What is Naturopathy?

What is naturopathy?
Medicus curat, natura sanat. "The doctor treats, nature heals"

This is an old saying that should come from the physician Hippocrates (about 460 BC to about 370 BC) and is still valid today in naturopathy.

Then as now, one believes in the self-healing powers of and in nature. The practitioner stimulates these forces. He breaks their course through his treatment so that they can take action again. But he is always aware that he does not heal himself.

Health and disease are considered in natural medicine as two poles of a dynamic balance. Every person becomes ill in the course of his life, e.g. with a flu infection. But normally, our bodies manage to get back into health by themselves. If he does not manage this, says naturopathy, external help is necessary in the form of a doctor, alternative practitioner or physiotherapist.

Since the history of each person is individual, this is of course taken into account in naturopathy. However, this is not to be confused with the term holistic, which is also often called in the same breath as naturopathy. It is dismissed by many naturopaths as a pure fashion concept of the last decades. Because naturopathy makes no claim to know everything about the patient or more than the treated person himself. This is the usual practice in current conventional medicine, where the doctor knows more than the person treated.

"If you reverse that relationship, with the assumption that the speaker knows more than the hearing person - and in the disease „speaks“Man, then, this means no less than a change of style in medicine in the sense of a solidarity in which research is again the responsibility of both physicians and the sick "(Alexander Mitscherlich 1948)..

Naturopathy tries in mutual physical and verbal communication with the fellow man as a treated to make connections, but raises no claim to so-called „holism“.

The concept of „holism“ has probably evolved as a countermovement through today's medical practice towards the more and more analytic. This means that you always pick out a part. Be it e.g. that Chinese centuries-old herbal remedies are now broken down into their components in the laboratory to make them individually in tablet form, ignoring the fact that it may be their totality, the interaction of all the substances that make up their effectiveness.

The earlier treatment approaches, it has recently been assumed, were not yet as logic-driven as our entire thinking today. At that time, medical reality was based on experience. Today we have many models, such as a neurological model, an anatomical model, etc ... with which we explain diseases and processes in our body. But there are a variety of symptoms, diseases and treatments that we can not explain with these models.

Concept of naturopathy has been supplanted, but is on the rise again
The analytical scientific approach in medicine prevailed approximately in the first half of the 19th century. In 1861, the medical study and examination regulations at the Prussian universities were changed. Until then, medical students had to „Tentamen philosophicum„ before the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. They had thus before the hospital of a philosophical examination over their knowledge of the connections of the „worldly wisdom“ to undergo. From 1861 for medical students was the „Tentamen physicum“ introduced with purely scientific and material contents. This is valid until today and every medical student has to complete it after the first semesters.

Despite the long history of natural medicine, this approach has gradually been supplanted from the usual practice of the medical industry.

At present, there is again an increased demand for and a multiple demand for naturopathic models and treatments. Because millions of people today confront medical professionals with complaints that are not reducible to simple local causes. And a large group has symptoms that can not be detected, explained, and therefore can not be treated with imaging or other modern methods of clinical technology.

Here are the gaps in the purely natural science-based medicine, which were also noted earlier, but not heard.

The British social physician Professor Thomas McKeown already in 1979 attributed the decline of infectious diseases of the last 200 years not to our medical achievements, but to better hygiene, immunity and other completely unspecific measures.

Recent studies have shown that every German visits the doctor on average 18 times a year. And the doctor sees an average of 45 patients a day. He then has about 8 minutes for each individual patient. Our medical system is in a worrying development. Of course, it must be taken into account that everyday medical operations are subject to and must adapt to the societal and global changes.

However, the neglect of the patient as a fellow man, as an individual who wants to be understood, demands correction and other approaches. And here, naturopathy, a model that has always existed alongside and even before our medicine today, is gaining in importance, not just for those affected. (Thorsten Fischer, Naturopath, 23. 01. 2010)