“How can I relax?” has become one of the commonest questions we are asked.

The answer, as in so many other situations, in another question: “Why are you tense?” It need not be put into words, of course, but the second must be answered in one way or another before any really constructive advice can be offered for the first. To most people, excessive tension is in the same category as a headache, and the popular belief is that there can be a cure analogous to aspirins. The medical profession, too, seems to favour the drug approach, and sedatives and tranquillisers are prescribed wholesale to undo the destructive tensions.

In this attempt to explain psychosomatic illness we may well begin by quoting an orthodox medical statement: “All illness moves toward resolution or death. The patient either gets better or he dies.”

Acute illness, usually regarded in Nature Cure circles as a healing crisis, or a spring clean, is vigorous -­‐ possibly even dramatic, in the sense of involving high temperatures and striking symptoms -­‐ and it can incur considerable pain or distress. But after reaching a climax of activity at any time within up to forty-­‐eight hours, it then proceeds to resolution.

Human beings are not unlike the living cells that make up every individual’s body. Each has its own personality, but the behaviour of the group may be strikingly different from that of its components. We are probably all familiar with at least some aspects of this in real life, having seen peaceable and rational individuals become collectively menacing. Those responsible for public order know all about the effect, and recognise its dangers in certain situations. Where people congregate with nothing to do, but having a sense of grievance, a kind of bitter fermentation is liable to occur.

Reports that a medical group has recently been formed to study the “commonest cause of inability to work -­‐ back trouble” prompts me to express a few thoughts on the subject. Having been trained—like all graduates of the Edinburgh School of Natural Therapeutics -­‐ to recognise signs of derangement in lower-­‐back structure, and having fairly diligently applied that knowledge for forty years, I feel less-­‐than-­‐usually inhibited by modesty.

It is now a full century since James C Thomson returned from America after training with Henry Lindlahr in his sanatorium in Illinois so I am writing this introduction as a fourth generation Nature Cure adherent. From Henry Lindlahr who taught my grandparents James C Thomson and Jessie R Thomson through my father C Leslie Thomson.

by C. Leslie Thomson In recent months, the topical press has reported a number of findings by medical investigators relating to tooth health . . . or the lack of it. […]

by C. Leslie Thomson A round dozen years ago, while sorting through a cupboard full of James C. Thomson’s papers, I noticed a postcard pinned up inside the door. I […]

Dry up, not Drink up!

Against the popular belief that we should drink at least three pints of water a day — even if we have to force it down, and this on top of the other liquids we take in as coffee, tea, fizzy drinks etc. How can I convince anyone that moderation in liquids is more healthy? As a third-­‐generation member of the school which has consistently warned against watery excess. I believe we have excellent reasons for advocating what is sometimes, rather dauntingly called dry feeding.

I believe there is a simple explanation for the medical faith in copious drinking. Doctors and nurses who urge high water intake are constantly confronted by patients who are predominantly on atrocious diets and strong medication. If unwholesome foodstuff can be flushed out, and drugs kept diluted such patient’s chances of survival may be improved.

COLDS AND INFLUENZA

by C. Leslie Thomson

The fundamental difference between orthodox and Naturopathic attitudes to disease is probably most clearly obvious in the case of the common cold. Whereas the doctors, and their drug-­‐manufacturing associates, spend much time and money trying to discover ‘the cure’, since the time of Hippocrates the Naturopathically-­‐minded observer has had a contrary attitude. Instead of regarding a cold as an evil to be fought, the more perceptive student has recognised the eliminative and corrective function of the cold. A cold is not in need of ‘cure’; it is in need of understanding. A cold is not a ‘disease’ (except in the limited, literal sense of being uncomfortable and causing dis-­‐ease); it is in itself the body’s own cure for a pre-­‐existing state of disease and disorder.

To the reader who accepts Nature Cure principles, the foregoing will appear elementary and obvious; but it may seem nonsense to anyonewho has not previously been exposed to our ideas. The latter individual is the victim of a conditioning process, in which there are powerful vested interests in his continuing ignorance. The honest teacher does not make a fortune from his information; the enterprising merchant may easily do so when he is able to manipulate gullibility and fear.