How Fasting Can Save Your Life
www.healthscience.org
The woman was an invalid. She had to be carried from bed to chair and from chair to bed. She was too weak to walk more than a few steps at a time. Among her several complaints was hay fever with which she had suffered each season for a number of years. It was 1918, and we were busy making the world safe for democracy.
Every Sunday she was taken by her husband to a class. He would bring along a reclining chair for her to use during the class. It was at this class that she met a Hygienist and was induced to try Hygiene as a means of recovering health. Weak as she was, she underwent not one but several short fasts.
Today as I write her story she has reached what many would consider old age, 73 years. She is in good health. She has been able to work through these decades. For more than forty years she has had no recurrence of hay fever. She has lived all of this time in southern climates where the air is filled with pollens almost all the year.
She has no allergies and eats any wholesome food that she desires. She is, however, but one among thousands who have recovered from hay fever by the unloading of toxins and correcting the mode of life.
In hay fever the Schneiderian membrane (a mucous membrane) of the nose becomes highly sensitive as a consequence of a state of chronic irritation (inflammation) for a lengthy period of time. Particles of dust, lint, and pollen, easily add to the irritation and cause it to “water” and become congested. The excited, irritated and inflamed state of the mucous membrane of the eyes, nose and throat seen in hay fever is but a state of what was formerly known as catarrh. To put this very simply: the sensitive condition of those membranes is due to the fact that they are sick—inflamed.
Today hay fever is said to be an allergy or to be caused by an allergy. Precise descriptions of allergy vary greatly. In general it is defined as “a condition of unusual or exaggerated specific susceptibility to a substance which is harmless in similar amounts for the majority of members of the same species.”
Yet it seems to me to define allergy as an unusual sensitivity is to beg the question—and to explain nothing.
The baffled expert hides behind the brilliant obscurity of his definitions. Allergy is now said to be due to failure of one of the normal defense mechanisms of the body. If there is truth in this, it must not be permitted to blind us to the fact that the symptoms that are called allergic reactions represent the calling into play of another of the body’s normal defense mechanisms. If one means of defense fails or is inadequate, there are other modes of defense at the command of the living organism which it may call upon. It is not left helpless because of the failure of one mechanism.
Whatever else we may think of allergy, we must recognize that it is not a self-caused state. Why is one man allergic and another not? Or, take the theory that allergy represents the failure of a defense mechanism, why does the defense mechanism of one fail while that of another does not? To answer this question, we return to our basic cause of disease—toxemia.
What is the cause of hay fever? It is a chronic inflammation of the nasal passages growing out of a pronounced toxemic condition that commonly has lasted for years. Toxemia is the basic cause of all inflammations of the lining membranes of the hollow organs of the body. So long as the toxemic state is maintained by enervating habits and so long as overeating is persisted in, there is no possibility of recovering from hay fever.
Anyone can test this statement for himself. Abstain from food for a time and watch the nasal discharge and other symptoms of hay fever clear up. There is simply no need for any one to go on, year after year, suffering with hay fever. Let the sufferer bear in mind that the pollens, the hair of animals, and other substances to which he is sensitive of allergic, are normal elements of his environment and he will realize that his sensitivity of them must be due to something within himself, rather than in those perfectly normal things that do not trouble other people. All of these elements are sources of allergic annoyance only to the sick. The healthy are not allergic.
The hay fever sufferer will cease to be troubled as soon as he is restored to health. He will not again be affected by them so long as he maintains a state of high level health. There are numerous means of palliating the symptoms of hay fever, but as none of these remove any causes, none restore the patient to health.
Each season he is forced to return to the means of palliation, to rush off somewhere to escape the source of his irritation. This is expensive, time-consuming and—futile.
The hay fever sufferer should take a real vacation: he should go to bed and abstain from food. This will be both less expensive and more effective than sea
voyages or junkets to pollen-free mountains. Once the sufferer has been freed of his toxic load and the irritated state of the membrances of his eyes, nose and throat has been corrected, all symptoms of hay fever come to an end and they do not recur if he lives healthfully. Any return to enervating habits and to overeating will result in a recurrence of the hay fever.
The period of fasting required in hay fever is commonly longer than that required for the more simple ailments. The time will run, in the average case, from ten days to four or even five weeks. Overweight individuals will require a longer fast than those of average weight or less.
Allergy in hay fever, as well as in migraine headache, is not a cause but a symptom.
The answer in both instances lies in disintoxication by fasting, by cleansing, by proper modes of living.
*Note: This article only gives credence to just one physical health benefits of fasting, from an Islamic stance there is numerous physical and spiritual benefits and rewards that cannot be measured.
