Guide to Herbal Remedies

While exercise is one way of getting heat in the body to fight against disease and keep the body healthy, there are other scientific methods like baths, fasting, etc., which not only keep the health of the body maintained, but also cure it in case of ailment. While the effect of exercise does not always reach the inner-most organs of the body, baths on scientific lines, as suggested by Nature-cure, take their heating effects to those organs and purify them of their foreign matter. Baths, are thus, a part of the Nature-cure philosophy or fundamental principle of producing heat in the body to cure ailment, by the process of applying cold water on the outer surface, or skin, of the body, and in this process, creating an artificial circulation of blood to oxidize the foreign matter accumulated in the body causing all types of ailments.
How a touch of cold water produces heat in the body can well be demonstrated on laboratory scale even at home. Place two beakers or glasses on your desk, one rilled with tolerably hot water and the other, with sufficient cold water. Put your finger first in hot water and when sufficiently warm, take it out and dip it in the cold water. What will happen? A feeling of swelling or hardening of the tip of the wet finger will be experienced. What has happened, is that, with the sudden cooling of the warm and outer part of the skin of the finger tip, the warm blood from inside the finger rushed up to the skin to warm it up again and, and in this process a feeling as said is observed. This is in short the principle, by which an artificial circulation of blood is produced to cure the body of accumulated wastes. To augment the effect of cold, the range of temperature, that is, the difference between the warm and cold water is increased and to manipulate this, new forms of scientific baths were invented by naturo-paths in the system of Nature-cure.
Besides baths, Nature-cure methods of treatment include fasting and exercise. By fasting abetted by exercise and baths, one can keep his health in good condition and also get himself cured of practically all ailments. Yet it costs little, much little comparatively with treatments by Allopathy or even other indigenous methods of treatment. Also, Nature-cure treatment can be had at home, except in rare and serious cases or in the case of non-availability of resources or help at home, when one can have it on normal expenses at the existing Nature-cure homes, which also impart, or one gets, training in Nature-cure applications of treatment thoroughly.

An ailment or disease is but the Nature’s revenge over man’s neglect of his own health. But Mother Nature is a kind mother, too. A mother punishes or chastises her children for their faults, but to set them right. So too, Nature, when after long suppression of his faults in the body by man, takes to revolt, it almost turns violent and shows its wrath by causing fever, high temperature, hard breathing, perspiration, pain, swelling and all that we call by the name of ailment.
Fever, is thus, a welcome sign. The above instances show the people’s faith in the curative potential of Nature that takes away the fear element of fever. One should, rather, welcome fever as a blessing in disguise. Rest assured that, if left to itself and not suppressed by medicine, and rather assisted in its natural course, fever purges the body of its ailments in their entirety with an element of renewed energy.
Fever is a necessity too. We have heard many elder people tell us of some people, who never had any sickness in their lives, but when got sick, to such terrible extent, that they could not survive and died. One plausible reason for such happenings, would be that a person whom fever visits now and then, has his body purged of its ailment in the body, removed by the purities action of frequent fevers, but the man, who never had any fever, or so, the foreign matter in his body goes on accumulating without its oxidation and removal by fever. Hence to such a man, when fever comes, it comes with violence, rather to purify the heavy lot of accumulated matter, which causes him his life sometimes.
Hence, it would not be wrong to say that fever is very much a necessity. After-all, what is this physical exercise that we are advised to take to keep our health going? It is an almost similar action that fever produces, that is, heat in the body, and when daily done, it keeps on oxidizing the possible foreign matter in the body.

Nature-cure is not something new to the people, though it was in Europe that it received a scientific bias, so as to be made acceptable to the modern man, whose sense of reasoning had considerably awakened with the coming up of renaissance in Europe. Man stopped believing in myths any more and began exploring reasonable background to every natural phenomenon, or happening. During his search for truth, he came upon many discoveries. Even a casual drop of apple from a tree gave a jolt to the awakened mind of Sir Isaac Newton—and in this simple happening he discovered the law of gravitational force and so on.
Nature-cure, in its present scientific form, too, was such a discovery in Europe. It so happened that a German gentleman, Louis Kuhne, in his fondness for hunting, had been to the forest one day, where he shot at a deer. The animal ran away with his wounded leg and went into a pond of cold water, Kuhne observed that the deer kept his leg immersed in the water of the pond for some time and then ran away. The next day, as Kuhne came to the same place, he saw the same wounded deer standing in the pond, before running away after some time. This happening kept Kuhne brooding over. Any other person in his place could have thought of it as a providential or mystic happening. But not so for Kuhne, whose mind was awakened.
Against the present theory of Medical Science that basically a germ is the cause of any disorder or disease in the body, the Naturo-path goes a step further, to establish by reason and example, that not germ, but the accumulated foreign matter in the body, is the basic cause of disease or the germ, whatever. His reasoning is that germs are always present in the air—the Medical Science, too, believes it—then why they don’t affect all people, even during an epidemic, like Cholera, Malaria, etc. The reason with the Medical man is, Resistance. It is the lack of resistance, he tells us, that makes a ground for the germ. It is here that the Naturo-path argues by asking, “What is this lack of resistance, if not, the accumulated foreign or waste matter in the body?” For a naturo-path this lack of resistance’ is a vague term with the medical science. The clear answer is with the Nature-cure, that is, the accumulated foreign matter in the body-system; that is the cause of all ailments in it.