No doubt, it is this bravado of the initiated that keeps many a novice from the first plunge into the mysteries of Nature Cure.  If these timid ones only knew what they miss!

Business Versus Cure

From a business point of view it would, perhaps, be better to omit the cold water altogether.  It would certainly be much less trouble; but then, the rugged honesty of Father Kneipp, the champion of the cold-water treatment branch of German Nature Cure, has descended upon his followers and compels them to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to make use of everything that is likely to be of benefit to the patient and to effect a real and lasting cure.

Our friends, the osteopaths, have only a pitying smile for our arduous labors.  They ask:  “Why fool with cold water and drive patients away, when pleasant manipulations bring the business?” If we query in return:  “Do your pleasant manipulations cure obstinate chronic ailments?” They answer:  “We do not expect to cure them.  The effort involves too much labor and spoils the reputation of our work.  Not one in a hundred chronics has the patience and perseverance to be cured.  Besides, if a patient comes too long to the office for treatment he drives others away.”

Some of the most successful osteopaths in this city make it a rule not to treat a patient longer than six weeks or two months.

In a number of cases this may be sufficient to produce marked primary improvement, but it is not enough to launch the patient into a healing crisis and, therefore, does not produce a real cure because it does not remove the underlying causes of the disease.  If, after a while, the latent chronic condition again manifests in external symptoms, the patient returns for another course of treatment; he was “cured” so quickly before and thinks he will be helped again.

In justice to the osteopaths it must be said that we are not referring to those chronic diseases which are directly caused by lesions of the spine or other bony structures.  If such dislocations or subluxations be the sole cause of the trouble, their correction by manipulative treatment may produce a cure within a few weeks.

But notwithstanding the teachings of orthodox osteopathy, the majority of chronic ailments have their origin in other causes.  In most cases, the existing spinal lesions are themselves the result of other primary disease conditions which must be removed before the bony lesions will remain corrected.

The mode of treatment depends upon the object that is to be accomplished.  If it is to make the patient feel better with the least possible expenditure of time, money, personal effort and self-control on his part, and the least amount of exertion on the part of the physician or healer, then osteopathic manipulations or meta-physical formulas may be in order.  But if the object is to cure actually and permanently a deep-seated chronic disease, all the methods of the natural treatment, intelligently combined and adapted to the individual case, will be required in order to accomplish results.