NATUROPATHIC MEDICINE

Naturopathic Medicine, Natural Medicine, or Natural Therapeutics

Naturopathic Medicine, Natural Medicine, or Naturopathy in short, is an alternative system of medicine which essentially uses drugless modalities to coax, needle, rehabilitate, nourish, stimulate and encourage a diseased body back into health. It uses the principle that a living body has an inherent ability to heal itself again if it is properly stimulated in the right direction. A cut or an injury to the body for instance, will never heal if the body’s highly complex repair mechanisms refuse to cooperate, no matter how much of first-aid, bandages, stitches, surgery, medical intervention with antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, analgesics and medications we pump into it. These agents do not heal the body. Drugs only suppress the symptom and do not do the healing. Only the body can heal itself as doctors watch hopefully from outside. The body will not heal if the body refuses to self-repair the injury. The healing must be done only by the body, while the doctor can only watch hopefully from outside.

Therapeutic modalities in natural medicine make use of this principle that the body can rectify itself when appropriately nourished, stimulated, coaxed, needled, and rested. Treatment by a doctor using natural medical approach include proper diet (dietotherapy), exercise, approaches in preventing and counteracting further environmental damage to the body, such from free radical damage, pollutants in food, water, air and soil, elimination of waste from the body, such as through special therapeutic baths (steam bath, Sitz bath etc), colon cleansing, physiological fasting (the application of special dietotherapeutic regime and fruit juice fasting), the use of clean air and clean water, sunlight, positive lifestyle, and lifestyle modifications, positive thinking, psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy, meditation techniques, behaviour therapy, phototherapy, hydrotherapy, steam application and cryotherapy (similar to the use of ice-packs in soft tissue injuries which first-aiders are more familiar with, but done in very much greater details, using very much more advanced techniques), rest and relaxation (like the bed rest a doctor would prescribe, but the rest techniques are done in much more elaborate ways than merely going to sleep).

Treatment also includes phytotherapy with herbal and botanical medicine as well as enhancing and supporting other treatment modalities through multi-directional and integrated approach. Naturopathic doctors do not use drugs like allopathic doctors just to suppress the symptoms of the disease, and pray for the body to naturally overcome the problem.

These are some of the many lines of management available to a practicing naturopathic doctor who may decide either to treat conservatively and singly, such as prescribing only bed rest or use multiple prone approaches. In the event of a simple fever, sponging, increased fluid intake, such as the intake barely water (a diuretic), and bed rest may be all that are necessary. A patient may be put on a day or two of fasting on rice water, fruit or vegetable juice or coconut water, which is equivalent to giving ORS (oral rehydration salts) as practised in conventional medicine for an uncomplicated case of diarrhoea due to food poisoning. On the other hand the naturopath (a doctor who practices naturopathic (natural) medicine may decide to treat very aggressively through multiple approaches including dietary, behavior and lifestyle modifications, physiotherapy, rehabilitation therapy and / or herbal medication for long-standing cases.

During the training of a naturopathic doctor, a very deep and detailed understanding of human body structure (anatomy), its functions (physiology), and its chemistry (biochemistry) were taught for two years at exactly the same level as taught in conventional medical schools. The syllabus also included among many, the principles of pharmacology and phyto-pharmacology (botanical medicine), their chemistry, metabolism and mode of action, clinical phytotherapeutics, clinical nutrition, and dietetics (dietotherapeutics), pathogenesis and disease recognition and classification, diagnostic procedures, and their diagnostic comparison with modalities in conventional medicine, general medicine, natural child-birth, comparative medicine, minor surgery, rehabilitative medicine, radiology, osteopathy and postural alignment, hydrotherapy, relaxation and visual therapeutic techniques, the application of acupuncture and acupressure, botanical medicine, psychotherapy etc., etc,

These were taught during class-room lectures and during clinical training. After completing their basic practicing degree and clinical training, graduates who wish to continue further for their Masters and PhD degrees will be required to submit, in addition to higher course work followed by examinations, an original research thesis of no less than 40,000 words. Their integrated therapeutic approaches will all be integrated into the practice of natural medicine. Thus a doctor of natural therapeutic is very well trained, well-versed and very knowledgeable on the best therapeutic modality to use to treat a patient.

They take the best integrated approach drawn from the best of each medical system, and try to combine them into their practice. This gives the patient the best chance since the best features from every medical system is put together into the treatment..

Having been in medical research for 25 years of my life, and finding we have opened up more questions than we could solve, I strongly believe we need to approach the problems of health from a very broad spectrum of human behaviour, and the environment. We cannot solve them at looking at cells and tissues through a microscope, and merely prescribing some medicines to try to solve health problems.

I see health problems now as very big and extremely complex problem. I have even undergone a 3-months formal course in epidemiology and tropical medicine in 1991, as well as in medical biotechnology to study tiny and complex entities like DNA molecules (molecular medicine). They were all part of our postgraduate and post-doctoral training meant for doctors and medical researchers from various ASEAN countries through inter-Governments technical exchange. But all these have not solved any problem. We need to be trained holistically and look at patients as a person, and not as a collection of DNA and chemistry.