Why all of this confusion? After thousands of years of study of trial and error, of research and experiment, why are there so many and such contradictory schools of healing today? The answer, I think, is very simple -- mankind got started on a wrong medical premise and every school of healing, old and new, has accepted this premise and sought to build upon it.

Disease has been looked upon as a foe, an evil, that needs to be combatted, subdued, controlled, suppressed, killed -- in a word cured. Every symptom of disease was and is regarded as evil. At first, disease was looked upon as the workings of malignant spirits. Later it came to be looked upon as the work of malignant germs. Our Christian Science friends see it as the outgrowth of malignant animal magnetism. Recently I heard a lecturer who pictured it as the result of malignant vibrations.

Always it is something attacking the body -- something that must be killed or driven out before it kills the patient. Remedies are the shot and shell hurled at the unseen foe.

Certain obvious facts about disease have come to be theoretically recognized by practically all schools of so-called healing in recent years -- namely, that the various symptoms of disease represent physiological actions of a defensive, conservative, eliminative and curative character.

Fever is now recognized as a friend and not a foe. Indeed efforts to cure disease by the use of artificial fever are numerous. The constructive character of inflammation is recognized and artificial inflammation (hyperemia of Bier) is employed to treat many conditions.

Any intelligent layman, though lacking training in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, can understand that when violent coughing ensues upon sucking a bread crumb into his lungs, the purpose of these vigorous expulsions of air (expiration) is to dislodge and expel the irritating and obstructing material. He should be equally able to understand that in a cold, bronchitis, or pneumonia, coughing serves the same purpose in keeping the air passages free of mucous and other exudates.

Sneezing, which is also a violent expiration, serves the same purpose as coughing, only it is directed at irritants and obstructions in the upper air passages, whereas coughing is directed at irritants and obstructions in the lower air passages.

Vomiting empties the stomach of poisonous drugs or of mucus, or of decaying or unwanted food. It is as much of a protective measure as coughing.

A diarrhea is only a vigorous, rapid bowel action. If the sufferer has taken a purgative (calomel, for instance), he can easily understand that the diarrhea is a means of eliminating the poison. It serves the same protective function when it is decomposing food that is hurried out of the food tube.

I could take up every other symptom of disease and show them to be, also, protective, conservative and reparative measures, but it would make this article too long. Enough has been said to show that the so-called symptoms of disease are processes of cure. Indeed, disease enemy we have been taught it is. It does not need treatment -- it does not require cure.

Doctors who try to cure disease are trying to cure the cure. Dr. Stanford Kingsley Claunch declares that the belief in cure is a form of insanity. The intelligent reader should now be able to understand his reason for his declaration.

Nearly all patients get well, whatever their disease and however treated -- they always did. The Indian medicine man who danced around the wigwam and beat his tom-tom and shouted his incantations, or who chewed up a bunch of herds and spat the juice on the chest of his patient, saw his patients recover as often, or more often than the modern scientific physician. The Christian Scientist sees her patients recover, often after the medical man has declared recovery impossible. All schools of healing have recoveries under their care.

All of these schools claim credit for their methods for these recoveries -- they all ride to glory on the self-healing powers of the body. None of them ever cure anything, but they all claim credit for recoveries that occur under their treatment. None of them are willing to accept responsibility for the deaths that occur while under their care, although they are often actually responsible for death.

In this connection let me repeat what I have said many times before. The drugless schools do not cure more patients than the medical schools, they only kill fewer. All methods of treatment are injurious. Most medical methods are more damaging than most drugless methods, although some drugless methods are more damaging than some medical methods.

Medical men tell us that acute diseases are self-limited. That is, they run a definite course and end -- the patient either gets well or dies and treatment does not help. They admit that they cannot cure chronic diseases. Acute diseases are self-limited and chronic diseases are incurable -- what, then, is the function of the physician? Is he not taking money under false pretenses when he treats a patient?

In his Presidential Address before the Ohio State Medical Association, June 1920, J.F. Baldwin, M.D., F.A.C.S., of Columbus, Ohio, surgeon-in-chief to Grant Hospital, Surgeon Children's Hospital, Fellow American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists and Abdominal Surgeons, and its president in 1919 --20m etc., discussed what the learned men of "science" are pleased to denominate the "cults."

In this address he said that "nearly all diseases tend to recover," and that "could the public become aware of that with which all intelligent physicians are familiar, namely that the fact that a patient recovers is no evidence whatsoever of the value of the medication, that he might have gotten well quicker, indeed, if he had no medication, then the evidence afforded by quacks, patent medicine fakers, and those who practice the different cults, will be recognized as entirely valueless."

He neglected to add that when the public becomes aware that it is the patient's own powers and not the "remedies" that produced the recovery, and that the so-called remedies hindered recovery, they will recognize that the evidence afforded by the "scientific" fellows is also entirely valueless. It doesn't matter whether the treatment is administered by a "quack" a "cultist" or a self-styled "scientific" treatment peddler, the cure is always accomplished from within. All acute is self-cure. No doctor and no drug and no treatment can cure anything.

Dr. Baldwin did get dangerously near the precipice when he said immediately preceding the above statement: "The ordinary physician who successfully treats a pneumonia or typhoid fever, or any other of our self-limited diseases, to say nothing of the host of functional diseases, is very apt to assume that the treatment which he has been giving has been instrumental in effecting the recovery of the patient. He may even get a little chesty over his results, as he calls them. He ignores the fact that all these diseases tend to get well, and that as a matter of fact none of these diseases, while pursuing their ordinary course, are in the slightest degree affected beneficially by any drug treatment. Under ordinary conditions in the treatment of these diseases the drugless healer, or even those who give absent treatments will accomplish practically as good end results as the best educated physician with the entire armamentarium of the Pharmacopoeia at his back. It is in the unusual case, in the complicated case, that scientific knowledge and treatment demonstrate of their vast superiority."

In that last statement he cautiously pulls back a ways. He does not go on and tell the whole truth. He hides behind a wholly gradatious assumption -- an assumption which is wholly inexplicable in the light of the preceding and the succeeding statements. If "scientific knowledge" has any real value, it should be of use in all cases and not merely in the worst cases. If it cannot help the milder cases, how, then, may we expect it to help in the more serious ones? It is as though our umbrella will not protect us from a light summer shower, but afford as ample protection from a torrental downpour. And then, when he follows this, in the very next paragraph, with the statement that recovery might occur quicker if no medication is used, he certainly makes confusion worse confounded.

In the functional diseases and the self-limited diseases (and these include almost all so-called disease), if they are not unusual or complicated, the drugless healer, or the no-treatment lady who sends her mental or spiritual healing currents from afar, "will accomplish practically (sic) as good end-results as the best educated physician with the entire armamentarium of the pharmacopoeia at his back," for "none of these diseases" are "in the slightest degree affected beneficially by any drug treatment."

Let us cut into that. It means that no drug your physician can give you will aid your recovery from pneumonia, or typhoid, or colds, or constipation. But it does not mean that these drugs will not hinder your recovery. It does not mean that they do not prolong your troubles. It does not mean that they do not make you much worse. It does not that they do not often kill the patient. It does not mean that they do not build the much-talked of complications. It does not mean that they are not responsible for the squeal that so frequently follow drug and serum treated acute diseases.