A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease by Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

How fasting helps reversal of chronic, degenerative diseases

When you’re suffering from a chronic, degenerative disease, and the doctors you trust are recommending drugs or surgery, it’s hard to believe that simply going without food could be of any lasting benefit. This is also compounded by ridicule in medical circles and the media, which mistake fasting for starvation and label it quackery.

This book provides an excellent introduction into the natural hygiene (see History of Natural Hygiene and Principles of Natural Hygiene) view of health through healthy living. Fuhrman explains how health is maintained, how disease occurs, the role of diet, and the physiological effects of fasting. Fuhrman has a solid grounding in natural hygiene as well as knowledge of diagnostics and pathology.

If you are new to fasting and suffer from a chronic, degenerative disease, this is the book you need to read to understand how fasting can help you return to health and how proper eating can help you not only remain healthy but rejuvenate your body, increase your energy and improve your mental functioning.

Please support this site. I earn a small commission for every Amazon purchase through my site. However, if you came here from Amazon and then click back to Amazon, it doesn’t count. The best way is to close all browsers, come back here, and then click through to Amazon. Every little bit helps. Thank you!

Several chapters are devoted to explaining how diseases occur and how fasting can reverse headaches, hypoglycemia, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, overweight and other chronic conditions. But fasting isn’t a quick fix. Lifestyle changes must follow to prevent recreating the same diseases.

What this book is not is a detailed treatment of how to conduct or break fasts. The information given is superficial with the caveat that those wishing to fast over three days should do so under the supervision of a qualified fasting practitioner.

I also do not any longer endorse the vegan dietary model, and Fuhrman is definitely pro-vegan. While I agree that diets high in feedlot beef, confined poultry treated with antibiotics, and farm-raised fish are detrimental, I’ve come to believe that healthy alternatives (e.g., wild game, grassfed beef) are healthful foods to which our species is biologically adapted (see The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat or NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body for alternative views). If you are a vegetarian or vegan, then Fuhrman’s your guy.

If you’re looking for a book on fasting itself, I highly recommend The Science and Fine Art of Fasting or Fasting for Renewal of Life, both written by Herbert Shelton. As a young, injured man, Furhman fasted under the supervision of Shelton and was so inspired by what he witnessed at Shelton’s school that he later became a doctor. We can thank Shelton that fasting hasn’t been completely buried by the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical cartel, and we can thank Fuhrman for carrying the torch.

Despite these shortcomings, I still think this is an excellent book that offers hope and a path for those who are ready to take control over their health. We need more doctors like Furhman.

Buy Fasting and Eating for Health.

Was this review helpful? Please vote for it on Amazon. That helps bring it to the front and increases my exposure. Thanks!

An Exposition of the Principles and Practices of Orthopathy by Herbert Shelton

Exhaustive treatment of the principles of Natural Hygiene

Herbert Shelton is the voice for natural hygiene (NH) in the 20th century. NH teaches that the body is fully self-sufficient and can properly regulate its functions and maintain health if we live in accordance with the laws of health. These are clean air, clean water, proper food, fasting, sunshine, rest, exercise, cleanliness, warmth, hope, community, composure, etc.

We have been taught since youth that disease–the outward manifestation of inward imbalance–is the enemy and is to be conquered through drugs and surgery. Failing body parts are removed, cells are destroyed, our system is poisoned by toxic chemicals called pharmaceuticals. We blindly go along taking our drugs, poisoning our system, and deteriorating further until more and more drugs are needed to suppress even more symptoms of imbalance and to counteract the effects of the other drugs. We enter our golden years crippled and tired. We are not taught to correct the habits that cause disease but that disease is an attack from outside. This is just the “scientific” equivalent to the earlier (and often current) belief that disease is caused by demons.

Now, we who are enlightened poison ourselves with herbs and external therapeutics in an effort to “assist” the hundred trillion cells of our body in their work. If the body creates a fever to speed metabolism to deal with an internal imbalance, is it prudent to ingest a toxin (non-food) to suppress that fever? If our body, in diverting energy in sickness toward cleansing and repairing, causes us to lose our hunger, is it wise to fill our bellies with food?

Please support this site. I earn a small commission for every Amazon purchase through my site. However, if you came here from Amazon and then click back to Amazon, it doesn’t count. The best way is to close all browsers, come back here, and then click through to Amazon. Every little bit helps. Thank you!

Do we suffer from an acupuncture or aspirin deficiency? Is it wise to immerse the human body in very cold or very hot water causing a flurry of energy-dissipating activity to reach homeostasis? To what end? To feel invigorated? Yes, as invigorated as the tired horse to which you applied the spur!

Is osteoporosis a disease crying for drugs or the end result of the body robbing the bones of alkaline minerals to buffer acids ingested from years of improper diet–all to maintain our blood at a pH of 7.4 in an attempt to keep us alive?

Is the origin of disease an enemy from outside or an internal act of physiology by the body attempting to LIVE? NH affirms that disease is the cure. All our wisdom could never match the complexity and grandeur of the processes of life within us.

If I could only have one book on health and the human body, this would be the book. This is 518 pages that will turn your current ideas of health and disease upside down. Natural hygiene–the let-alone treatment–is nothing new. Pharmaceutics and surgery are the newcomers. We’ve just evolved from the ingestion of bat excrement and the scrapings of St. Peter’s tomb to pus and patentable poisons. If pharmaceutics and surgery were the top performers in health attainment, our nation would not be the sickest nation on earth and our economy would not be strapped with the ever-rising costs of health care.

If you want to know about the true nature of disease and the attainment of health, this book is well worth your money and time.

Buy Human Life Its Philosophy and Laws.