Would It Take A Cancer Diagnosis For You To Consider Natural Remedies?

During the last 30 plus years of Naturopathic practice the one thing that really upsets me when people choose not to consider natural remedies and suffer the consequences. I have seen many people who have come for treatment after their condition has fully developed and reached a stage that makes it difficult to treat and unfortunately sometimes impossible to treat. I have lost a close friend because, for one reason or another, she did not treat a pre-existing conditions very well and took a band-aid approach to depression with pharmaceutical antidepressants.

Please do wait until you have a diagnosis – serious or otherwise, before you seek Naturopathic treatment using natural remedies. Many diseases begin long before they show themselves as symptoms, so a preventative approach is key.

My clinic is just around the corner from the Royal Price Alfred Hospital here in Newtown, Sydney and over the years I have many people come to my clinic wanting treatment for conditions that are terminal or very difficult to treat. As wonderful and powerful Naturopathic approaches can be, my heart always goes out to them but they have left it too late for me to be able to help them in any significant way other than perhaps palliation.

I cannot think of many illnesses and diseases that occur overnight -in fact most ill- health builds up over months or years. Little by little the body’s healthy responses are challenged to the point when there are tangible signs and symptoms of an illness.

Let’s take diabetes for example – poor eating habits, high on-going levels of stress and other lifestyle factors lead to excess insulin being secreted from the pancreas as the body tries to keep the blood sugar levels balanced. Eventually blood glucose tests show higher and higher sugar levels ending in the diagnosis of diabetes. So when did the diabetes start? Well it’s an insidious process which has no definitive beginning – rather you can see it evolves over time. Let’s look at rheumatoid arthritis that affects the joints – do you wake up one day with painful and immovable joints? Of course not – again this is a condition that occurs over time, triggered off by various circumstances like stress or dietary factors.

Consider Natural Remedies?

So my question for you today is, “at what point would you consider Naturopathic treatment to help reduce the onset and progression of illness and disease?” Will you wait until you have overt symptoms or will it be a last resort when often it is more difficult to treat regardless of the actual type of treatment? These are not rhetorical questions! I seriously want you to think about this.

Simple Strategies

There are so many simple ways to incorporate natural treatments into your health-care routine.  For example, check out my article, Low Acid Foods. By making some simple changes to your eating, you can enjoy significant positive changes to your health. You might like to consider a Vegetarian Paleo diet – making some adjustments to the typical Paleo approach. These are just two examples of changes you could make right now – if you decided to.

What Are Natural Remedies?

There is no real definition and what is natural and what is not is sometimes questionable. This distinction very quickly becomes an philosophical discussion. One way of looking at this, however, is to see what these treatments are not. Generally we accept that these remedies are not the remedies used in western medicine. The fundamental tools of western medicine are the use of pharmaceuticals. This definition seems to be a widely held and accepted view. 

I consider these natural medicines to include much more than herbal medicines, nutritional approaches, homoeopathic medicine etc. We need to include lifestyle factors that can significantly impact health. Having a super-healthy diet, being physically active, taking care of your emotional health. I would consider all under the same umbrella.