Naturopathic Medicine Advantages

Question: What differentiates Naturopathy from the Medical System?

Answer: Both are valuable systems that excel at different aspects of patient care.

Naturopaths are "Active Preventative Practitioners" they support a "body" in its inert capability to heal itself. Naturopathic care, attempts to treat the root cause of a health issue so that the body can ultimately heal itself. Naturopaths can work in conjunction with medical doctors.

General Medical practitioners, work on treating ( fighting) "Diseases" with drugs or surgical intervention, to the level of "absence of disease or infirmity".

The Conventional Medical Health System is NOT providing services to achieve "complete physical, mental and social well-being".

Conventional Medicine is crucial in emergency situations.

Question: What are some of the Advantages of Naturopathy

Answer:

1. Naturopathy is unique in its Holistic Preventative approach to Health. Naturopathy relies on the undeniable fact, that a patient is a whole being, not just a collection of symptoms or body parts. That fact alone enables a Naturopath to device an individual treatment and wellbeing strategy for a patient, involving the physical, mental, spiritual and even the social part.

2. Naturopathy is unique in its wellbeing approach by "Activating" patients to participate and learn to take responsibility for their own health.
   This is a very well defined difference to the medical system, where the patient stays mainly Passive.
   The Naturopathic system "needs" the patient to be actively involved in their own health.
   Activities like changing lifestyle and being involved in different aspect of physical and mental activities, such as specific individual prescribed nutritional plans, exercise, breathing techniques, attitude change, relaxation or meditation and so forth.

3. In Contrast, the medical system treats a symptom or a disease;
   ... treatments are NOT tailored to the individual, but targeted for a symptom with little regards to the rest of the body or mind.
   ... and .. the Patient is kept mainly "Passive", taking no action on behalf of their own health other than taking prescription drugs or signing a paper for invasive intervention.

Question: What can't Medical Practitioners do, but Naturopaths are good at?

Answer: Medical Practitioners in order to effectively treat someone, "have to diagnose a disease". If no disease is diagnosed by any type of medical test, they are unable to treat, help or support the patient.

Contrary to general knowledge, Doctors are not well-versed to advance a person health, or prevent a disease from developing, they are waiting for a disease to manifest in order to treat it.

The medical aim for prevention is focused on Vaccination and early detection of disease (Passive Prevention. As valuable as that is, those functions are not actively supporting a patients health.

Therefore, Active Preventative Health Services as provided by Natural Therapists/Naturopaths can fill this gap, and educate and support patients health.

Question: What is the healing power of nature?

Answer: Naturopathic medicine can be divided into 3 distinct principles;

1. The Philosophy part, the tradition and history that explains the principle of; "a body has an inherent ability to maintain and restore health".
   

2. The Evidence based system, supporting a patient with; Nutrition, as in diet, nutritional supplements, and Herbal supplements.

3. The Education: "Doctor" means teacher, even so most Naturopaths don't refer to themselves as Doctors, they actively educate the patient about beneficial health lifestyles.

.. see also > What is Naturopathy all about?

Question: How can Naturopathic Medicine benefit your wellbeing?

Answer: Naturopathic medicine by treating Holistically, Individually and Preventive, taking all aspects of a patient into account, is able to eliminate destructive, physical and mental lifestyle behaviours, and motivate a patient to actively work on their own health.

By treating and addressing problems holistically, Naturopaths are experts at treating "Lifestyle Diseases and Conditions" that don't respond well to conventional medicine.

Naturopathy is recognising that a person under "Stress" (a chronic disease is stressful), has different "Nutritional Requirements" than a perfectly well and healthy person.

By addressing nutritional short comings, while changing lifestyle behaviour, a patient will have an increase ability to overcome long lasting health problems, such as chronic diseases.

Naturopathy is treating each patient as individuals, not as a symptom or a disease. In fact, even if 2 patients have the same symptoms, because of the holistic naturopathic approach and individual symptoms, the treatment will differ from one patient to the other.

Question: Is there any good evidence supporting naturopathic medicine?

Answer: ... YES .... Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is considered the paradigm in conventional healthcare and has been suggested as the methodology for natural medicine.

The underlying foundation of EBM is the randomised controlled trial, which is very valuable in evaluating "single treatments for individual diseases".

There are randomised controlled trials that suggest that naturopathic treatments, such as botanical medicine, nutritional therapies, acupuncture, and physiotherapy are effective at treating some conditions, such as fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, depression, asthma, hypertension, and type II diabetes.

While randomised control trials are important, they are NOT the best paradigm to validate the individual targeted Natural Treatments, or the use of multiple treatments in patients with more than one disorder or disease.

Randomised control trials can NOT be applied for a holistic treatments for individual patients.
..... 10 patients with headaches, may have the same symptom, but a holistic treatment will consider the underlying factors, and therefore the treatment will NOT be a "Painkiller", but a protocol to support patients to overcome headaches all together.

For this and other reasons, some scientists have suggested that an evidence-based approach should include not only research evidence, but also Clinic Expertise and patient preferences (Geyman, 1998).

Question: What is Naturopathy offering the Public Health Care System?

Answer: The essential differences between Naturopathy and Medical Practitioners are quite significant and relate back to the philosophical differences between the two professions. These very differences place Naturopathy in a unique position to offer aspects of Health Care that are extremely worthwhile and otherwise unavailable.

Some of the unique benefits of Natural Therapy / Naturopathy include:

1. Works in Active Prevention

2. Works holistically and actively involves and educates the patient. Always treats the whole person, not just their disease.

3. Specialises in preventative, complementary health care management, utilising a wide variety of natural modalities and utilises only naturally occurring substances or their derivatives, therefore avoiding harmful side effects.

4. Focuses on the underlying cause of illness and seeks to address the cause of illness and to restore health.

5. Seeks to maintain good health and thus to prevent illness. Co-operates with the body's natural processes.

6. Does not involve surgery. - Does not involve life-threatening procedures.

7. Is very cost-effective in that it maintains health and therefore reduces need for hospitalisation, reduces illness related loss of productivity.

Skeptic's Question Section:

Natural Therapies have been intentionally "misrepresented" over many years.

Most "Skeptics" seem to be biased against Natural Therapy in General, and do NOT understand the Health Supporting and Preventative Principles of Natural Therapy.

One has to ask therefore; why are some people so opposed to Natural Therapies?

Apparently, skeptics are not working on a solution to improve the Australian Health System, instead their aim seems to be to get rid of Natural Therapies altogether.

Just imagine, thousands of years of tradition, practiced and used by Millions of people, and a small group of skeptics seem to think they know better than anyone else, and try to dictate to the whole world to stop Natural Therapies?

Does it matter that Skeptics are against Natural Therapy?
Yes, unfortunately, some skeptics are medical professionals who have considerable influence on government and medical regulating bodies.

What Natural Therapists must do:

1. Natural Therapy bodies need to streamline their efforts in promoting and explaining Natural Therapy principles and its advantages to the public and specifically to regulatory government bodies much more decisively.

2. Naturopaths to voluntarily post/add their strict "Code of Ethics/Conduct" to their web-pages.

3. Naturopaths to voluntary "police" their own industry.

4. Naturopaths to voluntary add an addition to their "Code of Ethics", to define the difference of the Naturopathic "Scope of Practice".

NOTE: Copy suggested "Code of Ethics"

Skeptic's Question: What can Naturopaths add to the medical system, which is not provided already?

Answer: This is just one of the questions that demonstrates that Skeptics do not, or WILL NOT understand the principles of Naturopathy.

Medical Doctors :

1. DO NOT treat patients holistically, they only treat one disease and one body system at a time.

2. DO NOT treat patients individually, they treat/fight the disease without considering the whole individual.

3. DO NOT treat patients if no diagnosis can be established. - Patients go home with the same symptoms they presented with.

4. DO NOT treat patients to support/improve patients Health and Wellbeing.

5. DO NOT treat patients for Active Prevention.

Naturopathic Practitioners do all of the above:

Naturopaths are absolutely dedicated to improve patients wellbeing on all levels.

Naturopathic Practitioners are educated to treat for "complete physical, mental and social well-being".

NOTE: This is not a competition - This is an attempt to improve the overall Health System, by providing Increased Preventative Care.

Skeptic's Question: What evidence is there that naturopathic consultations improve health?

Answer: Evidence is certainly important, and the therapeutic agents Naturopaths are using have scientific evidence. However, because of the preventative and wellness improvement principles of a Naturopathic treatment, "Double Blind Tests are obviously not possible".

The evidence is presented by the Naturopathic Treatment Outcomes / Clinical Evidence:

1. The Naturopathic patient feels better after the treatment than before the treatment.

2. A Naturopathic patient with an improved lifestyle, diet and physical and mental exercise regime is much less likely to attract a health problems, such as getting over weight or developing type 2 diabetes, or any stress related problem.
   

3. Statistics to the ever increasing numbers of patients visiting Complementary medicine therapists is further evidence.

4. 70 to 80% of people consulting Naturopaths do so, because patients have NOT received supportive Health Advice from their Doctors.

5. Statistically, people AFTER visiting a Naturopathic practitioner stay healthier, and are generally more aware to live a healthy lifestyle.

Skeptic's Question: Problems with common practices by Naturopaths, including "misdiagnoses".

Answer: Naturopaths "Do NOT Diagnose a Disease for the Purpose of naming a disease". Naturopaths do NOT treat a specific Disease, and they do NOT use any drug or surgical treatment to treat a disease.

Naturopaths Do always support a patient's health and wellbeing, to enhance the patients ability to heal themselves.

NOTE: There are fraudulent people in any profession.

Skeptic: The direct marketing of "unnecessary supplements".

Answer: Most "unnecessary" supplements are self-prescribed and bought over the counter, probably in conjunction with over the counter unnecessary medical products.

There is also evidence, that "over the counter medical products", like pain killers, are more dangerous than natural supplements.

Naturopaths do only "prescribe" supplements deemed necessary to improve a patient's health.