Avoid Poisonous Drugs
Many transgress the laws of health through ignorance, and they need instruction. But the greater number know better than they do. They need to be impressed with the importance of making their knowledge a guide of life. The physician has many opportunities both of imparting a knowledge of health principles and of showing the importance of putting them in practice. By right instruction he or she can do much to correct evils that are working untold harm.MHH 61.4
A practice that is laying the foundation of a vast amount of disease and of even more serious evils is the free use of poisonous drugs. When attacked by disease, many of the sick will not take the trouble to search out the cause of their illness. Their chief aim is to rid themselves of pain and inconvenience. So they resort to patent nostrums, of whose real properties they know little, or they apply to a physician for some remedy to counteract the result of their misdoing, but with no thought of making a change in their unhealthful habits. If immediate benefit is not realized, they try another medicine, and then another. Thus the evil continues.MHH 62.1
People need to be taught that drugs do not cure disease. True, they sometimes afford present relief, and the patient appears to recover as the result of their use. This improvement is because nature has sufficient vital force to expel the poison and correct the conditions that caused the disease. Health is recovered in spite of the drug. But in most cases the drug only changes the form and location of the disease. Often the effect of the poison seems to be overcome for a time, but the results remain in the system and work great harm at some later period.MHH 62.2
By the use of poisonous drugs many bring upon themselves lifelong illness, and many lives are lost that might be saved by the use of natural methods of healing. The poisons contained in many so-called remedies create habits and appetites that result in ruin to both soul and body. Many of the popular nostrums called patent medicines, and even some of the drugs prescribed by physicians, act a part in laying the foundation of the liquor habit, the opium habit, the morphine habit that are a terrible curse to society.MHH 62.3
The only hope of improving things is to educate the people in right principles. Physicians should teach the people that restorative power is not in drugs but in nature. In case of sickness, the cause should be ascertained. Unhealthful conditions should be changed, wrong habits corrected. Then nature is to be assisted in her effort to expel impurities and to reestablish right conditions in the system.MHH 62.4