naturopathydigest.com -- Who Does the Healing? Who Should Do the Treating?

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Who Does the Healing? Who Should Do the Treating?

By Alex Vasquez, ND, DC, Editor, Naturopathy Digest
AVasquez@NaturopathyDigest.com

Many of our current health care paradigms and policies are stale leftovers from an earlier time when our collective knowledge of health, disease, and appropriate interventions were quite primitive.

Further complicating these issues were the powerful and synergistic influences from the allopathic profession and the pharmaceutical industry, both of whom wanted patients and doctors to believe that pharmaceutical drugs (and to a lesser extent surgery) were the gateway to health. The procurement of government and charitable funding, combined with the wealth generated by the high-profit sale of pharmaceutical drugs, was leveraged with university affiliations, political action committees, and the most powerful advertising campaigns ever devised, to create a paradigm of pharmacosurgical dependency among a populace that some would argue have been kept intentionally ignorant of the means for autonomous health attainment.
Given that one of the biggest factors contributing to the success and perpetuation of a paradigm is its invisibility, its assumption of "normalcy" and "naturalness," then the biggest initial obstacle to changing the status quo of a system that does not work resides simply in the ability to describe the situation accurately. Only after our operational framework - our "reality" - has been "decoded" can we be effective in creating positive change when such change is warranted. Given the high lethality, expense, ineffectiveness and inequity in the American health care system, I think we will all agree change is warranted.
Answers to the questions of the very nature of "healing" and the means to its attainment ("treatment") have been either ignored or assumed, and only rarely fully considered. Further, when discussed, the nature of healing and the appropriateness of a given paradigm of treatment often are described as polarities rather than as continua.
At one end of the spectrum, we have the allopathic pharmacosurgical model, which presupposes the human body is inherently defective and thus needs to be saved by some medical treatment or other. In the allopathic model, the doctor does the work of healing. In this paradigm, health problems from hypertension to depression are appropriately labeled and "treated" with one or more selections from the corresponding category of antihypertensive or antidepressant drugs, respectively. The logic in this case purely is circular and thus illogical, except that it "makes sense" based on the labels that have been applied to the disease and its corresponding treatment. While these interventions alter physiology to effect a reduction of the dysfunction being addressed, the underlying assumption remains that such suppressive treatment was appropriate because the body is assumed to be defective and thus "in need" of medical intervention, for which the patient is supposed to be grateful and forthcoming with payment.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have the holistic model, which holds that the body is "wise" and that it alone is responsible for the process of healing. In this model, healing is effected via correction of some underlying dysfunction (often a nutritional deficiency or imbalance) and/or the removal of a noxious foci, be it an occult infection, xenobiotic exposure, hormonal imbalance or psychoemotional maladaptation. Thus, once the body-mind is given the tools with which to function properly and after damaging influences have been remediated, the body can then go about its business of conducting business as normal, namely that of striving for and approaching optimal health.
The problem with these models is that they are non-superimposable. They are both correct. Complicating this reconciliation is another observance: Both of these models also are wrong. The relative "rightness" and/or "wrongness" of these paradigms lie not with the paradigm itself, but rather with the clinical situation, the individual patient, to whom the paradigm is applied. Except in extreme and obvious cases, the utility of a reasonable intervention is not absolutized into a black or white polarity; rather, such treatments generally exist on a grayscale continuum. Sometimes, two grays are more effective than either a black or a white; hence the power of naturopathic medicine, replete with multicomponent interventions.
One of the heaviest and sharpest rhetorical spears hurled toward devotees of holistic medicine is that their approaches would be impotent in the face of a "real problem," such as battlefield or vehicular multitrauma, and therefore the categorical assumption is made that holistic treatments in their entirety lack the merit ascribed to "real medicine." The usual image is that of a near-death soldier or post-wreck driver who is mocked for requesting holistic or "alternative" care. This joke gets a hearty laugh from devotees of the pharmacosurgical model, who shame their holistic comrades by focusing on this particular example of patient care as if it were representative of all healthcare experiences. The joke is only funny when we fail to appreciate that 1) the major diseases of our time are caused by lifestyle and environmental factors; and 2) even serious diseases can respond well or better when "holistic" interventions are included. (For example, the use of moderate-dose glutamine (e.g., 18 grams per day) in intensive care units helps patients recover faster and reduces medical expenses by approximately $30,000 per patient.)
Beyond the ego boost it gives to the "real doctors" in the audience, the beauty of this sub-intellectual witticism is in its self-affirming and self-validating outcome: The surest way to cultivate a population dependent on pharmacosurgical interventions for their very survival is to deny access to the "holistic" lifestyle, nutritional and functional interventions that could have prevented their lifestyle-induced diseases in the first place. Do we need to add statin drugs to our drinking water, and dispense antidepressant and insulin-sensitizing drugs over the counter? Of course we do, as long as we continue to cultivate a sedentary, yet overworked, society with no free time for relationships, exercise and harmonization - either within or without. Alternatively (pun intended), we might allow patients and "pre-patients" universal access to naturopathic physicians so the germinating weed of illness is pulled from the garden before it becomes a flaming bush. In such ways, we as health care providers might fulfill our promise to our patients by following the dictum: "The best treatment for disease is prevention of disease." Drama, fanfare, and doctors' pseudo-omnipotence would be replaced by cost savings, improved societal health and altruism. Health professions might someday work in synergistic concert, rather than antagonistic disharmony, with the recognition that, regardless of paradigm or pedigree, we all can play an important part in orchestrating societal health. Imagine that.