It is a sad truth that the general public today is not so well informed on personal health and hygiene as it should be.
Present day education offers a study of basic sciences such as biology, physics, mechanics and other special subjects that are essential to modern methods of industrial and social life. Personal health should also be one of the basic subjects of study in secondary schools and colleges. But it is not.
This is amazing. The well-educated, modern, technically trained individual may be well-versed in his special skills, sciences or arts, but he knows little of how to take care of his own body. Disease is prevalent among well-educated individuals as well as among ordinary and average people. This is a sad reflection on our educational system and the curriculums of our schools.
Knowledge about the care of the body and about what to eat for breakfast, dinner, and supper is easy to acquire, but it is not being taught as a special course of study. In this book, the author hopes to convey a practical message to the reader, a message relating to his or her personal health and well-being.
Having been a practicing physician for over 35 years, and having dealt with many individuals with health problems, I know that this book will have practical value for every reader. It is based on the study of both mild and severe problems of ill-health at the bedside and in office practice.
My little clinic, The Health Rest, has afforded me many special opportunities to study sick people. When does a sick person leave his regular physician or medical specialist? When sickness plagues the body despite medical and surgical forms, types and methods of treatment. My type of practice presented many a challenging problem. Every one of my patients has been studied as carefully and thoroughly as possible.
My treatment has always been administered on the basic principle of making the patient comfortable without drugging him or her into a sense of euphoria. Therefore my patients have been treated by means of fasting and restricted diets. Withholding of food, or eating simple fresh fruits and vegetables, aids the sick body in its vital processes of consuming and eliminating irritating cellular waste by-products that manifest themselves in disease symptoms.
I was confronted with the problems of treating arthritic patients, asthmatic patients, diabetics, and cases of stomach and intestinal disorders, skin diseases and other chronic types and forms of disease. Some of my patients came to me after they had been treated by specialists and by specializing institutions. The chronic diseases, when treated ordinary orthodox medical methods, remain uncured. I was successful in bringing about physiological changes from pathological conditions because I used food and fasting as medicine. Food and fasting as medicine have been used by pioneers in the medical field in the past. In fact, medical literature has some very valuable classics on the dietetic treatment of the difficult chronic diseases.
Around 1923 a monograph, Chronic Fatigue Intoxication, by Dr. E. O. Ochsner, was published. That eminent doctor of medicine was an outstanding surgeon. In the introduction to his volume of 190 pages, Dr. Ochsner pointed out that he had found among his many surgical cases the symptom-complex of chronic fatigue intoxication, which he defined as a distinct disease entity. Dr. Ochsner called this syndrome a specific disease. Surgery did not cure his fatigued patients because, as the great doctor observed, they suffered from retained cellular and tissue waste.
This writer agrees with Dr. Ochsner that chronic fatigue intoxication is a difficult disease problem, but it is not a disease per se.
Chronic fatigue intoxication is a symptom of any and all chronic diseases.
The diabetic patient is also a tired individual before clinical symptoms and signs of diabetes can be found.
The arthritic, the asthmatic, the sinus case are all tired. Fatigue as such is taken for granted as a kind of by-product of living. How many adults wake up refreshed from a night’s sleep? People reach for a cup of coffee or a cigarette or both, because the body craves stimulation or narcosis. For this reason I prohibit the taking of coffee or cigarettes during treatment. In fact, one of my provisions, or conditions for accepting a patient, is that no medication such as coffee, tea, or sedatives shall be used as part of my treatment.
In extremely sick cases, as in severe asthma, diabetes, or rheumatic and other kinds of heart disease, certain emergency drugs are used by the writer. Adrenalin, insulin, and mercuhydrin are three basic drugs that I have found necessary to use under special conditions. The sedatives, analgesics and narcotics are not used or required when the patient is treated by properly managed rest and diet, including vigilant nursing.
This book is therefore a product of practical hard work and considerable experience.
The chapters on general subjects, such as “Nutrition, Past and Present,” “Individual Health,” and “Diet in the Various Ill-Health Problems,” are included in order to give the reader a comprehensive idea of the various aspects of the health problem in relation to the food problem.
Other chapters deal with “Digestion and Assimilation of Food,” “The Place of Food in the Body,” “The Various Food Products and How to Use Them,” andvery important”Menus for Health” and “Recipes for Health.” My type of menu involves less work than ordinary cooking and, in spite of the fact that the food is prepared without any seasoning, it is extremely appetizing as well as healthful.
How did I learn the art of cooking? By being compelled to go into the kitchen to supervise the preparation of meals according to the principles of the New Knowledge of Nutrition. In the ordinary teachings of dietetics, these fundamental principles are hardly being touched on. For example, the New Knowledge of Nutrition teaches that sugar-containing foods may demineralize the bones, nerves and muscles of the body. Why then are sugar-containing foods prescribed by physicians for infant-feeding, invalid-feeding, etc.?
Animal-meat consumption is also considered by such eminent nutrition authorities as Professors H. C. Sherman and E. V. McCollum as “entirely unnecessary.” Professor McCollum states in his fine work, The New Knowledge of Nutrition, that human health can be built ideally by the use of the “protective foods.” Professor McCollum describes the protective foods as fresh fruits, fresh leafy vegetables, and dairy products.
Professors McCollum and Sherman proved experimentally that the lacto-vegetarian diet is the ideally possible human diet. Many a patient who suffered from one kind or another of malnutrition has been built up by the writer with dairy products, in addition to fresh fruits and vegeables.
The feeding of animal meats and fish to sick people is one of the tragic mistakes that is being made by the medical profession in the orthodox field. It is a tragic fact that this much respected profession ignores factual scientific knowledge about the suffering sick. It is in contradiction with the best dietary knowledge to allow surgical patients, after their operations, to eat in the same manner as they were in the habit of doing before their operations. Many sick persons, for this reason, wander away from their physicians and surgeons and seek advice, guidance, and treatment from unorthodox physicians and even from laymen. While these facts are taken up elsewhere in the book, I feel it is appropriate to stress them here.
Suffering humanity is entitled to a better deal. Only when physiclans give their patients the right service will they stop losing them to the “quacks.”
So-called “regular” medical practitioners have been sitting on high saddles. They allow themselves to condemn anybody or any group with different ideasor with better ideas than are in vogue among the powerful leading elements in the medical field.
But progress cannot be stopped. The newer schools of therapy are all products of progress. In fact, the best among the honest thinkers and writers on medical subjects concede that Nature is the only physician that can cure. The great French surgeon, Ambrose Pare, gained immortality for himself when he admitted that “God heals wounds” after the physician cleans and dresses them properly. The All-Powerful Medical Profession is presumptuous indeed when it claims that it has the sole prerogative to treat and “cure” the sick. At everyone else, – they fling the unjust and unfair epithet, quack.
When a patient is being treated by conventional medical methods for bronchial asthma and yet remains uncured for a decade or a score of years, isn’t that patient entitled to try a different method? When that different method proves effective in curing the patient, should his new physician be called a “quack”?
Honest open-mindedness on the part of the leaders and practitioners in the medical field (and this includes the minority, my own school of osteopathic medicine) compels giving up their prevalent attitude of indifference to and outright prejudice against individuals who have pioneered in newer methodsmethods that have proved to be clinically correct and effective in prolonging life and eradicating disease from the body!
The struggle of the pioneer in the health field is as formidable today as it was a century ago. The tactics of those in power are to keep the pioneers isolated in obscurity. This attitude is unfair both to the public and to science.
New drugs are acclaimed every year or every second year, and doctors are urged to try them for what ails the patient. Why not try new diets in the same generous open-minded spirit? Food cannot hurt anybody. Drugs often do hurt the guinea-pig patients.
The chapters that follow will, I hope, give the reader a measure of understanding of nutrition for health.