Naturopathy in Nutritional Medicine
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“Both Naturopathy and Nutritional Medicine focus on ensuring the health of clients by focussing on the root cause of illness and building the health and well-being of a client rather than treating ailments” (Community Services & Health Industry Skills Council 2013).
This essay will draw comparisons between Naturopathy and Nutritional Medicine and look at the key differences and similarities in the history, evolution and philosophies of the two health practices.
Naturopathy is a holistic approach that is centred on stimulating and supporting harmony and balance within the body and keeping oneself in sync with nature. At the core of Naturopathic medicine is the philosophy that the human body has an intrinsic ability to establish, maintain, and restore health. Thus, a Naturopathic treatment forgoes the use of current medical drugs and radical surgeries, and instead prescribes a largely natural diet, supplemented with vitamins and minerals and herbs, to allow the body to heal itself and maintain balance. As a practice, Naturopathy assesses the patients mental, emotional, nutritional and physical behaviours and seeks to treat the cause of any underlying health issues and provide long term health benefits, rather than find a band aid-effect cure.
Similar to Naturopathy in its principles, Nutritional Medicine places emphasis on the relationship of food and nutrients to the well-being of the body, rather than relying on more conventional medical approaches to treat ailments. The practice of Nutritional Medicine is based on the knowledge of what is needed to give optimal nourishment to the body, with each persons body being unique and their requirements different. Nutritional Medicine also considers the environmental effects on the quality of foods, and more specifically, how the macronutrients and micronutrients in foods can affect the chemical processes of an individual and in turn benefit their overall health.
Encompassing so many different modalities within the whole healing system itself and with the use of practices and concepts dating back to hundreds of years BC, the origins and invention of Naturopathy is extensive. In ancient beginnings, Greek Physician Hippocrates taught “that it was not the physician that cured disease, but the healing power of nature” (Hyens Health Clinic 2010). Hippocrates believed that a patient should be healed first by means of dietary approaches, secondly with natural medicine intervention, and only ever as a last resort, surgery. When conventional medicine began to lose its way some hundreds of years BC, after Hippocrates death, it was his principles that led to the want for Naturopathic practices and the return from the excesses of drugs and medicines. Modern Naturopathy was pioneered largely by American Samuel Thomson, with his discoveries of Naturopathic herbal medicine, and German homeopath Dr. Benedict Lust, who introduced much of the nutritional and physical therapy approaches still used in Naturopathy today. In 1895, also-German Homeopath, John Scheel, coined the term Naturopathy.
Again, Hippocrates was a founding father within the study of Nutritional Medicine. His now eminent quote, “let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food” is essentially the core value of all Nutritional Medicine practices. Since ancient BC, physicians have studied and drawn conclusions on the healing and disease-prevention properties of foods, but it wasnt for centuries that the intricacies of food as medicine were discovered. In the early 1800s it was discovered that foods are composed primarily of Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon and Hydrogen, and in 1840, German Justus Liebig was the first to make note of carbohydrates, fats and proteins and their compositions.