Education in health principles was never more needed than now. Notwithstanding the wonderful progress in so many lives relating to the comforts and conveniences of life, even to sanitary matters and to the treatment of disease, the decline in physical vigour and power of endurance is alarming.

It demands the attention of all who have at heart the well being of their fellow men.

Our artificial civilization is encouraging evils, destructive of sound principles. Custom and fashion are at war with nature.

The practices they enjoin, and the indulgences they foster are steadily lessening both physical and mental strength, and bringing upon the race an intolerable burden.

Intemperance and crime, disease and wretchedness are everywhere. Many transgress the laws of health (dietic system) through ignorance, and they need instruction. But the greater number know better than they do.

They need to be impressed with the importance of putting them in practice. By right instruction he can do much to correct evils that are working untold harm.

The use of drug is laying the foundation of a vast amount of disease and of even more serious evil is the free use of poisonous drugs. When attacked by disease, many will not take the trouble to search out the cause of their illness.

Their chief anxiety 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 realizes another drug (medicine) is tried and then another so on. Thus the evil continues.

People need to be taught that drugs do not cure disease. It is true that they sometimes offered present relief and the patient appears to recover as the result of their use, this because nature has sufficient vital force to expel the poison and to 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 result remain in the system, and work great harm at some later period.

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 means ruin to both soul and body.

Many of the popular nostrums called patent medicines and even some of the drugs dispensed by physicians, act a part in laying the foundation of the liquor habit, opium habit, the morphine habit that are so terrible a curse to society.

The only hope of better things is in the education of the people in right principles of eating and drinking. Let physicians teach the people that restorative power is not in drugs, but in nature.

Disease is an effort of nature to free the system from conditions that result from a violation of the laws of health.

In case of sickness, the cause should be ascertained.

Unhealthful conditions should be changed, wrong habits must be corrected.

Then nature is to be assisted in her effort to expel impurities and to re-establish, right conditions in the system.

Ellen G. White's Health and Happiness pp.76-78.