Teaching Health Principles
349
Preparation for Prayer for Healing
773. It is labor lost to teach people to look to God as a healer of
their infirmities, unless they are taught also to lay aside unhealthful
practices. In order to receive His blessing in answer to prayer, they
must cease to do evil and learn to do well. Their surroundings must be
sanitary, their habits of life correct. They must live in harmony with
the laws of God, both natural and spiritual.—
The Ministry of Healing,
227, 228, 1905
The Physician’s Responsibility to Enlighten His Patients
774. The health institutions for the sick will be the best places to
educate the suffering ones to live in accordance with nature’s law, and
cease their health-destroying practices in wrong habits in diet, in dress,
that are in accordance with the world’s habits and customs, which are
not at all after God’s order. They are doing a good work to enlighten
our world....
There is now positive need even with physicians, reformers in the
line of treatment of disease, that greater painstaking effort be made to
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carry forward and upward the work for themselves, and to interestedly
instruct those who look to them for medical skill to ascertain the cause
of their infirmities. They should call their attention in a special manner
to the laws which God has established, which cannot be violated with
impunity. They dwell much on the working of disease, but do not, as a
general rule, arouse the attention to the laws which must be sacredly
and intelligently obeyed to prevent disease. Especially if the physician
has not been correct in his dietetic practices, if his own appetite has
not been restricted to a plain, wholesome diet, in a large measure
discarding the use of the flesh of dead animals,—he loves meat,—he
has educated and cultivated a taste for unhealthful food. His ideas
are narrow, and he will as soon educate and discipline the taste and
the appetite of his patients to love the things that he loves, as to give
them the sound principles of health reform. He will prescribe for
sick patients flesh, meat, when it is the very worst diet that they can
have; it stimulates, but does not give strength. They do not inquire
into their former habits of eating and drinking, and take special notice
of their erroneous habits which have been for many years laying the
foundation of disease.