By: Leslie Phillips, Alternative Medicine Practitioner Founder of Lifey.Me

Conventional doctors practice allopathic medicine which primarily focuses on treating a disease rather then preventing one, this is where a physician tends to view a patient’s health based on the physical state of being, in which there is no presence of a disease.

Naturopathy doctors recognizes health as the optimization of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, according to Michael Murray, 2012.

Murray introduces the “infection equation” as a great example to showcase these differences in more detail: “in the infection equation what determines the outcome is the interaction of the host’s immune system with the infecting organism.”

A naturopathy doctor will use treatments designed to enhance the immune system while conventional doctors tend to use treatments that are designed to kill the invading organism.

According to research and collected data, the medical field has been very obsessed with infective organisms and diseases, recording the 19th century physician Louis Pasteur, who helped develop the germ theory, among others like pasteurization- fermentation.

The germ theory involves the belief that different diseases are caused by different infectious organisms, leaving the patient as a passive victim to the invasion, (2022, November 18).

Naturopathy is more obsessed with the host defense factors. “Claude Bernard, a 19th century French scientist, believed the state of a person’s internal environment was more important in determining disease than the pathogen itself.”

On his death bed, Pasteur reportedly said: “Bernard was right. The pathogen is nothing. The terrain is everything.”

It is fair to say, early physicians from both sides have equally contributed major findings that deserve recognition.

The reason more Naturopathy doctors are emerging in the field of medicine, despite the pushback from many conventional physicians, is that there has been a gross abuse of medicine and pharmaceuticals.

Let me explain. While antibiotics can indeed save lives when used appropriately, we live in a day where antibiotics are prescribed for nearly every symptom a patient can exhibit from acne, to bladder issues, coughs, infections, and sore throats, yet antibiotics play a role in the development of chronic candidiasis- a fungal infection caused by overgrowth of yeast, (2022, June 6).

NSAIDs have contributed to over 7,000 deaths per year from gastrointestinal bleeding. Instead of just treating pain, a doctor could focus on increasing the rate of cartilage formation for those who take NSAIDs for arthritis, osteoarthritis.

Often, those who suffer from migraines may ingest a lot of NSAIDs, yet their doctor might have failed to test their patient if they are reacting to gluten, which often causes headaches, or if the patient has a vitamin deficiency- one of the top reasons patients get migraines.

A successful future will involve naturopathy complementing conventional medicine- if the two can come to work together they can revolutionize health for patients. One will focus on prevention and natural healing, the other will step in when medically necessary.

Health care costs would go down as they are not currently sustainable. The quality of life for the people would improve. Case studies have proven that preventive medicine has reduced disability by 43% in some studies, a 54% drop in patients who have to be admitted to the hospital, and a 76% decrease in the amount of money spent on health care, Michael T. Murray, 2012.

Why Is There Conflict Between Naturopathy Doctors and Conventional Doctors?

Glad you asked.

Many conventional doctors are simply not educated in the body’s natural way of healing, in the role nutrients play, and how the body works with the environment. In fact, many conventional doctors have been indoctrinated in medical school that pharmaceuticals is the only way.

In many clinics, doctors have to write a certain amount of prescriptions and see a certain amount of patients in order to keep their license and receive funding. This is one of the many reasons that most patients today complain about how little their doctor knows or remembers about them. Healthcare has become so transactional.

While a naturopathy doctor is more likely to spend more time getting to know their patient, how they live, their family dynamics, the foods they eat, how their stress levels are, naturopathic doctors are more focused on finding the root cause.

Here is a great analogy to drive this home. If a bear comes crashing into your living room your body will immediately react- maybe you’ll freeze, shake or tremble, heart beat may skyrocket, blood pressure goes up, adrenaline pumps, maybe you fight back, or run. Sweat may drench your body, you may feel dizzy, or even urinate yourself.

Now if the same person goes to the doctor and forgets to tell the doctor they had recently encountered a bear, the doctor would run some tests and start prescribing medicine to treat each symptom, instead of asking enough questions to learn that the patient had recently been under tremendous stress in their encounter with a bear.

Even though the encounter with the bear has already past, the body is still reacting to present day signals from the brain because the encounter is still being held in the body.

Now, there are a lot of people who may take a ‘course’ and then call themselves a ‘naturopathy doctor’, they receive some mail-order certificate, which for this reason is why the field is struggling with its credibility in conventional medicine, it is imperative for patients to inquire which school the doctor graduated from and be willing to dig into the information.

As you want a doctor who has indeed specialized in Naturopathy and not from a course but from an accredited school and it will be important that they can demonstrate their competence.

Research

1. Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine. Joseph E. Pizzorno & Michael T. Murray, 2012.
2. Siegfried, T. (2022, November 18). Louis Pasteur invented microbiology and transformed public health. ScienceNews. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/louis-pasteur-transformed-health-disease-microbiology
3. Cleveland Clinic. (2022, June 6). Candidiasis Fungal Infection: Causes & Treatment. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23198-candidiasis‌