Nature Cure by Henry Lindlahr (best short books to read txt) 📕

The Treatment of Chronic Diseases

Let us now consider the best methods for producing the healing crises referred to in the preceding chapters, that is, the best methods for treating the chronic forms of disease.

We found that acute diseases represent Nature’s efforts to purify and regenerate the human organism by means of inflammatory feverish processes, while in the chronic condition the system is not capable of arousing itself to such acute reactions. The treatment must differ accordingly.

The Nature Cure treatment of acute diseases tends to relieve inner congestion, to facilitate the radiation of heat and the elimination of morbid matter and systemic poisons from the body. In this way it eases and palliates the feverish processes and keeps them below the danger point without in any way checking or suppressing them.

While our methods of treating acute diseases have a sedative effect, our treatment of chronic diseases is calculated to stimulate, that is, to arouse the sluggish organism to greater activity in order to produce the acute inflammatory reactions or healing crises.

If the unity of diseases as demonstrated in a previous chapter is a fact in Nature, it must be possible to treat all chronic as well as all acute diseases by uniform methods, and the natural remedies must correspond to the primary causes of disease.

The Natural Methods of Treatment

Natural methods of treatment may be divided into two groups:

Those which the patient can apply himself, provided he has been properly instructed in their correct selection, combination and application. Those which must be applied by a competent Nature Cure physician.

To the first group belong diet (fasting), bathing and other water applications, correct breathing, general physical exercise, corrective gymnastics, air and sun baths, mental therapeutics.

To the second group belong special applications of the methods mentioned under group 1, and in addition to these hydropathy, massage, manipulation, medical treatment in the form of homeopathic medicines, nonpoisonous herb extracts and the vitochemical remedies, and most important of all, the right management of healing crises which develop under the natural treatment of chronic diseases.

Diagnosis

Correct diagnosis is the first essential to rational treatment. Every honest physician admits that the “Old School” methods of diagnosis are, to say the least, unsatisfactory and uncertain, especially in ascertaining the underlying causes of disease.

Therefore we should welcome any and all methods of diagnosis which throw more light on the causes and the nature of disease conditions in the human organism.

Two valuable additions to diagnostic science are now offered to us in osteopathy and in the Diagnosis from the Eye.

Osteopathy furnishes valuable information concerning the connection between disease conditions and misplacements of vertebrae and other bony structures, contractions or abnormal relaxation of muscles and ligaments, and inflammation of nerves and nerve centers.

The Diagnosis from the Eye is as yet a new science, and much remains to be discovered and to be better explained. We do not claim that Nature’s records in the eye disclose all the details of pathological tendencies and changes, but they do reveal many disease conditions, hereditary and acquired, that cannot be ascertained by any other methods of diagnosis.

Omitting consideration of everything that is at present speculative and uncertain, we are justified in making the following statements:

The eye is not only, as the ancients said, “the mirror of the soul,” but it also reveals abnormal conditions and changes in every part and organ of the body. Every organ and part of the body is represented in the iris of the eye in a well-defined area. The iris of the eye contains an immense number of minute nerve filaments, which through the optic nerves, the optic brain centers and the spinal cord are connected with and receive impressions from every nerve in the body. The nerve filaments, muscle fibers and minute blood vessels in the different areas of the iris reproduce the changing conditions in the corresponding parts or organs. By means of various marks, signs, abnormal colors and discolorations in the iris, Nature reveals transmitted disease taints and hereditary lesions. Nature also makes known, by signs, marks and discolorations, acute and chronic inflammatory or catarrhal conditions, local lesions, destruction of tissues, various drug poisons and changes in structures and tissues caused by accidental injury or by surgical mutilations. The Diagnosis from the Eye positively confirms Hahnemann’s theory that all acute diseases have a constitutional background of hereditary or acquired disease taints. This science enables the diagnostician to ascertain, from the appearance of the iris alone, the patient’s inherited or acquired tendencies toward health and toward disease, his condition in general and the state of every organin particular. Reading Nature’s records in the eye, he can predict the different healing crises through which the patient will have to pass on the road to health. The eye reveals dangerous changes in vital parts and organs from their inception, thus enabling the patient to avert any threatening disease by natural living and natural methods of treatment. By changes in the iris, the gradual purification of the system, the elimination of morbid matter and poisons, and the readjustment of the organism to normal conditions under the regenerating influences of natural living and treatment are faithfully recorded.

This interesting subject will be treated more fully in a separate volume (~Iridiagnosis,~ published in 1919 by Dr. Lindlahr). In this connection I shall confine myself to relating briefly the story of the discovery of this valuable science.

The Story of a Great Discovery

Dr. Von Peckzely, of Budapest, Hungary, discovered Nature’s records in the eye, quite by accident, when a boy ten years of age.

Playing one day in the garden at his home, he caught an owl. While struggling with the bird, he broke one of its limbs. Gazing straight into the owl’s large, bright eyes, he noticed, at the moment when the bone snapped, the appearance of a black spot in the lower central region of the iris, which area he later found to correspond to the location of the broken leg.

The boy put a splint on the broken limb and kept the owl as a pet. As the fracture healed, he noticed that the black spot in the iris became overdrawn with a white film and surrounded by a white border (denoting the formation of scar tissues in the broken bone).

This incident made a lasting impression on the mind of the future doctor. It often recurred to him in later years. From further observations he gained the conviction that abnormal physical conditions are portrayed in the eyes.

As a student, Von Peckzely became involved in the revolutionary movement of 1848 and was put in prison as an agitator and ringleader. During his confinement, he had plenty of time and leisure to pursue his favorite theory and he became more and more convinced of the importance of his discovery. After his release, he entered upon the study of medicine, in order to develop his important discoveries and to confirm them more fully in the operating and dissecting rooms. He had himself enrolled as an interne in the surgical wards of the college hospital. Here he had ample opportunity to observe the eyes of patients before and after accidents and operations, and in that manner he was enabled to elaborate the first accurate Chart of the Eye.

Since Von Peckzely gave his discoveries to the world, many well-known scientists and conscientious observers in Austria, Germany and Sweden have devoted their lives to the perfection of this wonderful science. The regular schools of medicine, as a body, have ignored and will ignore it, because it discloses the fallacy of their favorite theories and practices, and because it reveals unmistakably the direful results of chronic drug poisoning and ill-advised operations.

In our work we do not confine ourselves to the Diagnosis from the Eye, but combine with it the diagnostic methods (physical diagnosis) of the regular school of medicine and the osteopathic diagnosis of bony lesions, as well as microscopic examinations and chemical analyses.

Thus any one of these methods supplements and verifies all the others. In this way only is it possible to arrive at a thorough and definite understanding of the patient’s condition.

The “Key to the Diagnosis from the Eye” outlines with precision the areas of the iris as they correspond to the various parts of the body. This colored chart of the iris has been prepared by Dr. H. Lahn, author of “The Diagnosis From the Eye,” and can be obtained from the Kosmos Publishing Co., 2112 Sherman Ave., Evanston, Ill.