Given half a chance the body will throw off toxic overburdens and cleanse itself.  And once the body has been cleansed of toxemia, disagreeable symptoms usually cease.  This means that to make relatively mild but unwanted symptoms lessen and ultimately stop it is merely necessary to temporarily cut back food intake, eating only what does not cause toxemia.  These foods I classify as cleansing, such as raw fruits and vegetables and their juices.  If the symptoms are extreme, are perceived as overwhelming or are actually life-threatening, detoxification can be speeded up by dropping back to only dilute raw juices or vegetable broth made only from greens, without eating the solids.  In the most extreme cases hygienists use their most powerful medicine:  a long fast on herb teas, or just water.  I will have a lot to say about fasting, later.

When acutely ill, the most important thing to do is to just get out of the body’s way, and let it heal itself.  In our ignorance we are usually our own worst enemy in this regard.  We have been very successfully conditioned to think that all symptoms are bad.  But I know from experience that people can and do learn a new way of viewing the body, an understanding that puts them at cause over their own body.  It allows you to be empowered in one more area of life instead of being dependent and at the mercy of other peoples decisions about your body.

Finally, and this is why natural medicine is doubly unpopular, to prevent the recurrence of toxemia and acute disease states, person must discover what they are doing wrong and change their life.  Often as not this means elimination of the person’s favorite (indigestible) foods and/or (stress-producing) bad habits.  Naturally, I will have a lot more to say about this later, too.

Chapter Three

Fasting

From The Hygienic Dictionary

Cure. [1] There is no “cure” for disease; fasting is not a cure.  Fasting facilitates natural healing processes.  Foods do not cure.  Until we have discarded our faith in cures, there can be no intelligent approach to the problems presented by suffering and no proper use of foods by those who are ill. Herbert Shelton, The Hygienic System, v. 3, Fasting and Sunbathing. [2] All cure starts from within out and from the head down and in reverse order as the symptoms have appeared._ Hering’s Law of Cure._ [3] Life is made up of crises.  The individual establishes a standard of health peculiarly his own, which must vary from all other standards as greatly as his personality varies from others.  The individual standard may be such as to favor the development of indigestion, catarrh, gout, rheumatic and glandular inflammations, tubercular developments, congestions, sluggish secretions and excretions, or inhibitions of various functions, both mental and physical, wherever the environmental or habit strain is greater