Many people think that the term “natural healing” or “natural medicine” refers to using herbs and other natural substances as a method of treatment. However, natural healing actually refers to an organism’s own inherent healing abilities. Conventional medicine is all about direct intervention. Natural medicine is about supporting and stimulating the body and mind to heal itself.
Different health care modalities line up along a continuum from a “fix it” approach to the purely “energetic” approaches. I came up with a simple breakdown of this continuum into four stages. Natural healing encompasses the last three. The stages are increasingly holistic and inclusive, meaning that the higher levels assume the other levels are also necessary.
1. Intervention. This is conventional medicine. Something must done to control the symptoms. Getting the patient to alter their lifestyle is also a consideration, but is usually secondary.
2. Environmental. This first stage of natural medicine recognizes the body’s own healing mechanisms and looks for a cause of why the body is not healing itself. The emphasis is usually on poor diet, environmental toxins, stress, etc. Get the patient to change their environment and/or habits in order to remove the obstacle(s) and the body can often heal itself. Direct interventions are secondary and as necessary.
3. Supportive. This next stage tries to encourage and boost the body’s own healing systems, in addition to looking for and correcting specific causes. Certain treatments are generally good for everybody. For example, no matter what health issues you have inherited and acquired, there will likely be at least somewhat better if you have a good diet, low stress, etc. Other treatments need to be individualized to the patient as well as to the nature of the problem. Individualized treatments are harder to study with the current standard of randomized double blind clinical trials, which rely on large numbers of subjects who are considered to be roughly identical.
4. Root. These types of modalities view health as being maintained at the root by some type of energetic force or forces, and disease comes from an imbalance or a disharmony of these forces. As the individual is brought into a more harmonized state by treating this root disorder, the body will naturally heal itself. Of course, the other three levels apply as appropriate—you don’t treat a broken arm (only) at this root level, for example. This level is considered “belief” by conventional medicine. Some methods are in fact primarily spiritual, but not all. Some of these modalities use these “energies” in the attempt to explain what is going on rather than being based on these mysterious forces and the methods themselves were often developed through experiment not conjecture, as is the case with homeopathy.
Different healing modalities can often work at multiple levels. For example, homeopathy can be used at all of these levels. You can buy homeopathic products that are just designed to help with a specific symptom. People use drainage remedies to help get rid of toxins. So called “constitutional” homeopathic treatments works at the top two levels, depending on the amount of similarity between homeopathic remedy and the patient.
Other people might choose different ways to categorize this, but the important point is that if you only see the health from the conventional, intervention based view, health care treatments at the other levels will seem weird, unscientific, and not “evidence based.” Especially the what I called the root level. #2 and part of #3 are at least consistent with a materialistic world view.
Comments:
John - two points, first I think that your characterisation of conventional medicine as only occurring at the level of ‘intervention’ is completely false.
All the factors that you mention in ‘environmental’ and ‘supportive’ have been recognised by conventional medicine for decades. Moreover, they form a significant part of public health strategies.
Anyone who lives in the western world will have been exposed to such government sponsored health messages countless times - don’t smoke, exercise more, eat fresh fruit and vegetables etc etc etc. Furthermore, there are a variety of regulatory initiatives that reduce environmental factors - such as removing lead from fuel. You might not think that they go far enough, but scientific medicine is very aware of how environmental factors can cause ill health.
The situation is the same with ‘support’. Psychotherapy and counseling are certainly part of mainstream medicine. You mention stress as a factor - this has of course been recognised by doctors for decades.
The only area where conventional medicine disagrees with you is on your ‘root’ level when you write about various ‘energies’.
This brings me on to my second point. Most people would accept that there are fundamental factors which predispose people to illness. But these are genetics.
Are you suggesting that natural healing can influence genetics?
As I wrote above, lifestyle changes are secondary in conventional medicine. If you want to see medicine really working on an environmental level, go visit a naturopathic physician, or a regular physician who is working with mostly natural therapies.
I think you missed something important about what I called the environmental level — it’s the idea that the body can heal itself given the proper resources and not burdened with toxins. It’s not the same as saying that toxin X can make you sick.
Public health is mostly concerned with vaccination and germ control. It’s much less “clean water” and much more “get rid of the nasties.” I’m not saying this is unimportant. Don’t misunderstand me. Nor am I saying medical interventions are bad, just only a piece of the desired whole.
As for therapy, my opinion is that it can work at all levels, including root healing. But in many cases it’s a combination of a kind of intervention — helping the person manage emotional symptoms — plus an environmental treatment — strategies for dealing with stress — with some supportive thrown in, because talking to someone about your problems is usually a good thing. Lots of people get kind of addicted to therapy, though. It acts like a drug for them, helping them cope but not helping them move on as eventually they should.
In my experience, genetics are not the only fundamental factors which predispose people to illness. Homeopaths use the word miasm to talk about the generational effects of infectious diseases. And I have also seen how traumas of the parents can show up in a kind of diffused, constitutional way in the children, although I can’t explain the method of transmission. And yes, I’ve seen homeopathy affect these inherited issues, including the expression of genetic factors. And no, I’m not claiming homeopathy can reverse Down’s Syndrome and such. Some disease is primarily genetic, but in most cases the genetics are only one factor.
Somebody off the street wouldn’t understand that, but sometimes a pump in body building is the best feeling you can have as a Natural healing.
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