Healing Cancer Naturally: Nature Heals!
The Natural Hygiene Approach to Healing

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”The bottom line is this ..: The human body "WILL HEAL"... If we get out of our own way and allow it, it heals itself. It is our basic nature. Anybody who tells you other than that is trying to sell you something. No matter what you have been told. Don't give up on yourself and don't buy into the lines like ... ‘oh well you've had a good life'... 'at your age'... and the worst of all ...'there's nothing further I can do, I suggest you finalize your affairs'... How dare anyone tell you to give up! So much in society combines to convince us of the propaganda that some things never get better. It's up to you ... do you want to get better? Make things better? It is human nature to make things better, evolve and grow.”
Shé D'Montford, Shambhallah, Australia

The human body is generally “designed” to be self-healing and will heal (often accompanied by an uncomfortable healing crisis [or several of them] involving the increased shedding of toxins) if the proper conditions conducive to healing are re-established. Did you know for instance that the Chinese have been healing cancer and other “incurable” disease solely via an increased supply of life force energy [chi] to the organism, or that there is a connection between fever and spontaneous remissions?
“The body is self-healing” (also the central tenet of the healing system known as Natural Hygiene) is perhaps the only “bold” statement you will find on this eclectic healing site without qualifications added, except maybe the following:
According to various “esoteric” sources, disease can also be (subconsciously) deliberately created to allow the indwelling spirit to leave physical existence, for instance in the presence of a (probably mostly unconscious) death wish before a reality considered too unpleasant to be worth continuing. A good illustration of this kind of determination to “go” may be found in those instances where people are healed from one disease only to succumb to a traffic accident shortly thereafter. This kind of “death wish” (also see Dr. Jürgen Buche’s lucid comments on purpose for living) is obviously also amenable to being uncovered and healed.

Natural Hygiene: natural self-healing

by Ulla, creator & Webmaster of Healing Cancer Naturally, copyright © 2004

The term "Natural Hygiene" refers to a self-contained health maintenance system which has been widely popularized through Harvey and Marilyn Diamond’s wonderful bestselling series "Fit for Life".

Natural Hygiene could be summed up as follows:

The body is inherently healthy and self-healing and always strives to maintain or re-establish optimal healthful conditions.

At the basis of any state of ill-health is “toxemia”, i.e. a (mostly gradual) buildup of retained metabolic or environmental toxins that the body didn’t manage to excrete through its normal purification channels, storing them instead in various tissues. The reason the body isn’t able to properly detoxify itself is “enervation”, i.e. lack of vital energy due to stress, unhealthy lifestyle and/or wrong treatment of the body (particularly through wrong food choices incl. overeating, toxin intake including medicinal drugs and noxious substances etc.).

All diseases are “healing crises”, i.e. an attempt on the part of the body to rid itself of toxin overload. Diseases should never be suppressed via medication or other methods but allowed to run their natural course, i.e. “Nature knows best”.

To achieve and maintain optimal well-being, vibrant energy, and freedom from illness, certain “natural laws” have to be followed. These comprise meeting the body's inherent, natural needs while respecting its boundaries by avoiding all “toxic” influences.

Required for health are fresh, pure air; pure water; moderate sunshine; regular exercise; adequate rest and sleep; fasting when ill; a diet of whole, organically-grown foods such as fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds eaten in their raw, natural state; eating foods in proper combinations and amounts for optimal digestion; emotional poise; right livelihood, and nurturing relationships. The same “laws of nature” need to be followed to re-establish health.

To avoid in one’s quest for regaining or maintaining optimum health and energy levels are all things and modalities not provided by nature and/or naturally toxic: this includes all drugs, all toxic foods and herbs, and all curing practices since they invariably interfere with the body’s own healing and/or maintenance/cleaning work.



Natural Hygiene was born in the early 1800s as a counter-movement to the then traditional medicine which used the common bleeding and drugging methods of the time, including depriving feverish patients of water and fresh air(!). Natural Hygiene was “invented” by Dr. Isaac Jennings, who in 1822, after practicing as a doctor for 20 years without getting good results, started to question these practices, and, as an experiment, gave his patients bread pill placebos with instructions to get plenty of bed rest, to take the pills with water and to ingest no other food and drink. In other words, he fasted his patients (without their knowing it), and he got excellent results for a number of years.

Being convinced of the remarkable recoveries obtained by the "Do Nothing Cure", he announced his revelation to the world, only to have it poorly received. Some of his patients got angry that they were given placebos and not true "medicines', and the medical doctors were not eager to embrace a system that did not revolve around their accustomed pills and potions. Despite the lack of acceptance, Jennings went on to write three books and became known as “The Father of Natural Hygiene."

Many seem to have completely recovered from "incurable diseases" such as cancer applying the above principles, particularly using an organic raw-foods diet.

One of the early proponents of Natural Hygiene was Sylvester Graham (the originator of the Graham cracker!), a Presbyterian minister and physiologist, who denounced the medical practices of the time in lectures he held throughout the United States. Graham later opened the world's first healthfood stores and restaurants, and inspired the creation of "Grahamite" health retreats. Between 1830 and 1860, at least 100 Hygienic homes, schools and sanitariums came into existence in the United States. In 1853 Dr. Russell Thacker Trall founded a college in New York aimed at training competent Hygiene teachers and lecturers.

(Above text partially excerpted from NATURAL HYGIENE: What it is and from where it came by Lisa Hagelthorn, Natural Health Consultant.)

http://www.soilandhealth.org
has as its mission “to bring this form of medicine to the attention of the public and to preserve the rapidly disappearing books that chronicle the formation and practice of natural hygiene and similar schools.” Click on “Go to the Health Library” and then “Alternative Medical Therapies” as well as “General Bibliography”. You will find J.H.Tilden’s "Toxemia Explained" in its original version, other works by the same author, Herbert Shelton ’s books on healthy Diet (examining eating and foodstuffs, data on food combining, feeding of infants and children, the digestive system), “Fasting and Sunbathing" (recovery of health), as well as other “classic” and some recent texts related to Natural Hygiene.

Long excerpts from “Fasting and Sun Bathing” by Herbert M. Shelton : The Health Benefits of Sunlight.

"Getting Well" by Herbert Shelton discusses sickness and health and can be found at gtwn.net/~genesis/gw/gw1.html.

Incidentally Dr. Herbert M Shelton is also the author of “The natural cure of cancer and its positive prevention by simple natural methods” (1931) which currently may be hard to find.

Some thoughts and comments on the body’s self-healing and Natural Hygiene

by Ulla, creator & Webmaster of Healing Cancer Naturally, copyright © 2004

If you look at how the US-centered “Natural Hygiene” movement came into being (there exists no truly comparable movement in Europe though the idea of “Nature Cures” is widespread here), you will see that it was a counter-reaction or movement against the (ob)noxious and often literally ”murderous” so-called healing practices of medicine as used in the 19th and previous centuries, which consisted of administering toxic pills, bleeding, etc. to the sick (“Natural Hygiene Man's Pristine Way Of Life” by Herbert Shelton for instance gives an eye-opening account of what was considered “curative” while literally killing people.)

Simultaneously, the “Natural Hygiene” movement was a “countermovement” to the widely held belief that an outside “miracle” agent (pills et al.) will restore a person’s health compromised by having lived one’s life with disregard for the “laws of nature” (i.e. the body’s need for wholesome food, fresh air, clean water, cleanliness, rest and peaceful living), rather than taking personal responsibility for restoring one’s health by reinstating healthful living habits.

In my eyes, this is exactly what constitutes Natural Hygiene‘s greatest value and contribution, i.e. to have pointed out

- the fact that the human (and animal) body is intrinsically self-healing if allowed to through proper living and support, thus encouraging people to always firstly look to Nature’s way of healing (healthy food, fasting, sun, water, rest etc.)

- the responsibility everyone has to properly look after their own health (by living “hygienically”)

- the deleterious character of all those medicinal practices which consist in mere suppression or treatment of symptoms instead of addressing the more basic causes (defined as “toxemia”), thus adding more toxins to a body already suffering from toxic overload; such palliative medicinal practices have simultaneously lured the sick into thinking that they need not make any personal effort towards maintaining or restoring their health but that “popping a pill” will “do the trick” (thus pandering to human indolence).



While Natural Hygiene holds as its basic tenet that the body is inherently healthy and self-healing and always strives to maintain or re-establish optimal healthful conditions by itself, it is of course not the only system of thought adhering to and promoting this ”common-sense” notion. Where Natural Hygiene differs is that it adamantly denies the goodness in any and all medicinal approaches which go beyond Nature’s (always capitalized) basic healing methods (which are fasting, diet, sun, water, rest etc.), even if such “curative” modalities are simply applied to complement or aid the natural (self-)healing process. This includes Natural Hygiene’s disapproval of such commonly used healing modalities as water applications, herbs and "spiritual" healing (e.g. prayer) (both of the latter are rejected by Shelton without giving deeper reasons or substantiation).

I agree with the Natural Hygiene approach in thinking that a generally healthy lifestyle (which includes natural organic nutrition optimized to one’s needs as well as one‘s emotions, thinking and spirituality) forms the true and only real basis of health. But I also believe in powerful "energetic" factors and approaches having a potentially “healing” (or opposite) influence (see for instance the healing of cancer and other “incurable” disease solely via an increased supply of life force energy [chi]), much more than Natural Hygiene writers do when they refer to “nervous energy”, “energy” or “enervation”. I also believe that humanity as a whole has only scratched the surface of a true understanding of life’s energetic basis.

Below is a list of some of the major tenets of Natural Hygiene (in its more “dogmatic” or “rigidly ideological” avatar) followed by personal notes on what I perceive as their shortcomings warrranting rethinking, improvement or expansion.

1. According to Natural Hygiene, the root of all disease is toxemia. Toxemia is roughly defined as gradual buildup of stored toxins (mostly from wrong food intake and inability to properly detoxify due to lack of vital energy or “enervation”).

2. According to Natural Hygiene, the human body is perfectly self-healing and has learned to adapt to any problem in the course of evolution and to detoxify any such noxious factors by itself. To heal (i.e. to get rid of toxemia), it needs (and should receive) nothing but what the “laws of nature” impose (fasting, healthy food, water, etc.). In fact, any “remedy” and remedial action incl. herbs and prayer is by definition either hindering the body’s self-healing or is toxic to its system (or its existence is flatly denied). There is no “healing power” in any substance. As one of the representatives of this kind of thinking, Dr. Bernarr, contends, ”Since life began on earth, our God within, our inherent intelligence within each cell of our bodies, has learned to make the optimum adaptation and resolution, to any problem to which our bodies are subjected. Whatever stresses our bodies presently have, our bodily cells have previously learned how to successfully cope with such. It is already built into our genes, our chromosomes and our DNA.”** And Shelton for instance rejects herbs as well as "spiritual" healing while basing his reasoning on hardly any "arguments" but resorting to ironizing.

3. According to Natural Hygiene, disease is always an attempt on the part of the body to rid itself of “toxemia”, i.e. shedding toxins (stored from wrong food intake, overeating, stress and “enervation”) in order to regain health, in other words, disease is always beneficial. “Our inherent intelligence, if it chooses to produce disease, it does so to protect us. This disease, or whatever our pathology or symptomatology, helps us survive, despite our self-destructive lifestyle, thinking and spirituality. Our disease is for our protective benefit. Our disease will spontaneously heal, when the cause and need for our inherent intelligence, our God within, to produce disease, no longer exists.”

4. According to Natural Hygiene, the hygienic system holds absolutely all answers “under the sun” to the healing of the human body.
My reply to 1: “The root of all disease is toxemia.”

This notion makes a lot of sense to me. I would add two qualifications/expansions from my observation/reading, however:

a) Apart from self-induced toxemia (which as far as I can tell is what is mostly referred to in Natural Hygiene writings), it appears that the “root” of disease can also be found in a number of causative factors seemingly independent of the individual (I put "seemingly" since “karma” in my view also factors in), such as nuclear radiation, fire damage, polluted water and air, depleted food (nonavailability of organic food), noxious chemicals, etc.

b) Energetic (incl. emotional) factors (what Natural Hygiene subsumes under the term of “nervous energy” or “energy”) play a much more complex role: while depleted energy supply can possibly/likely cause hypofunction and, if unadressed, even death, a healthy energy influx can and will allow the body to heal (see Energetics), even without a “perfected” diet. (Note: the term “energy” is used here loosely without defining its nature.)

Interestingly, Edgar Cayce ’s view of cancer genesis partially corroborates the view of Natural Hygiene (and others) that “the root of disease is always toxemia...defined as gradual buildup of stored toxins (mostly from wrong food intake and inability to properly detoxify due to lack of vital energy or “enervation”).
My reply to 2: “The human body is fully self-healing and has evolutionarily learned to adapt to and detoxify any noxious factors.”

Natural Hygiene may have been quite spot-on say two hundred years ago, when probably none of the present and few other man-made assaultive factors existed and humans could indeed count on their "evolutionarily" built-in resistance to overcome anything, given just proper food, rest etc...

But today? I think there have been some 50,000 new chemical compounds invented and introduced into man's living sphere over the last 50 years alone (many of which dangerous harsh chemicals are present in our polluted food, air and water supply, ranging from pesticides to artificial hormones; more accurate numbers can be found here).

Also, over the previous 100 to 150 years, an unprecedented depletion and imbalancing of our soils’ and crops’ microelement content has taken place due to intensive farming and atmospheric carbon dioxide increase beginning with the industrial revolution, which in turn has engendered widespread mineral and trace mineral deficiencies, in turn furthering numerous ailments incl. cancer.

Aggravating the above situation is the widespread intake of devitalized, industrially processed food low in nutrition and high in calories, far removed from what more naturally-living and healthier people consume.

Additionally, many novel electro-magnetic fields have been introduced into man's living sphere stemming from appliances, Cell Phone s, computers, TVs, microwaves etc.

Now according to Natural Hygiene (in its dogmatic avatar), the human body has learned to adapt to everything in the course of evolution. But did it have the ”evolutionary” time to adapt to some or all of this onslaught of new assaultive, unnatural substances and influences? Of course not. (And I think that cancer's grim rise in the USA alone from approx. 1 in 50 in 1900 to 1 in 3 in 2003 (per National Cancer Institute) accurately reflects this state of affairs.)

Yet according to what I will call again “rigid” New Hygiene thinking (see below), even those new toxins and chemicals invented in the last century (i.e. no matter how new the assaultive unnatural substances that the body had no evolutionary time to adjust to and/or develop natural defenses against), are supposed to be swiftly and efficiently dealt with exclusively by “Nature‘s” (always with a capital N) usual and customary defense and healing mechanisms, i.e. fasting, rest and healthy “natural” (raw) nutrition. (Incidentally, if this were true, how is it that so many animals living in the wild succumb to or get sick from the introduction of man-made poisons, though they are in full possession of all their body’s evolutionarily acquired natural healing capacity??)

So in the case of someone falling ill (due to any of the above newly introduced noxious influences), the same type of “purist” New Hygiene thinking will “logically” refuse them all “harmful” “curing” modalities including herbs, since these are considered purely “palliative” (of detoxification symptoms) and therefore noxiously hindering the body’s own healing efforts. No matter in what kind of sick state the body has gotten into...

Shelton explains in “Natural Hygiene Man's Pristine Way Of Life”, “Yes, some people will die under the Hygienic plan of care; but we have known of one or two deaths under drug treatment. Nobody ever claimed that the processes of restoration are always successful, even under the best of conditions.”

In other words, purely following Natural Hygiene principles will not help every person to heal since for some according to Natural Hygiene it’s too late and nature and the body’s reserves can’t do the patching up by themselves. Still, according to Natural Hygiene, even these patients are absolutely refused any herbal or other ”palliatives” to increase their chances of recovery. This in spite of the fact that there is overwhelming evidence of the helpfulness and healing power of many time-honored herbs and herbal combinations in many (incl. desperate) cases.

In truth it rather seems to me that the despised “palliatives” such as herbs may come in as life-savers in many cases of more serious illness (see further below).

A sad but enlightening example of this kind of rigid “follow my true purist healing path or die if you are too weak to heal by yourself” can be read in Victoria Boutenko‘s “12 Steps to Raw” (a book on raw eating): “I’ve seen 132 people who had cancer, and they came to the [Creative] health institute and they felt better. Their tumors shrank and they decided to stay raw. They even applied to new jobs and applied to college. But when they went home and Christmas came, they all failed. All of them died. They couldn’t stay on raw food. They left children and loved ones behind because they couldn’t resist the addiction to cooked food. That is the truth. I know their names. I knew those people... Their families supported them. But they couldn’t resist their addiction to cooked food and they died.”

To my feeling, this is proof that a one-sided approach (just improving diet and lifestyle) may often not be enough considering the fact that some have actively and passively abused their body for many years (and consequently created very serious illness) as well as the fact that humans are made up of many “energetic” levels (see Energetics). While Natural Hygiene thinkers possess a definite glimpse of the energetics that play a crucial role in health and illness (referrring as they do to “nervous energy” and the depletion of vitality as a major cause of toxemia etc.), they are far from having all the answers in this area where we are mere neophytes on this planet in my view.
No herbs?

The above-quoted 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 do a raw-food regime all the time (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 in Cancer Treatment), but, and it bears repeating, “rigid and purist” Natural Hygiene thinking will deny these helpers and even possible life-savers 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 life-long 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”). 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 sweating 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 felt during the consumption of the “deadly” foodstuffs, pleasurable feelings creating all kind of good and beneficent 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 after some time of suffering from them. (Also compare Why do some health (food) “gurus” get sick?)

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, here is an article detailing the vital importance of non-interference with the body’s self-healing in the case of fevers healing the body, especially in virus infections:

Excerpt: The viral core molecule of RNA cannot reproduce if the body temperature is above 101 degrees. Humans have genetically developed a natural method to defeat viral infections called a fever. With a mild fever of 101 degrees the telomers on the ends of the RNA molecule cannot attach and the virus cannot reproduce itself, and the body's white blood cells quickly destroy the invading virus. But the modern "regular" treatment for a fever from a cold or flu is to reduce the fever to ease the discomfort. This is wrong.
By lowering the fever below 100 degrees, the invading virus is allowed to reproduce and spread massively throughout the body. If the multitude of viruses finally cross the blood/brain barrier the result is a fever of 104 or more, causing brain damage or death. This is often called Reyes Syndrome or Viral Encephalitis and is not a disease but the result of improper treatment with aspirin or other NSAIDs to lower the natural viral infection fever. Read the full article


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 a reality 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 recommends to follow only “Nature’s way” (diet, fasting, fresh air, etc.) and a conventional doctor recommends following his/her drug/surgery approach, each AS THE ONLY WAY TO HEALTH AND RECOVERY, is in fact STRIKINGLY SIMILAR: both maintain to hold ALL TRUTH regarding the healing of the human body (while implying or openly stating 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 herbs as well as "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 facts 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 (chetday.com/v4n7.pdf). T.C. Fry is a famous proponent of Natural Hygiene who died in 1996 at the age of 70 after having been ill for at least a year*. 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” revolutionary 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 also 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 a 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.”


**Incidentally, the same Natural Hygiene proponent also recommends Water Fasting to cancer patients. I have invited him and his clients to share any cancer healing success stories thus achieved with the visitors of Healing Cancer Naturally but beyond an amazingly aggressive refusal (accusing me of trying to invade his clients’ privacy) have not heard of him again.
While Upton Sinclair includes in his book The Fasting Cure, written nearly 100 years ago, several cancer healing testimonials attributed to fasting, one needs to remember that these accounts hail back decades before environmental, chemical and radiation pollution started to become major problems throughout the westernized world, posing many new additional health burdens on the human body.
According to a knowledgeable-seeming source, “one thing Shelton was sure of, and he was a true expert on fasting, was that Cancer was not affected in a positive way by fasting. He thought, and remember this goes back to the 40s, 50s, and 60s, that perhaps if surgery was performed, then a fast might produce beneficial results.”
Dr. Max Gerson’s “conception of a prolonged fast or periodical three-day fast” was that “You can't let the cancer patient fast. In the cancer patient the body is so depleted, if you let them fast they go downhill terribly.” Compare Gerson Therapy. Also see Stanley Burrough’s objections to water fasting. All the foregoing notwithstanding, here are testimonials for Two Bladder Cancer Cures Achieved via Water Fasting (formerly stage 2 and 3, respectively), testifying yet again to the power of the human body, mind and spirit to heal the physical vehicle of man.

Further information on Natural Hygiene

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

Their article “Is Cooked Food Poison? Looking at the Science on Raw vs. Cooked Foods” found at
http://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.

A newly launched (1-1-2004) International Natural Hygiene Society 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 grass roots 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‘."