Natural Cures For Dummies. Joe Kraynak

Tour the various treatment approaches that make up natural medicine’s healthcare model, including aromatherapy, Ayurveda, biofeedback, chelation, functional and herbal medicine, acupuncture, osteopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, and nutritional medicine.

Chapter 1

      Getting the Lowdown on Natural Cures

       In This Chapter

      ▶ Understanding nature’s role in curing illness

      ▶ Weighing the pros and cons of natural cures

      ▶ Knowing when to seek conventional care

      Modern medicine does a pretty good job fighting infections and acute illnesses. Unfortunately, its track record for preventing and treating chronic illness is abysmal. In fact, many chronic illnesses, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and arthritis, are now epidemics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people in the United States spend 86 percent of their healthcare dollars on chronic diseases – most of which are preventable through diet and lifestyle changes.

      When you go to a conventional doctor, however, you rarely get educated or trained in proper nutrition or a healthy lifestyle. Instead, the doctor hands you a prescription for a medication that typically treats the symptoms and has a laundry list of very scary side effects, few of which are mentioned at the time.

      There’s a better way: Nature’s way.

      Wrapping Your Brain around the Concept of Natural Cures

      Over the course of a couple million years, the human body has evolved to develop incredibly efficient self-defense and self-healing mechanisms. Yet when you visit a doctor complaining of an illness, the doctor typically disregards what nature has so carefully crafted and offers treatments cooked up in a laboratory, many of which degrade your body’s own healing power. Consider the use of antibiotics, which kill not only harmful bacteria but also healthy bacteria in your gut – bacteria that are essential for proper digestion, nutrition, and immune response.

      Natural medical practitioners take a different approach. They work with nature to strengthen the body’s ability to fight infection and heal itself. In this section, I provide additional insight into the natural cures approach, provide some background on its history, reveal the science that supports it, and let you know what to expect from it as a patient.

Defining natural medicine

      Natural medicine is any healing practice that harnesses the power of nature, including the human body’s self-defense and self-healing mechanisms, to prevent and cure illness. Natural medicine includes the following practices:

      ✔ Aromatherapy: Essential oils extracted from plants are used in numerous preparations, including massage oils and bath salts, to enhance physical and psychological well-being.

      ✔ Ayurveda: This traditional Hindu system of medicine seeks to establish healthy balance in mind, body, and spirit through diet, herbal formulations, and yoga.

      ✔ Biofeedback: This healing technique helps you control bodily processes normally thought to be outside an individual’s control. It does so by providing real-time monitoring and information about those processes as you perform techniques to regulate them.

      ✔ Chelation: Detoxification of heavy metals and other toxins from the body gets rid of harmful substances that your body isn’t geared to eliminate on its own.

      ✔ Functional medicine: Functional medicine is personalized medicine that recognizes and addresses each person’s individual genetic uniqueness and the complex interactions among genes, diet, and lifestyle.

      ✔ Herbal medicine: This practice treats illness with plants or plant extracts and is perhaps the oldest form of medical practice.

      ✔ Homeopathy: Homeopathy treats illness by giving the patient minute doses of natural substances that would cause the same symptoms in a healthy person. The concept behind homeopathic remedies is similar to the concept behind vaccination, which deliberately exposes people to dead or weakened bacteria or viruses to protect them from infections caused by those organisms.

      ✔ Massage and bodywork: Manipulation of the body, primarily the bones, muscles, and nerves, to relieve tension and pain, establish balance, promote detoxification, or treat specific conditions comes in many forms, including chiropractic adjustments, traditional massage, acupuncture, reflexology, rolfing, Reiki, and shiatsu.

      ✔ Naturopathy: The Swiss Army Knife of natural healing, naturopathy uses numerous alternative treatments to promote healing and health, including diet and lifestyle counseling, herbs, homeopathy, massage, aromatherapy, acupuncture, and biofeedback.

      ✔ Chiropractic treatment: Chiropractic treatment seeks to realign the spinal column and joints that cause pain and dysfunction related to the nerves, muscles, and organs of the body. Many chiropractors follow a functional medicine approach. Look for a chiropractor who’s received advanced training in functional medicine.

      ✔ Nutritional medicine: This approach uses food along with vitamins, minerals, and other supplements as medicine to cure illness and optimize health.

      For more about these natural healing disciplines, check out Chapter 3. Head to the chapters in Part II for details on treating specific health conditions.

      

No two individuals are alike; effective treatment requires a personalized treatment plan. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to visit an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner (IFMCP) doctor or a naturopath for an initial evaluation to determine whether you have any food allergies or sensitivities, nutritional deficiencies, digestive disorders, or genetic vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. To find a practitioner who has trained with the Institute for Functional Medicine, visit www.functionalmedicine.org and click Find a Practitioner. To find a naturopath, visit www.naturopathic.org and click Find a Doctor.

Sifting through the science behind natural cures

      Conventional science often questions the effectiveness of natural medicine by citing the dearth of well-designed clinical studies, but natural medicine actually has a growing body of scientific evidence to back it up. This evidence comes primarily in two forms:

      ✔ Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled (RDBPC) clinical trials: RDBPC studies, which test the effectiveness and safety of medications, are the gold standard in the pharmaceutical industry. More and more, these same studies are used to test the effectiveness of alternative treatments, including nutritional supplements. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is devoted exclusively to studying and reporting on the safety and effectiveness of alternative and complementary treatments; visit nccam.nih.gov for details.

      

RDBPC studies aren’t always suitable for testing natural treatments, however, because these treatments are often tailored to the individual patient’s needs and involve a combination of interventions, including dietary changes, nutritional support, exercise, and physical manipulation.

      ✔ Investigations into human biology and physiology: Advances in technology are revealing more and more about how the human body functions and how genetic, environmental, and lifestyle variables alone and together influence health and illness. For example, a recent study published in the journal Cell found that some of the bacteria living in the human body produce antibiotics, which help prevent and fight infections from certain harmful bacteria. This study provides additional support for the natural cures approach of supporting a healthy immune system with probiotics and avoiding the overuse of broad-range