Introduction to NatMedix
(Continued)
As a result, conventional Allopathic doctors are duty-bound to follow the approved protocols laid down by institutions that dance to the drug companies’ tune. If they deviate from this, they risk alienating their colleagues and losing their licenses.
This same model has forced Doctors of Chiropractic to emphasize musculoskeletal conditions in practice, and to use procedures that are expressed in Allopathic language, in order to not estrange their conventionally minded critics. The use of Chiropractic methods to address organic disease has been given little emphasis in recent years, due to the science of that application being less “defensible”.
Naturopathic doctors have also succumbed to this thinking, wherein disease is increasingly explained by the Allopathic germ theory model, and long-practiced Naturopathic modalities are brushed over as embarrassing reminders of a pre-scientific time. Great care is taken by the modern Naturopath to point out that he or she is trained in “modern, scientific” medicine.
The very idea of “evidence-based medicine” suggests that any method not based on what the dominant authorities deem to be “evidence” is likely ineffective. This is dangerous thinking, for several reasons. It first ignores those methods that have a long history of successful use but have not been subjected to tests in modern times to determine exactly why they work. It also excludes those procedures that cannot easily be subjected to a controlled trial (how does one keep a subject from knowing he is fasting, or receiving hydrotherapy?).
By creating acceptance for those applications that show a “statistically significant response rate”, one is subtly deceived into thinking that there is reliability. If the placebo rate in a trial was 20%, and the response to the treatment was 22%, it is considered to be proven efficacious. An untested empirical therapy, on the other hand, may actually work 90% of the time, but the 22% method is “proven”, and the other is “unproven”. An excellent analysis of this “gold standard” for scientific research is found in Harris Coulter’s excellent work, The Controlled Clinical Trial: An Analysis[1].
Scientific trials are only likely to be applied to those methods and materials that can be patented or are proprietary in some way. There is no way to recoup the expenditure of testing if the product can be purchased elsewhere (or worse yet, is free). Therefore, like the conventional pharmaceutical industry, the companies that serve the natural medicine profession now offer herbal isolates and extracts of long-used products, often “standardized” and rendered more efficacious by a “new process”, or available in a patented form. Naturopaths are now prescribing standardized extracts instead of the whole herbs their predecessors used, and are abandoning therapies that have been shown to be efficacious because they do not currently have the seal of “evidence” approval. As with the drug companies in Allopathic medicine, the nutraceutical companies are beginning to dictate how natural medicine is practiced.
The Naturopathic doctors of past generations did not wait for conventional acceptance or well-designed research trials to tell them it was all right to try something. They applied their therapies, watched the results, and then shared them. When results improved by altering the procedure, that change became incorporated into their protocols. They went about improving their methodologies the same way that Ford Motor Company and IBM did—paying attention to the results and building on them. This blueprint was very effective.
Naturopathic medicine relied heavily on hydrotherapy in the beginning. Because many early Naturopaths were also Chiropractors, the knowledge that spinal manipulation was a powerful healing agent caused it to become part of the Naturopathic armamentarium. Later, when it was seen that Homeopathic doctors as a group were disappearing, that methodology was incorporated into Naturopathy. Still later, acupuncture would also appear as another proven tool readily accepted by the practical Naturopath (and long before being accepted by conventional medicine and science).
Today we have a curious situation: Some methods that are “evidence-based” may be only minimally effective, while those abandoned because they were pre-scientific or “unproven” may be some of the most reliable therapies in clinical practice.
Consider the Allopathic medical world. In ranking of specialties by how much they rely on hard evidence from randomized controlled trials, obstetrics is dead last. Yet there is no other specialty that has statistically saved as many lives as obstetrical innovations. Obstetricians have improved their methods over the years by simply applying them clinically. Their colleagues in other specialties look down upon them because there appears to be little science in what they do. Yet the advances in improving outcomes of obstetrical cases are almost entirely due to modifications made by the clinicians themselves, not by research teams.
In 1933, the New York Academy of Medicine issued a report showing that there had been no improvement in death rates for delivering mothers for the previous twenty years; moreover, newborn deaths were actually increasing. This study, and another federally-issued report, determined that midwives delivering at home had better statistics than hospital births. The investigators were shocked in their finding that two-thirds of the deaths reported were preventable with then-current medical knowledge. But the technics being used by physicians at the time were terribly inefficient compared with the midwives’. Midwives, however, were not licensed providers. So the burden was on the obstetricians themselves to improve their methodologies, and that they did.
The future practitioner of natural medicine must in part be driven by this empirical attitude, whether a Naturopath trained from the start, a progressive acupuncturist, or a Medical Doctor or Osteopath who converted. If natural medicine is to go the way of Allopathy, it will become just as rigid and stifling of independent innovations, and it will become just as subservient to the manufacturers who endow the schools. The beauty of, and also the reliability of, natural medicine has always been rooted in its accessibility. With a few simple tools one could outperform the most powerful synthetic drugs. Sadly, many in our profession today believe this is not possible. This work is an attempt to correct that misperception.
One of the most enduring non-prescription drugs in the U.S. marketplace has always advertised that it is “doctor tested, hospital tested”. We should not ignore the fact that Naturopathic doctors were able, decades ago, to cure pneumonia with hydrotherapy, spinal concussion, and a few herbs. Naturopaths, Chiropractors, and Allopaths alike were able to similarly clear the lungs using short wave diathermy. This was both “doctor tested” and “hospital tested”. Just because Azithromycin can now be prescribed, should we forget that other modalities are effective for pneumonia, especially in the age of drug-resistant strains?
This manual is a compendium of two works, much like the Lake book of 1946. Volume One is an overview of natural modalities that have found their way in and out of the Drugless profession. Students of natural medicine, or practitioners who have a certain focus of practice, can use this to familiarize themselves with other modalities they have not yet incorporated.
Volume Two contains protocols for common disease conditions, using the various modalities of natural medicine. The user can elect to bring into play any or all of these, and choose which options in each category to start with. In most cases, the most important items, both diagnostically and therapeutically, are distinguished by a check mark (P) preceding them. It is suggested that these be considered first, with alternative items being consulted if the first plan fails. By bringing an eclectic mix of therapies into play, the author has had a consistently high level of success in his practice.
James Hewlitt-Parsons, in his book Naturopathic Practice[2], warns:
It is a pity that in so many cases our various forms of Natural therapeutics are so one-sided or are used by practitioners in a one-sided manner. Some will follow fasting and diet only with almost religious fanaticism, while others will practice the Schroth cure exclusively, while yet others will practice the Biochemic or homoeopathic systems to the exclusion of all other natural treatments. Natural therapy ceases to be effective as such when used in this way as it is only by the application of every possible indicated therapy that a real cure can result.
The author takes this stance as well. While a single type of therapy can be extremely effective in the hands of a highly experienced practitioner, a sick public should not have to seek out only the most senior doctors in order to get good results. Rather, it is the sincere and industrious junior practitioner who will get the most out of this volume. By the mindful blending of the methodologies herein, the recent graduate can arrive at results achieved by those in practice for decades—because they have been formulated by the best practitioners of natural medicine down through the years.
I offer a final quote from that master physician, Henry Lindlahr, who put natural medicine on a scientific footing, and whose lectures on the Law of Cure have never been equaled. In his magnum opus, Nature Cure: Philosophy & Practice Based on the Unity of Disease and Cure, he made a very definite statement about eclectic practice:
- In order to do justice to our patients and not neglect our responsibilities toward them we must use in the treatment of disease all that is good in all the natural methods of healing. In serious chronic cases any single one of these methods, whether it be pure food diet, hydrotherapy, massage, spinal treatment, mental therapeutics or homeopathy, is not by itself sufficient to achieve satisfactory results or to produce them fast enough…In Natural Therapeutics every one of the various methods of treatment is supplemented and assisted by all the others.
It is the author’s hope that the reader will find this book a valuable resource in the constant expansion and refining of one’s practice that makes a career in natural medicine so rewarding.
C. P. Negri, OMD, ND
(Excerpted from The Negri Manual of Natural Medicine, 2007)
[1] Coulter, H., The Controlled Clinical Trial: An Analysis, Center for Empirical Medicine, 1991
[2] Hewlett-Parsons, J., Naturopathic Practice, Arco Pub. Co. 1969