Health - Your Birthright

Health--
Your Birthright

There is no cure for birth or death
save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana

   Health is the birthright of all living things in their natural environment. It is guaranteed by the laws of Nature while ever those laws are respected.

   But we conceited humans, because we have dammed a few rivers and cut a few canals, have succeeded in deluding ourselves that we have mastered Nature. And because we have changed a few species of plants and animals to our advantage, and have invented heart transplants and so on, we further delude ourselves that we know better than Nature and can do better on our own. And that's why we have been deprived of our most precious birthright--good health from birth to old age.

   In nature there are neither rewards or punishments.
   There are consequences.
      Robert Ingersoll

   It's as simple as that. People who are never sick and who live long are not lucky--they, knowingly or unknowingly, have merely followed habits of life in accord with Nature's simple guidelines. Their good health is not a reward, it is a consequence--natural and predictable. By the same token, people who get sick from time to time or even all of the time are not unlucky; they are not in any sense unfortunate victims of disease--their ill-health is merely a predictable consequence of things they are doing wrong.

   The concept of natural health is simple and unshakeable, and can be proven in a very short space of time. The concept is:

1. Good health is the normal state of all living things and will always be maintained in the absence of unnatural influences.
2. In sound health, the defensive systems of the body are capable of easily repelling and destroying any potentially harmful organism (germ or virus) that may be encountered.
3. Disease of any kind (infectious or metabolic) can only eventuate if a person is subjected to adverse influences such as malnutrition, stress, etc, to the extent of exceeding the body's capacity to cope.
4. Providing the vital organs retain some function, then whatever the state of illness or injury, once the body is freed of the adverse influences responsible, it will immediately, without any outside help, commence to restore itself. And if at the same time optimum conditions of nutrition, sunshine, fresh air and rest are provided, the restoration will proceed at a surprisingly rapid rate.

   These principles are fixed and unfailing, and can be observed working in any unspoiled environment in which trees, plants and animals exhibit constant vigorous health, and death occurs only through injury or old age.

   Why do humans get sick? Why do we need doctors, dentists and hospitals? The human body in proper condition is as tough and germ resistant as that of any animal in the wild, and the only reason it becomes frail and susceptible to disease is that, in our civilized enclosures, we subject ourselves all the time to so many unnatural and harmful influences, the most harmful of them being the cooked and otherwise denaturalized food we eat. So with digestion overworked and with body chemistry not right, our health diminishes and symptoms of various malfunctions appear, such as head colds and blemishes in our early years, proceeding to the conventional problems of the middle aged and elderly.

Reclaiming Your Birthright

   The key to reclaiming your birthright and powering your way back to topline health and vigor is not that you have to do anything very special. You don't need to buy lots of herbs or meditate or have acupuncture.

   All you have to do is to STOP doing the things that are doing you harm, whereupon your body, given favorable circumstances and with its inbuilt wisdom, will soon restore itself.

   That is simple-but there are pitfalls, the main one being that the world is full of conflicting advice, most of it either only half right and a lot of it totally wrong, which means you must sift all the information you are offered regardless of its source. Remember: opinions only become facts when they are proven. To demonstrate this point, the chapters which follow describe just how mistaken many of our traditional beliefs are--beliefs about nutrition, germs and viruses, disease and medicine--which misconceptions, while held on to, prevent any chance of a full comprehension of our subject. Other information follows as well, of course, and as Sherlock Holmes said to his friend Dr Watson (or words to the same effect): 'Whenyou have eliminated all that is false then whatever remains must be the truth.'