Naturopathy is a patient centred healthcare system based on the notion that if the individual is sufficiently empowered with knowledge about health and illness that he/she has the ability and responsibility for a healthy outcome. Health is about adopting a life-style that promotes health and is based on the concept that living life in a natural way is the first step. It is essentially ecological in that naturopaths recognise that we need to live in harmony with our environment.
Nutrition is the cornerstone on which naturopathy rests and holism is the driving principle. Fresh vegetables and fruit, whole cereals, clean air and water. The importance of how our food is grown is emphasised in this context. Growing our food organically is recognised as an important factor leading to health as well as rearing our animals in a free-range environment. The recent foodscares regarding BSE and salmonella, and latterly, foot and mouth, have made the public conscious of the price to be paid for the intensive, industrialised chemical and pharmaceutical factories that farms have been turned into in the name of efficiency. The demand for organically grown food far outstrips supply, so much so that it is being imported from all over the world. This is particularly ironic when farmers are being paid subsidies not to farm and to set aside.
Naturopathy is the professional aspect where a patient seeks advice from a naturopath, the professional. Nature cure is a term often used to describe the way of life of those following the above philosophy and it is particularly pertinent in describing it as a lay system of considering health and illness. The individual following a nature cure regime usually eschews drugs and vaccination. Often, they will avoid alcohol. Smoking is particularly to be frowned upon. White bread, sugar in all its guises, salt and other condiments are foods to be avoided. Naturopathy utilises dietetics in its therapeutic armamentarium and suggests that an individual may follow a strictly vegetarian regime or possibly a mono-diet. A short or long fast may be suggested.
The naturopathic perspective of illness and disease
Naturopathy says that there is only one disease but that there are many manifestations of it. Depending on such factors as genes, environment and life-style depends on how disease is manifested. Generally, naturopaths claim that acute illness is curative. It is an attempt by the organism to restore homeostasis. Young, vital people tend towards acute disease.
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Chronic disease is a process of adaptation. The body no longer has the capacity to respond in an acute way. Arthritis, coronary disease, diabetes and cancer could be looked upon as chronic diseases from this perspective. The naturopath’s task is to attempt to restore the patient’s vitality in an effort for the patient to respond in an acute way. When this happens it is called the healing crisis. Older patients with lowered vitality tend to suffer from chronic disease. Naturopaths see health and illness in evolutionary terms. Generally, discounting genetic influences, the first thing that we suffer from is a cold. We generally die in old age from such conditions as cancer, diabetes and coronary disease.
Acute conditions such as colds, influenza, fevers and boils are curative in that they are seeking to return the organism to health. The more healthy we are the more likely we are suffer from them. How often does it happen when an older person with some crippling condition starts off on a nature cure regime and after two or three months has to take to their bed with a bad cold or influenza. Sometimes it is not understood as the patient has not had a cold or `flu’ for years. When this happens it is described in nature terms as a healing crisis.
Fasting
Fasting is the absention from food for a period of 12 hours or longer. Breakfast is so-called as it breaks an overnight fast. Fasting is generally used for religious or health reasons, or both. Purifying the soul or the body is a simple way of looking at fasting. Water only, and it is important to drink water while on a fast. It is said that one can fast for up to 90 days; this practitioner has no experience of such long fasts but he has personally supervised fasts of 42 days. It is unfortunate that it takes 3 days to get through the the first part of a fast; it is after this that a fast becomes easier. A fast should not be undertaken without the supervision of someone qualified to oversee it. There are contra-indications to fasting. Cancer, diabetes and coronary heart disease are obvious conditions to be cautious about. There are many other conditions that one should be careful about before undertaking a fast. If in any doubt seek out a qualified naturopath. It may be best to undertake a food reform program before undertaking a fast. It is certainly wise to prepare for a fast for about three to four days before hand by eating fresh vegetables and fruit. A book to recommend about fasting is Arnold Ehret's `Mucusless Diet Healing System' which is available in most health food stores. It is an old text and some of the of the language is somewhat archaic but it is a valuable book about fasting for all that.
Organic food
Here, in the UK, it seems that we have been inflicted with one food crisis after another. Mad cow disease, salmonella and eggs and now it is foot and mouth. It is not difficult to blame the farmers for their iniquitious farming practices but possibly the latest foot and mouth crisis can be laid at the hands of a few irresponsible farmers. However, is it not surprising that salmonella is not endemic with battery farmers? Is it not surprising that it is not particularly healthy to eat the products resulting from the battery farming of poultry? When meat meal products are fed to vegetarian animals is it not surprising that some anomalies may be thrown up in that humans suffer some grotesque conditions such as BSE? This practitioner has been present in supermarkets where customers have remarked over the cheapness of broiler chickens and have subsequently bought them. Have not the consumers thought about the miserableness of that chicken's existence and now they are ready to consume it? The question is; at what cost to the consumer, or perhaps there is no cost, the consumer is getting what is coming to them. One thing is certain, naturopathy is of absolutely no benefit to them.
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Naturopathy would seek an ideal where our food is grown in a natural state without the use of insecticides, pesticides, weedkillers and artificial fertilisers. It sees a world that is essentially ecological in that if there are pests about it is because the food is not sufficiently integral to survive or that there are insufficient natural predators present, possible because they have been destroyed by the use of pesticides. Naturopathy believes that there is an ecological relationship between all living things and that forms of life only exist in an environment that suits them. Germs and bacteria require a suitable environment; change the environment and they go. In this paradigm there is no such concept as a weed; it is doing what a weed should do and restoring homeostasis to that particular area.
The healing crisis
To be looked upon as a constructive process in the regaining of health. Acute illness is a healing crisis. It is the naturopath’s task to return a chronic patient to health by inducing a healing crisis. Fevers and colds, influenza and skin eruptions such as boils and abcesses are acute manifestations. Mono-fruit regimes and fasts are utilised during a healing crisis. Hydrotherapy plays an important part in this context.
Hydrotherapy
At one time was a system of medicine in its own right. In the USA, in the 19th century, hydrotherapy had a huge following. Not only was it non-heroic in nature but it was empowering for patients, particularly women. In fact, many hydrotherapists were women. Hydrotherapy enabled mothers to look after their family’s health needs. According to the water-curists, disease had two causes: firstly, a lack of nervous energy, or the presence of morbid matter in the system, or both combined….., or lowered vitality. The second cause was a violation of hygienic laws. There was emphasis on `unphysiological voluntary habits’. Water was the primary healing agent offering absolution and purification. There was a hydropathic conceptualization of women’s physiolology in that it wasn’t pathologised which helped promote an unimpaired social role for women. This is abstracted from the writings of the watercurists around 1850 and demonstrates an open-mindedness and forward thinking competely at odds with the allopathic thinking of the day and of the day, a century later. Hydrotherapy was more than just using water as a therapeutic agent, it was a way of life and a way to become healthy. It was the fore-runner of naturopathy and naturopathy embraced the philosophy totally.
History of naturopathy
Modern naturopathy, as we know it today, was said to be founded in 1892 by Benedect Lust who bought Father Kneipps’ hydrotherapy to the USA from Germany. Its roots are described as going back to the time of Hippocrates who said that if all the medicines of the world were thrown into the sea it would be bad for the fish but good for humanity.
There was a famous medical philosopher with roots buried deep into alchemy and astrology who could be considered the true father of medicine. He rejected the orthodoxies of the time and attempted to construct a new philosophy in considering what health and illness and indeed what life was all about. He postulated a force that he called `munia' which emanated from all living things. His name was Paracelsus and he called for the burning of all the books of pathology that preceded him and said to his students to follow him, that he was the true messenger of what health and illness was all about. It was Paracelsus who rolled a little ball of plague and injected it into himself who perceived of the principles lying behind the homeopathy of the future which was to be propounded by Hahneman in 1810. Paracelsus was born in 1492 which coincidentally was the year that Columbus set off on his trip ultimately to discover America. It was the `munia' of Paracelsus that subsequently became to be recognised at lying at the core of any vitalistic system of medicine.
This is by necessity a brief overview of what naturopathy and nature cure are all about. It is also important to stress that it is a model of health that many people can live by and, in fact, many do. But, at the end of the day, it is a health belief model and one could debate some of the basic principles of naturopathy. What can be stressed though, is that it works and empirical evidence points to it working. The basic principles of naturopathy were laid down in the 18th and 19th centuries and it is interesting that recent medical advances especially concerning immunology and the genome would seem to confirm the validity of the claims made by naturopathy.
The guiding principles of naturopathy:
i) to enable the body, via its immune system, to restore homestasis
ii) that it recognises all planes of existence
iii) that it seeks to empower patients by offering knowledge about health promoting activities
iv) to encourage the individual that he/she has the power to change their level of health by their own actions in
changing life-styles
v) it recognises the `wholeness’ of life, the unifying power behind the universe, and the interconnectness of all
living things iv) it is ecological in recognising the interdependence of all living things, from the macro to the
micro