Complimentary and Alternative Medicine to help you heal yourselfNaturopathy is a set of alternative medicine modalities which emphasize the effectiveness of natural therapies such as herbs, nutrition, and a holistic lifestyle in bringing the body back into balance whereby restoring health. Naturopathy is founded on the idea that our bodies have an intrinsic ability to heal themselves.
In the World Health Organization's 2008 World Health Report they list two of the biggest problems in medicine today is the fragmenting of care and misdirected care. They go on to describe fragmented care as "The excessive specialization of health-care providers and the narrow focus of many disease control programmes discourage a holistic approach to the individuals and the families they deal with and do not appreciate the need for continuity in care..." (WHO: World Health Report 2008, pg. 8)
The idea here is that fragmented care does not support holistic treatment (i.e. treating the whole person, mentally, physically and spiritually) in order to restore the health of the person. Instead doctors today are becoming specialists for one organ or region of the body or another, and when treatment is prescribed to fix an ailment plaguing that part of the body, allopathic treatment inevitably causes another area of the body to become diseased or out of balance in the process. WHO goes on to describe misdirected care "....neglecting the potential of primary prevention and health promotion to prevent up to 70% of the disease burden"
The report suggests that medical care today is narrowly focused on "disease care" and there is little information and care focused on the prevention of disease. In my opinion, the reason for this focus on disease care is that there is simply more money in it for the doctor than disease prevention. Think about it, if a doctor operates on a person and performs a coronary bypass, they collect a whopping $30,000 fee. If this same doctor performs an angioplasty, this is an $8,000 add on fee. If however that doctor would have recommended some lifestyle changes, vitamins, minerals and some exercise in order to head off disease further down the road, he would only make his normal office visit fee (no more than a couple of hundred dollars). In today's society we could all use a little guidance when it comes to balancing our nutritional, dietary, exercise and even our spiritual and emotional needs as well. Alternative medicine and naturopathy together can help to empower those who want to help themselves. Thank you for visiting ~~  
|
