The “mainstream” healthcare industry in the USA and Europe is called allopathy. It is based on drugs and surgery. This allopathic model is based on an idea called scientific reductionism – reducing or contracting everything to the simplest form. There are other systems of medicine that are based on expansion and natural principles of inclusion and wholeness. Rather than reduce and exclude, they look at the whole body and environment to find a cause.
There are countless examples—for example, a person with a cold. In the allopathic drugs and surgery model, your doctor focuses on the symptoms and gives you an OTC or Rx medication to eliminate (suppress) them. A natural-based healthcare provider might look at the bigger picture and discover your cold is the result of excessive stress which was breaking you down and weakening your immune system from the last two weeks when you were working 12 hours a day, had too little and disturbed sleep, too much junk food, and were burning the candle at both ends.
See what a difference CONTEXT makes? The end result (a cold) is the same but understanding the CAUSE makes all the difference in HOW this can be treated. This is where natural medicine is totally different than allopathic drugs and surgery.
It is like driving your car down the highway when suddenly you see the red dashboard light start flashing, Danger! So you pull over. The allopathic approach is to simply cut the wires so the flashing red light goes off. “Red light problem solved,” they say. The holistic approach would be to pull over, then lift the hood and find out WHY the light is flashing and get to the root cause of the problem. It is a very different approach. One is symptom or disease management. The other is about actually healing the problem by discovering the root cause of the symptoms.
The natural approaches to healing have been around a long time. Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine go back 2000 years. Older still is the 3000-year-old system called Ayurveda which is still widely used to this day throughout the world because, like acupuncture, its principles are based on natural laws that are as valid today as then. Ayur means life and Veda means knowledge so AyurVeda means the Knowledge of Life. In it (and the other natural systems) we find instructions about how to eat, drink, proper diet, the best way to sleep, exercise, and even think. Sounds pretty modern, huh? As the old saying goes, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Here at the NCC, our motto is “Natural alternatives to drugs and surgery”. Every – and that means EVERY – man made drug has harmful side effects in the body. Even the lowly aspirin, the simplest of all drugs, has harmful side effects because it’s original natural source has been chemically altered artificially so that it can be patented (protected by the manufacturer). Aspirin comes directly from white willow bark which has been used by natural herbalists and native people for centuries. Another example is the well known sedative drug Valium which comes from the natural valerian root. Many Rx drugs today trace their roots back to these natural sources.
When your body needs healing it is important to know and remember that you have OPTIONS and those options include a natural approach to healing. There is nothing wrong with drugs or surgery but they should be used as a last resort and only if the natural approaches have failed – which they rarely do.
