CHAPTER IV.
PSYCHOTHERAPY.
A science applied to diseases which are of a purely mental origin and which sooner or later will affect the body. All chronic physical diseases caused by physical injury will in time become mental. Here material science, with or without mental treatment, will bring relief. The treatment is not at all comfortable and (in most cases) a housecleaning process. The liver is the greatest filter of the body and the most sensitive organ. Chronic or acute and poisonous secretions are produced through mental influences, and this in turn produces mental congestion. Pressure upon nerves produced by chemical or mechanical injury affecting the liver or other vital organs will in time produce congestion of the brain. The latter can be cured by taking away this pressure through applied physiological chemistry and applied anatomical adjustment. In severe cases of illness the cure depends to a large extent on the faithfulness with which the details are carried out. Some of these seem unimportant to the patient and to those who know little of the treatment. In any case where successful results have not been obtained, it has always been easy to point to faults of commission or omission.
An individual who has an analytical turn of mind ever ready to investigate his methods of treatment after he has put himself under a doctor’s care makes a cure almost impossible. The over-development of certain nerve centers and the mental discipline necessary for relaxing these functions will retard or oppress the functions and nerve centers of the sympathetic nervous system, which are needed for control of repair work. In other words, nerve centers which are abnormally positive will cause other abnormally negative nerve centers to exist and prevent these from reaching a normal positive state. As a result the body cannot eliminate its waste matter, and reconstruction is almost impossible.
Two-thirds of the inmates of our insane asylums and prisons might be cured if the proper treatment were applied. The young under twenty years of age yield much easier to treatment than older persons. Pseudo psychic healers or those who deny the existence of a disease do either effect a cure by faith or else they paralyze certain nerve centers and drive the disease inwards turning it into phlegma or fat, or else into more dangerous material such as cancers, insanity or heart failure. Scientific psychic healers are doing wonderful work by means of the psychometer in the diagnosis and treatment of psychic disorders. However, the cause and prevention of the disease for these unfortunate victims lies deeper. They are the product of modern and wrong methods of education, stimulated and forced by artificial feeding. They have reached that state of refinement, or culture of the flesh, and soul starvation where degeneration is at work. If the body is the strongest, the result is mental derangement. If the body is the weakest, the result is cancer and tuberculosis in its acute or chronic form, and many other bodily disorders. A healthy person (even if born with a delicate body) who has been perfectly fed on natural foods which have not been deprived of their organic salts could not possibly be affected by slight shocks of unpleasant environment to such an extent as to produce diseases either mentally or physically. Sorrow and disappointments in life are just as necessary for our development as rainy and unpleasant weather is. The weak brains and bodies of brittle bone and diseased flesh are the result of wrong feeding. Chronic food poisoning and starvation is much more detrimental to the human race than wholesome natural foods with the addition of small quantities of alcohol. The person who is boasting of health and old age in spite of small quantities of whiskey taken is generally born with no weaknesses. The effects of alcohol have probably shortened his life of eighty or one hundred years, but his mental and physical capacities have been superior to that of many intemperate drinkers as well as eaters.