Dr. Otto BuchingerDr. Otto Buchinger, founder of Buchinger Therapeutic Fasting discovered this form of health therapy when suffering from a personal physical illness. Chronic tonsillitis caused an infected rheumatism of the joints, as an invalid he was forced to give up his position as a naval doctor. When the medicine given to him at that time (penicillin was as yet unknown) effected no cure, a naval comrade encouraged him to start fasting. He clutched onto this desperate solution and completed a fasting cure with Dr. Riedlin in Freiburg. “This cure”, he later wrote, “ saved my life and existence”. It was the most difficult regeneration he ever experienced – even later with his own patients "with vomiting and fainting spells", but: “ I could move my joints again like a young recruit!”.
At first in Witzenhausen on the Werra, then in Bad Pyrmont, he developed and refined the fasting method and described it in his book, “The Therapeutic Fasting Cure”, published in 1935, which went on to become the standard work in its field and is available in its twenty – eighth edition today. Additionally, he treated an increasingly larger group of fasting patients in a spacious “sanatorium”, and delivered public lectures, wrote numerous articles and letters in his field of specialisation.
Dr. Otto Buchinger considered total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco to be of the utmost importance, as well as a new philosophy of life that centred on movement and carefully selected nutrition. Additionally, he already showed a serious interest in the “inner self” (the soul), in fact, he even developed a series of “hygienic” disciplines for soul hygienic purposes, such as work (only the work preferred by the individual), a good sense of humour, an engagement with nature, a secondary occupation, reading and a “good companion”. In particular, he found the human soul to be worthy of therapy during the fasting procedures, as he - as opposed to received opinion – considered not the body, but the soul to be in ultimate need of healing. As a conscientious Christian and well- read individual, he recommended “spiritual nourishment” to his numerous patients (The biblical Psalms, Angelus Silesius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe); he himself interpreted Rilke poems and played Beethoven symphonies on his gramophone during the so – called “collective consultation sessions”.
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