WHY DOCTORS DRUG by A. J. B.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 10, 1901

WHY DOCTORS DRUG.

By A. J. B.

It is gratifying to note that of late years some honest doctors are beginning to come to their senses regarding the harmful and cruel practice of administering drugs for every human ailment. A few of these reformers are endeavoring to counter-educate the people, and to turn the tide against the promiscuous use of drugs. Nature alone is the true restorer, and if unencumbered with those poisons, will be able to throw off the disease.

In a recent address made before the British Medical Association, Dr. James F. Goodhart, an eminent English authority on medicine, answered the question, “Why do we give drugs?” by saying that drugs are often given, “not because the disease demands it, but because the patient is not happy till he gets it,” and that “the drugs are sometimes given to hide our ignorance or to mark time while we watch and wait; they are given sometimes as a gambler on the Stock Exchange speculates in ‘futures.’”

How long will patients permit themselves to be thus experimented upon? Common sense should teach any sick person that by taking a drug, he is introducing into his weakened system another disease, which nature will be obliged to throw off, or overcome, before recovery can ensue. There is no short-cut road back to health, through the use of drugs. It generally takes about as long to really cure a disease as it does to contract it.

All that drugs can possibly do is to cut off the line of communication from the seat of pain or disease, to the brain. But to think that they actually cure or remove the cause of any disease, is as foolish as it would be for the inhabitants of any country to imagine themselves rid of an invading army simply because they had cut all the telegraph wires. Drugs are liars. They tell the brain that everything is all right, whereas the disease itself is there all the time. Trust only nature’s simple restoratives.

A. J. B.