the basic sciences reveal. For example, the science of pathology describes the process of inflammation in a most illuminating way. If the medical student, as well as the physician and surgeon, applied this knowledge, many of the diseases that are classed as inflammations would be cured instead of being left with the individual sufferers.
The writer has been able successfully to treat sinus disease, bronchial asthma, the various forms of arthritis, inflammatory heart diseases, kidney diseases, stomach and intestinal diseases, and also skin affections. This achievement has been possible through application of the principles that Dr. J. H. Tilden stressed in his writingsand by the therapeutic use of fruits!
Although some conventional medical hospitals do use fruit juices with the objective of “curing” disease, they do this by adding the fruit juices to regular, ordinary meals. But fruit juices and fresh fruits must be used as the Diet and not simply as a supplement to ordinary breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners. A healthy person will digest his meals more efficiently if his first course and dessert is fresh fruit rather than canned or cooked fruit. In order to cure very serious inflammatory and degenerative diseases, all other foods except fresh raw fruits must be excluded. While the inflammatory and degenerative diseases are discussed elsewhere in the book, the subject warrants further discussion at this point. In inflammatory diseases, there is functional deficiency as a pronounced symptom. In the degenerative diseases there is actual organic change or anatomical change from normal to abnormal. For example, an inflamed stomach, even with ulcer, is considered an inflammatory disease symptom-complex. Stomach degeneration, where there are actual cellular changes from normal to abnormal, as in cancer, is classed as a degenerative disease. In fact, if an inflammatory disease remains uncured the affected structures take on organic degenerative changes. Dr. Kellogg of the Battle Creek Sanitorium, in many chapters of his great work The New Dietetics, stressed the extraordinary attributes of fruits.
One attribute of fruits is their property of neutralizing bacterial poisons. For this reason alone, people who are mildly sick or even severely sick should be put on fruit and fruit-juice diets for a period of a week to a month. Not much weight would be lost by the patient. The orthodox medical doctors seem to be concerned too much about the weight of their patients- They ought to be more concerned about the patient’s symptoms-of pain, pressure, chronic distressing fatigue, dyspnea (or shortness of breath), and other symptoms that characterize the early and late stages of chronic disease.
The acute diseases, those that are characterized by fever, such as flu, pneumonia and other acute infections, can also be treated more effectively by fresh raw fruit juices and fruits properly administered. Fruits indeed have medicinal properties. They could be the best won-der drugs! When a child is sick with a cold, he should not be given any farina, crackers, milk, or eggsfoods that are prescribed regularly in ordinary medical practice. This type of “feeding a cold” aggravates and complicates the illness. Yet medical doctors who consider them-selves up to date prescribe such “light diet” mixtures for the sick.
Fresh raw fruits and fruit juices should be used in accordance with the knowledge that has been gained by modern scientific methods in clinical research- The various drugs that are synthesized every so often are no substitute, and prove of little or no curative value. When used as The Diet, raw fruits have proved to be of pronounced curative value.