For more than two thousand years it has been, in fact, as it is to a great extent today; the physician prescribes to the best of his knowledge, medicines compounded according to certain rules dogmatically laid down in the schools.
Here we have at once the fatal mistake at a glance.
Instead of studying nature and the laws of nature, instead of using natural means to _heal disease_, they administer deadly poisons to _allay suffering_, poisons, which doubtless may be able to repress pain or to temporarily suppress the symptoms of disease; but can _never remove the cause_, which alone may rightly be called healing.
The drugs prescribed by thousands of physicians today, with but a casual acquaintance with their action, are bound by their nature to produce evils worse than the disease itself.
Physicians prescribe creosote in cases of consumption to stop the expectoration of blood.
Creosote will do this, and may suppress the cough, as well as the accompanying pain; but will it cure consumption or destroy or remove the cause of this deadliest of diseases?
On the contrary, it inevitably produces laryngeal phthisis after a very short time. It destroys the head of the windpipe and the patient dies in consequence of the destruction of one of the most important organs of the body.
In most instances the physician is either oblivious or unaware of these facts. He follows those old-standing doctrinal sophisms laid down by human "science" but discredited by nature.
His courage is called "audacity" by those who have not lost all feeling for humanity.
Meanwhile, those who regard medical science from a business standpoint only, are very quick to pronounce judgement upon any natural treatment of disease and to condemn the most successful natural physicians as charlatans and frauds.
In order to be competent to decide upon a correct course in the treatment of disease the physician must possess a thorough chemical knowledge of all the fundamental substances of which the human organism is constructed. With the patient therefore rests the responsibility of choosing his physician, since no physician can be of any assistance who cannot define what substances are deficient in the blood, and who does not possess the requisite technical knowledge to supply this deficiency by adequate dietetic means.