What is natural medicine?

Natural... is...Overused. You will find it on anything and everything from toothpaste to sugar...What, sugar!? Yes, I even saw "all natural" on a sugar package the other day at the supermarket. The entire sugar industry is disappointed that the FDA refuses to define the word "natural."

Sugar is natural and is derived from nature, but nothing in nature is ever that sweet. This brings me a bit closer to my current thought of what natural medicine is. Today I had an interesting discussion with my Chinese medicine colleagues on imbalance. In Chinese medicine, there is a line from a classical text stating that "Imbalance is treated with imbalance." What this means is that disease is basically an imbalance of yin and yang and so to bring a predominantly yin disease or yang disease back into balance, the equal but opposite imbalance is needed to restore equilibrium. The more out of balance and further from our equilibrium or true natural state, the more un-natural the intervention has to be to restore balance.

So although sugar is "natural," there is no "natural" high concentration of sweetness like that found in the modern refined white stuff. [side note: researchers find "Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine as reward."] This is how people become can "addicted" to sugar and gain weight from sugar.

The closer we are to nature, the more healthy we are. When we are further from being "in harmony," with natural processes, we are less natural and thus disease starts to develop. Sugar is more natural than Nutrasweet, but sugar is less natural than honey. As I wrote in the last couple of blogs, getting to sleep by 11pm is more natural than staying up all night and sleeping during the day. On the other hand, getting to bed an hour or two after the sun sets is much more natural than staying up until 11pm if the sunset was at 6pm.

Iatrogenic diseases are diseases caused by a medical intervention - especially a physician's. These are often called "complications" or "side-effects" in modern medical jargon or a "healing crisis" or "healing reaction" in natural medicine. Iatrogenic diseases could be interpreted as the side-effects of interventions that are farther from nature than say a more natural intervention. Many modern pharmaceuticals fall into this category. Its used to be that in all pharmacopeias (list of drug actions and chemical make-ups), all the pharmacological substances listed the plant, bacteria, etc that they were derived from in nature. That is no longer so because drug companies can now molecularly characterize the exact shape of a receptor site and synthetically create a drug that can fit the exact shape of the receptor.

Yes, modern pharmaceuticals are very powerful, but since they are in fact very refined and precise yet distant derivative of some substance in nature, they often have many associated undesirable side-effects (The side effects are then treated with more drugs). The same trend holds true for the supplements.

Often times people think that because this or that supplement is "natural" it is free of any side-effects that would be seen with a drug. Supplements are becoming more and more refined as well. A good example of this is "red yeast rice extract." This supplement is used to lower cholesterol and works as well as Lipitor...because red yeast rice extract is, as the name describes, an extract of yeast. This is basically a drug labeled as a supplement. Red rice yeast extract shares many of the same side-effects as Lipitor because it acts exactly the same - as a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor.

So is a supplement that acts like a drug natural? I would say not if its a refined to an extent like the sugar example above. Remember the ultimate goal of natural medicine is to bring people back into balance in a manner that is the least harmful and thus the closest to a natural physiological process and the rhythms of nature. If we take our cholesterol example, food and exercise can often lower cholesterol significantly. Lifestyle change may be slower, but there are less side effects to eating fiber containing fruits and veggies and exercising daily.

So in order to get better and heal, should we all sell our possessions and live in the woods with only animal pelts to cover us? Not exactly, the ultimate job of a natural medicine practitioner is to guide the patient back to his or her natural state and life rhythms. If you are a child, is it good to sit inside all day and play video games? If you are an adult, is it best to stay up until 2 am watching the "Late Show?" If your a woman in menopause, should hormones be used to create the hormone levels similar to that of a teenager? All of these questions should be answered on whether or not this substance or that habit restores natural physiology and rhythms of life.

The body develops disease because it is trying to adapt and bring itself back into a natural balance. The farther we are from nature, the more imbalanced our physiology becomes and a more diseased state develops.

Natural medicine is restoring a balance back into human beings' lives. Natural medicine is restoring our strong connection to nature and its rhythms.

Until next time,
Gibran