NATURAL HYGIENE: THE SCIENCE AND FINE ART OF HEALTHFUL LIVING
By Dr. T.C. Fry and Dr. David Klein
Natural Hygiene, or Healthful Living, is the art and science of living healthfully in accord with our natural biological heritage. Natural Hygiene embodies those principles which guide us to correct living practices. It is a health system of cooperating with nature to allow our self-healing powers to fully express themselves, enabling the body to rejuvenate and establish its highest level of health. Hygiene literally means “the science of health.”
Natural hygiene is about enhancing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being through education and right living. It provides us with a simple, holistic, living awareness system for regaining and maintaining superb human health and beauty. Hygiene is personally empowering and liberating. It teaches independence and rational action. It banishes fear and ignorance regarding human health and how to keep it. Ultimately, it is about freedom.
Natural hygiene always refers to nature as its mentor and teacher. When wholistic, comprehensive understanding is required, one must refer back to nature in its pristine majesty as the final authority. Because present-day life seems to be losing touch with those conditions which made life possible, natural hygiene brings us back to the garden so to speak. We should strive to meet life's requirements and to smoothly balance them in all aspects so that we can easily lead a joyous and fulfilling existence.
Natural hygiene concerns itself with those principles and truths applicable to human life so that we may wisely apply them to our lives. We are of the firm conviction that only by living healthfully can we realize the loftiest joys, peace of mind, and blissful connection with all of creation which is our birthright.
Animals in nature are creatures of instinct. Following the guidance of instinct, they are correctly self-directed to meet their needs. They thrive optimally in accord with their environmental and genetic possibilities. Discovering and attuning to our natural instincts is part and parcel of natural hygiene. Our inborn guiding instincts always tend toward healthful and constructive living when they are unclouded and given proper attention. It is ignorance of our instincts and the laws of life that creates our sickness and suffering.
In presenting the concept that health is normal and natural, natural hygienists emphatically refute the idea that disease is inevitable in our lives. We contend that disease will not occur unless there is sufficient cause. Health maintenance is an unceasing process in every organism. When the organism is overwhelmed by toxic substances beyond its ability to eliminate them in normal course, the body institutes emergency action to effect expulsion of the toxic burden. This crisis is called “sickness” or “disease.” Toxic materials accumulate in the body from two sources:
1. From unexpelled body wastes that are endogenously generated as a normal part of our metabolism; and
2. From exogenous materials ingested and partially or wholly retained due to inability to cope with the eliminative load.
All the needs of normal physiology are present in states of disease and are required to be supplied to the end that organic and functional integrity may be preserved or restored. No piecemeal plan of care can possibly succeed in restoring health. Hygienic care comprehends not only a regulation of the diet but a synthesis and coordination of all the factor elements of normal living: drinking, breathing, sunning, temperature, clothing, exercise, rest, sleep, emotional factors and more. Nothing short of a total regulation of the way of life can produce ideal results.
All processes of recovery or healing are but extensions and modifications of the processes that preserve health. The materials and processes employed in caring for the sick must be in consonance with physiology and compatible with all other useful measures. A sane method of caring for the sick will not force the body to utilize substances that are not subject to its metabolic processes.
Our biological nature—ie: the makeup (structure, function, and living essence) of our bodies—determines our needs and how we should meet them. Health is our natural state of being. Disease processes (or illnesses) are perfectly natural responses enacted by the body for the purpose of detoxifying, rebalancing, and adapting to harmful influences and healing. The condition of health (or wellness) is only achieved by living healthfully—ie: satisfying our mental/emotional/physiological/spiritual needs.
The hygienic health system of self-healing has a 200-year track record, establishing it as the most effective healing system ever known to man. The true hygienic art consists of applying to the living system whatever materials and conditions it can use under the circumstances and not in the administration of poisons which it must resist and expel. Drugs are themselves causes of disease and produce disease whenever given. They cure nothing. The drug system endeavors to make the sick well by administering poisons which make well persons sick.
Natural hygiene, on the contrary, restores the sick to health by the means that preserve health in well persons. Disease is caused by violations of the laws and conditions of life. The hygienic system stops the violations and supplies healthful conditions. Drug medication adds to the causes of destruction and metamorphoses acutely into chronic disease where it does not kill outright. The attempt to cure disease by adding to its causes is irrational and absurd. Hygienic care involves the proper use of all hygienic materials and influences of nature but rejects all poisons. There is, therefore, between the hygienic system and the drug system an irrepressible conflict. If one is true, the other is false.
We must eliminate the dead weight of false knowledge and ideas that we carry with us each moment. Using treatments, drugs, herbs, or anything else abnormal and unnatural to the body can interfere with healthful bodily functions but, under no circumstances, can these agencies heal the body. Because these devitalizing agencies depress and suppress symptoms (or evidences) of body healing efforts, and because the body discontinues vital activities to contend with these agencies which makes the symptoms disappear, the anti-vital effects of drugs and treatments are mistaken for healing effects. Nothing but the body can heal itself.