These incurables had been exceedingly trying.  More than once one or another had quit, discouraged and disgusted, only to return, knowing that, after all, Nature Cure was their only hope.  After they left us, we lost track of them and often wondered how they were getting on.  Imagine our pleasant surprise when all three were reported by the newcomers as being in good health.  What if it did take months or even years to produce the desired results?  What would have been the fate of these three patients if it had not been for slow Nature Cure?

Discouraged patients frequently ask:  “Why do others recover so quickly when I show so little improvement?  This cure seems to be all right for some diseases, but evidently it does not fit my case.”

This is defective reasoning.  True Nature Cure fits every case because it includes everything good in natural healing methods.  In stubborn cases Nature Cure is not to blame for the slow and unsatisfactory results:  the difficulty lies in the character and advanced stage of the disease.

Chapter XXIII

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.