Healing crises always occur after a period of marked improvement.  As the vital force builds up during the healing process, the body decides it now has obtained enough energy to throw off some accumulated toxins, and forcefully pushes them out through a typical and usually previously used route of secondary elimination, such as the nose, lungs, stomach, intestines, skin, or perhaps produces a flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches and pains, etc.  Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has merely accelerated its elimination process.  Do not attempt to suppress any of these symptoms, don’t even try to moderate fever, which is the body’s effective way to burn out a virus or bacteria infection, unless it is a dangerously high fever (over 102 degree Fahrenheit).  Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the person into a cool/cold bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold water sponge baths.  The good news is that healing crises usually do not last long, and when they are past you feel better than you did before the crisis.

Asthmatics seem to have the worst crises.  I have had asthmatics bring up a quart of obnoxious mucous from their lungs every night for weeks.  They have stayed awake all night for three nights continuously coughing and choking on the material that was being eliminated.  After that clearing-out process they were able to breath much more freely.  Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitis have nothing but non-stop pussy discharge from their sinuses for three weeks.  Some of this would run down the throat and cause nausea.  All I could say to encourage the sufferer was that it needed to come out and to please stand aside and let the body work its magic.  These fasters were not grateful until the sinus problem that had plagued them since childhood disappeared.

The interesting thing about healing crises are that the symptoms produced retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something entirely unknown to the patient.  Usually they are old, familiar somatics, often complaints that haven’t bothered the faster for many years.  The reason the symptom is familiar but is not currently a problem is because as the body degenerates it loses vital force; with less vital force it loses the ability to create such acute detoxification episodes in non-life-threatening secondary elimination routes.  The degenerated body makes less violent efforts to cleanse, efforts that aren’t as uncomfortable.  The negative side of this is that instead of creating acute discomfort in peripheral systems, the toxemia goes to more vital organs where it hastens the formation of life-threatening conditions.