Have you ever received care from a naturopathic practitioner or physician? Dr. Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD advises on what naturopathic medicine is, how long it has been around and why it addresses health issues in a more efficient way than symptom-focused care and treatment of health issues used by the modern medical approach.
Naturopathic medicine in essence has been around since man has been around and walked on earth. We always used herbs to heal ourselves, we used the proper food to get nourishment, we’ve used sun, we’ve used water, we’ve used all these natural healing remedies to support our healing process.
Here in the U.S., it’s a young country, hasn’t been around very long, but in Europe and older civilizations such as India and Asia, natural healing has been around forever.
Common principles we deal with when addressing healing modalites is the healing power of nature, any time you want to support the body’s own healing process, you want to utilize things that have been given, that exist around us. We have tools everywhere: herbs, vitamins, minerals. These elements are simply extracts of healing components from herbs and foods.
Then also you want to identify and treat the cause, you don’t just want to do surgery at the knee if you have knee pain: you want to understand what’s behind the pain: maybe the kidneys aren’t filtering out euric acid properly, maybe the liver isn’t detoxifying properly, or maybe you aren’t absorbing nutrients properly.
All of these factors are important, and looking at the being as a whole rather than just focusing on one location or region of the body, as necessary to consider and address in healing.
As a naturopathic doctor, you want to be someone that empowers the patient. You want to be the teacher. You want to give them principles and guide them along their journey. The idea is that when a person is done in their healing journey, they are not dependent. They know what they need to do to be healthy and to move toward better health.
We also talk about prevention; it’s much cheaper to prevent something from happening than to fix it when it’s already happened. It is much easier to correct something before it turns into cancer or heart attack or stroke than it is to correct it after it has turned into cancer or after you’ve had a heart attack or stroke.
These are some of the principles of naturopathic medicine and why it’s important to have it as a viable option for your healing journey.
Photo by Simon Matzinger on Unsplash.
