The Power of Healing
Herbert M. Shelton
"Dr Shelton's Hygienic Review" August 1964


        Our ancestors said that sickness was of God, but there were also many among
them who asserted that it was of the Devil. The men of science say that
disease is due to the invasion of the body by foreign entities (germs and
viruses), a concept that is identical with the demon etiology of the past.
Whether disease is due to invasion of the body by one of the imps of Satan or
to its invasion by more material, if invisible organisms, the basic idea of
causation is the same. To the Hygienist sickness is a manmade state or
condition.

        It seems an unfortunate circumstance that in every age and in every
department of human activity and learning, truth must engage in a
death-grapple with fallacies, superstitions and popular vices and defeat and
route these before it can receive a respectable hearing. Perhaps there is
something to be said for the testing of truth by such a struggle, but it does
seem to delay the progress of mankind. The vital truths of Natural Hygiene
will be accepted as certainly as were the truths that the earth is round and
not flat and that the earth turns on its axis and the sun does not go around
the earth, although there remains much error to be combatted. We need not be
discouraged, although we may be excused our impatience with the slowness of
progress.

        Two of the errors that must be overcome is that disease exists per se, and
that it is a foe of life and that healing is accomplished by forces extrinsic
to the living organism. So long as these two superstitions rule the thinking
of mankind we will keep up a fight against fictional enemies on the one hand
and a futile search for cures on the other. Once we have learned to see
disease as remedial effort and healing as a spontaneous biological process
belonging to the living organism, we can cease our futilities and devote
ourselves to rational ways of caring for the sick and to rational ways of
preventing the evolution of illness.

        A standard text book of pathology says that "during his age-long struggle
for existence, man has developed defense mechanisms which enable him to
overcome many agents of injury occurring in his environment." While this
statement well expresses the reigning view of man and his past, and explains
that his powers of defense have been evolved, it completely fails to explain
how he managed to survive while lie was developing these defense mechanisms.

        It is my view that his defense mechanisms are endowments and not
developments, and that he possessed them from his origin. I go further and
say that it is my firm conviction that prehistoric man, possessed of greater
vigor, greater purity and acuteness of sense, and fewer perversions,
possessed more vigorous means of survival than his modern descendents. Man's
innate abhorrence for tobacco, for example, and his repulsion against it when
it is first introduced into his body, represents the workings of a defense
mechanism of major significance. Strong psychological factors, originating
with the ancient medical man and persisting to the present, cause us to
ignore the significance of this protest, so that other means of defense have
to be requisitioned and our whole sense of abhorrence is suppressed. This may
be applied equally to the thousands of other poisons man has been induced to
take into his body as friends.

        The absurd notion that the organismic convulsions (disease) and weaknesses
with which man suffers are of exotic origin is so crucial to the prosperity
of the medical profession that the physician is compelled, in sheer
self-defense, to contest with every weapon he can command, the verities that
the "diseases" listed in medical nosologies constitute climacteric
symptomatologies of subclinical impairments of spontaneous origin and that
these "diseases" cannot be mitigated or recovered from so long as the mode of
life that engenders them continues to be carried out. The physician must, at
all times, remain committed to the crotchet that "diseases" constitute
physiological miscarriages localized in particular organs - and that the
restitution of these organs to their original state is equivalent to the
eradication of human pathologies.

        Having traced all human pathology primarily to the excesses and deficiencies
of which our race is universally guilty, and secondarily to the resulting
poisoning, it seems unnecessary to argue that this poisoning, unless
counteracted, would constitute so fatal an affront to the body-total as to
lead to the speedy extinction of the race. The bare fact of the current
survival of man proves that the body's inherent restoratives are continually
operative to stave of collapse.

        The intrinsic forces of the living organism seek continually to reestablish
that fundamental physiological integrity without which individual existence
cannot endure. At the same time, the persistence of human malbionomic living
renders it equally patent that this restoration is being just as continually
annulled by the forces of disintegration set in motion by a mode of living
that violates every law of existence - forces that not only reinstate the
pathology as speedily as it is repaired, but do so in such a fashion as to
aggravate all aspects of human pathology.

        The many and varied symptom-complexes listed in medical text-hooks under the
rubric of disease are restorative and resistive processes the primary intent
of which is the elimination of toxin and the healing of damaged tissues. To
the extent that medical practice bends its efforts to the elimination of
these symptoms and symptom-complexes, by any other means than the removal of
their causes, it critically interferes with the processes of recovery.

        Since any organismic disturbance, whatever its origin or locus, constitutes
a menace to the organism's continued existence, it automatically occasions
the mobilization of the body's mechanisms of defense. The means of defense
and repair are, for the most part, more modifications (exaggerations and
diminutions) of the ordinary or normal actions and processes of life.
Coughing and sneezing, by which foreign substances and sources of irritation
and obstruction are expelled from the air passages, are but exaggerated forms
of expiration; diarrhea is but an exaggeration of the regular bowel action;
fever is but an exaggeration of the normal temperature of the body;
inflammation is but an exaggeration of the normal circulation in a part; pain
is but an exaggeration of the normal sense of feeling; prostration is a
reduction of normal muscular action; lack of desire for food and lack of
digestion is similar to prostration. The body behaves in its relations to
substances and conditions that are opposed to its welfare, in a manner to
preserve and restore its integrity.

        When we reduce fever, check a cough, suppress a diarrhea, "relieve" pain,
subdue vomiting, and interfere with the work of inflammation, we do battle,
not with the fictional entity that we think of as the disease that his
attacked the body, but with the forces of life. We cripple the defense
mechanism that is designed to save life and preserve integrity. If a tonsil
is enlarged, a thing that increases the defensive power of the tonsil, and we
remove it, we remove part of the body's first-line defenses. What we mistake
for an attack upon the body, by a foreign foe is part of the process of
healing and defense.

        Under the misguidance of the magician, man was led, slowly, to abandon
reliance upon his intrinsic biologic restoratives and to rely more and more
upon exotic substances and processes that further sicken the organism, under
the pretense of healing it. Even, if today he still mouths the ancient phrase
that "nature heals," he is unwilling to rely upon the intrinsic forces of
healing to restore him to health, but prefers the magic processes of the
physician, who is but the ancient magician in a modern dress. Man has been
conditioned by the physician to believe that he can find, even invent
restoratives that are superior to those intrinsic biologic defenses upon
which he relied throughout the long period of prehistory. Although in his
three thousand year search for exotic restoratives, he has sacrificed himself
and uncounted millions of his fellow-creatures to his schemes of salvation,
which, never any more than means of evanescent palliation, often murderous in
their effects, have invariably and inevitably aggravated his original
impairment and pathology.

        That man's unbiologic mode of living has not long ago returned him to the
ashes of extinction is due to the marvelous efficiency of counteracting
restoratives that operate within him, unknown to him, so that the scales of
existence are being continually loaded in favor of survival. This is to say
we have survived because we are being and have been continually healed.
Unfortunately, the therapeutic means and measures he has applied to himself
operate destructively so that his survival is always on the verge of
permanent annulment. Man's survival has been transformed into a fierce
struggle for mere existence.