While exercise is one way of getting heat in the body to fight against disease and keep the body healthy, there are other scientific methods like baths, fasting, etc., which not only keep the health of the body maintained, but also cure it in case of ailment.
While the effect of exercise does not always reach the inner-most organs of the body, baths on scientific lines, as suggested by Nature-cure, take their heating effects to those organs and purify them of their foreign matter.
Baths, are thus, a part of the Nature-cure philosophy or fundamental principle of producing heat in the body to cure ailment, by the process of applying cold water on the outer surface, or skin, of the body, and in this process, creating an artificial circulation of blood to oxidise the foreign matter accumulated in the body causing all types of ailments.
How a touch of cold water produces heat in the body can well be demonstrated on laboratory scale even at home. Place two beakers, or glasses on your desk, one filled with tolerably hot water and the other, with sufficient cold water. Put your finger first in hot water and when sufficiently warm, take it out and dip it in the cold water.
What will happen? A feeling of swelling or hardening of the tip of the wet finger will be experienced. What has happened, is that, with the sudden cooling of the warm and outer part of the skin of the finger tip, the warm blood from inside the finger rushed up to the skin to warm it up again and, and in this process a feeling as said is observed.
This is in short the principle, by which an artificial circulation of blood is produced to cure the body of accumulated wastes. To augment the effect of cold, the range of temperature, that is, the difference between the warm and cold water is increased and to manipulate this, new forms of scientific baths were invented by naturo-paths in the system of Nature-cure.
Besides baths, Nature-cure methods of treatment include fasting and exercise. By fasting abetted by exercise and baths, one can keep his health in good condition and also get himself cured of practically all ailments. Yet it costs little, much little comparatively with treatments by Allopathy or even other indigenous methods of treatment.
Also, Nature-cure treatment can be had at home, except in rare and serious cases or in the case of non-availability of resources or help at home, when one can have it on normal expenses at the existing Nature-cure homes, which also impart, or one gets, training in Nature-cure applications of treatment thoroughly.
It is thus imperative that a thorough knowledge of the body’s structure, the functions of different organs of the body, the digestive system and, no less, the function of blood in the body is given to the reader before imparting a knowledge of the methods of treatment in Nature-cure.
The purpose is that the reader can have his own treatment by himself even at home. In a way, he has to be his own doctor by due knowledge and practice. Once when that is acquired one is independent of medicine and the physician, thus living a life of self-confidence and respect.
We shall deal separately with the three fundamental methods of Nature-cure treatment, that is, the baths, the exercise (Yoga) and the food. Here we begin with an important aspect of knowledge bearing relation with all these methods and that is the knowledge of blood and its circulation.