Nature Heals

The Natural Hygiene healing system

In-depth critique (part 2)

No herbs?

The aforequoted cancer patients' story also seems a "brilliant" example of Natural Hygiene "fanatical" thinking: i.e. rather than giving (even seriously) ill persons any so-called "palliatives", i.e. medicinal substances such as proven helpful herbs (which could possibly save their lives), Hygienists seem to "prefer" having people die when they break a new and unaccustomed diet and don't have the willpower and emotional strength to consistently stay on a raw-food regime (which latter regimen might indeed have "done the trick" of healing them, at least temporarily, as evidenced by a number of people having seemingly achieved a full healing from cancer by simple diet alone).

There are some powerful herbal remedies as well as energetic/emotional/spiritual approaches which apparently can exert a strong healing/vitalizing/detoxifying etc. influence (e.g. a number of people and animals have been healed of various afflictions by simple herbal approaches, compare for instance Herbs & Grasses Against Cancer), but, and it bears repeating, "rigid and purist" Natural Hygiene thinking will deny these helpers and even possible lifesavers to people, forcing them to either "do (eat raw only and fast) or die".

"Too bad for them" if they are emotionally too unstable or traumatised to consistently stick with an unaccustomed diet in the midst of temptations and lifelong conditioning to unwholesome foods...also "too bad" if their inbuilt self-healing powers don’t manage to restore their body to health...

As mentioned above, Natural Hygiene was born as a wholesome countermovement to the common drugging and other deleterious practices of medicine. In my eyes, it then went overboard in the other direction (probably to preserve the purity of what had become its dogma, i.e. "Nature and following Nature’s Laws heals, everything else harms", and to erect itself into THE system holding "all truth"^[3]).

Natural Hygiene has thus rejected out of hand ANY substance at all which human lore and historical experience have claimed to possess curative or healing virtues (defined by me as vitalizing/detoxifying/inducing perspiration etc. etc.).

And it may also be pointed out that the above example of a raw-food advocate describing Christmas dinner and ensuing days of "bad" diet as literally deadly seems to betray a rather simplistic cause-and-effect thinking.

Obviously the person must have something very much wrong with their body and energies to fatally succumb to such simple "negative" inputs (which on top are partially balanced by the pleasure undoubtedly derived from the consumption of the "deadly" foodstuffs, pleasurable feelings creating all kinds of good and beneficial hormones (compare Laughter is Medicine).

Last but not least, two of the best-known figures of Natural Hygiene, T.C. Fry and Herbert Shelton, died (at 70 and 89 respectively) from diseases they had been suffering from for some time.^[4]

Natural Hygiene’s contention that "remedies" (drugs etc.) hinder the self-healing of the body IS absolutely, critically and vitally correct in certain and possibly many if not most cases. As an example, read these excerpts from an article detailing the vital importance of noninterference with the body’s self-healing in the case of fevers healing the body, especially in virus infections.

My reply to 3: "All disease is the body’s beneficial attempt to shed toxins in order to regain health."

While this certainly seems true of all illness involving the shedding of toxins (such as colds with their abundant mucus discharge), according to some esoteric sources, disease can also be created by the "soul" to allow the indwelling spirit to leave physical existence, for instance in the presence of a (probably unconscious) death wish before an existence considered too unpleasant to be worth continuing.

A good example of this kind of determination to "go" may be found in those people who are healed from one disease only to succumb to a traffic accident shortly thereafter. Once the "death wish" is uncovered, addressed and healed, disease should no longer be unconsciously created.

My reply to 4: "The hygienic system/Natural Hygiene holds the ultimate answer to the healing of the human body."

From my reading, Natural Hygiene seems to hold much truth (also see my above intro).

Sadly, in its "rigid, dogmatic" variety, it is also flawed by its claim of being all-encompassing, i.e. holding all the answers and covering everything related to human health and recovery (closed-circuit thinking and theory).

The manner in which a "dogmatic" Natural Hygiene practitioner will recommend to follow "Nature’s way" only (diet, fasting, fresh air, etc.) and a conventional doctor will recommend following his/her drug/surgery approach, each AS THE ONLY WAY TO HEALTH AND RECOVERY, is in fact STRIKINGLY SIMILAR: both maintaining to hold ALL TRUTH^[3] regarding the healing of the human body (while implying or openly stating any and all other approaches to be in error).

Claiming to hold all truth in any one particular field of human exploration is a common human weakness, also known as hubris and dogmatism. It is practiced for instance by various religions with similar claims to holding "all truth".

Facts that don’t fit into the base dogma may be ignored or ironized out of existence (examples of this stance are Shelton’s nearly out-of-hand rejection of both herbs and "spiritual" healing, based on hardly any substantiated arguments; another example: the question "are bacteria and viruses villains or are they do-gooders since they help to clean out waste" seems to be simplistically reduced to "they are good/helpful to neutral" leaving out or denying any evidence to the contrary).

So obviously, this is exactly where I think both "dogmatic" Natural Hygiene practitioners and conventional doctors (or any other person, for that matter) are wrong: by pretending to have all the answers to healing, they exhibit hubris, dogmatism and closed-mindedness to anything which doesn‘t "fit".

This stance is likely to be based on a serious lack of humbleness and openness before the vast and still widely unknown field of healing.

After writing the above lines, I came across Chet Day’s obituary of T.C. Fry (formerly published at chetday.com/v4n7.pdf). T.C. Fry was a famous proponent of Natural Hygiene who died in 1996 at the age of 70 after having been ill for at least a year^[4]. In "The Life and Times of T.C. Fry", Chet Day arrives at astoundingly (or not so astoundingly) similar conclusions to mine:

"Unlike those who shout that they have the truth in whole, I say we can only glimpse pieces of it. How can any of us have the hubris to think we fully understand the intricate wonder of at least 75 trillion cells of each human body working in harmony one second after another for an entire lifetime?"

To conclude, here is a somewhat pertinent observation by Rudolf Just (1877–1948), one of the fathers of a reformist lifestyle and diet in Germany who observed the following characteristic in raw food circles: He found fanatical people holding a wrong inner attitude: "They are looking for recovery, rescue or even redemption/salvation via a strict ascetic diet...they are dangerously mistaken in trying to reform humanity through diet, i.e. from the outside."

Rudolf Just assigned priority to the spiritual over the physical and material, trying to lead sick people onto the path of recovery in a comprehensive or holistic sense: "Men who do not find the path of faith are in reality not being helped".

Addendum: Dr. Hamer’s "New Medicine" approach to the healing of cancer and Natural Hygiene

In perfect keeping with Natural Hygiene’s principles of "Nature heals" and "Disease is a healthy expression of the body’s efforts to heal itself", Dr. Hamer further enlarges upon them by including crucial emotional factors.

"From his personal experience — he himself has had cancer — and from those patients he took care of in many university clinics, Dr. HAMER established over the years that there is always a definite syndrome at the source of cancer, and not just a kind of stress. It requires a strong stimulus, a brutal psychic trauma, which hits the patient as a major event in his life, an acute dramatic conflict, lived in complete psychic isolation."

"Dr. Hamer discovered that not only cancers, but also the cancer ‘equivalents’ ulcer and hypofunction were elicited through this same pathway. He also found that Nature handles the development and recuperation of all these conditions perfectly on its own (except in rare, extreme cases), and that all that's needed is to support the individual through the stages. Practical help, psychotherapy, biologically correct nutrition and fasting, those became the cornerstones of the new treatment."

For details see Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer's German New Medicine.

Further information on Natural Hygiene

For much well-researched scientific information on Natural Hygiene and humans’ natural diet see www.beyondveg.com/cat/nat-hyg/index.shtml .

Their article “Is Cooked Food Poison? Looking at the Science on Raw vs. Cooked Foods” found at www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1a.shtml discusses in-depth the validity of oft-repeated statements re Natural Hygiene and raw and cooked diets including such claims as Howell's theory of "food enzymes," Kouchakoff's "digestive leukocytosis," does cooking make minerals "inorganic" or less assimilable, and the science behind the Pottenger's Cats experiment.

An International Natural Hygiene Society launched on 1–1–2004 (www.naturalhygienesociety.org) aims to "put true science back in Natural Hygiene and facilitate debate and discussion" and to "allow all hygienic doctors to join the discussion, not only a dominant few." It "intends to explore Natural Hygiene and the Laws of Life in all their many facets. To become again a grassroots organization that is inclusive rather than exclusive and most importantly in the words of Dr. Shelton to ‚Let the truth be known even though the heavens fall‘." (Sadly, this initiative seems to have been discontinued sometime in 2019.)

... and for the best, easiest, and least expensive ways I know to heal cancer

after studying the subject for some twenty years, click here.

Footnotes

3 An all-too-common human failing with far-reaching consequences, see On Life, Truth & Philosophy: Quotes.

4 Compare Why do some health (food) "gurus" get sick?.