What is Naturopathic Medicine?

Overview

Naturopathic medicine is a medical movement and profession that has recently moved to the forefront of health-care innovation in North America and whose influence in beginning to be noticed elsewhere in the world. Naturopathic medicine is a comprehensive medical approach which integrates scientific knowledge with several well-established alternative therapeutic systems. It combines what is known (in Israel and elsewhere) as naturopathy with up-to-date medical knowledge and a multifaceted perspective on healing. In addition to the methods of traditional naturopathy which centre around nutrition, herbal medicine, and lifestyle changes, naturopathic medicine currently encompasses the use of Chinese medicine and acupuncture, classical homeopathy, physical manipulation, and more. There are six accredited schools in the USA and Canada which teach a rigorous, four-year, full-time curriculum in naturopathic medicine.

Naturopathic philosophy

Naturopathic medicine as a philosophy of medicine has its roots in antiquity, while it modern form it dates back to the late 1800s when it was established as a profession by European immigrants to North America. According to naturopathic medicine, the actual symptoms that patients complain of do not represent the disease but are the manifestation of some underlying imbalance in the organism. Because human beings are incredibly complex, there is usually no unique perspective that fully explains any given imbalance. Indeed, living beings are not machines running according to simple cause-and-effect relations; rather, we exhibit a fairly consistent pattern of being — consisting of heredity, early childhood environment, family relationships, social environment, temperament (psychological tendencies, strengths, weaknesses), past medical interventions, unusual events causing physical or psychological trauma, food intake, physical activity, exposure to toxins, and so on. These constitute the complex web of interacting factors that form the physical and non-physical self.

This philosophical perspective translates into treatment methods that do not target symptoms directly but instead strive to shift the organism away from its current state toward a state of better overall health. In fact, interventions that target symptoms without addressing the underlying pattern are generally regarded as non-ideal or ‘suppressive’ and are used only as temporary measures. Indeed, the attainment of a better state often requires one to stop chasing symptoms as they arise but instead focus on fundamental, long-term improvement, during which process discomfort might take a while to be alleviated.

In accordance with this complexity, naturopathic medicine is an evolving, open-ended system of medicine. Applying naturopathic principles therefore requires a measure of both insight and creativity in diagnosing the nature of the imbalance and in devising appropriate treatment. Insight refers to the need to see beyond the pathology or conventional diagnosis to reach and understanding the pattern of imbalance of the whole organism — something that classical homeopathy, EFT, and Bowen Technique all strive to do. Creativity refers to the need to adapt to the peculiarities of the individual patient, leading to the customized use of a combination of techniques from a wide pool of rather than advocating the same treatment to everyone with the same condition. As such, any therapy that agrees with the basic principles of the system can be called naturopathic.

Healing potential

Beyond improvement in medically recognizable conditions, naturopathic approaches are capable of leading to a higher level of well-being than ever before, and in the best cases contributes to the spiritual growth of the individual as he or she finds increased strength and creativity in addressing recurrrent difficulties and life-long challenges. Thus it is important to recognize that maximizing treatment potential requires the acceptance by the patient that he or she is not only a complex physical entity but also a spiritual being with an innate life force that manifests through physical constitution, behaviour, temperament, and beliefs.