Published September 20, 2003 in the North Island Weekender
This time of year folks are getting back into a routine after the summer holidays. Summer is the time for the heart. It is warming and we take holidays not only from work but our tightly scheduled life. I call this a filling up of the well. Our stressful lives deplete our emotional and spiritual well being and taking time for ourselves and enjoying the beauty of where we live goes along way to rejuvenating our souls. The fall is a time for the resetting of our life’s goals for another year. It is a time we consider taking some courses if we have graduated long ago and perhaps a time when we look at our health and our exercise program and wonder how we can make this body last for many years to come and still have fun! It is a time for rejuvenating our bodies.
Naturopathic medicine is like taking a course. It is a lesson in learning the cause of your health problem and learning new things that can help your body stay the course as you age. In fact your body is like a garden. What you feed it, and what stresses you put it through make it either a wonderful organic garden where all the body organs function beautifully to provide you with the vim, vigor and vitality to see you through to your 80’s and 90’s or makes it a chemical garden, a soup of toxins!
People are lot sicker these days than when I first started
practicing 17 years ago. Why is this? There are many theories but I believe it
is a combination of the tons of toxins dumped into our environment world wide
every year, the fast pace of our world due to modern conveniences of the
internet, cell phones and flight that not only make us work harder and faster
but also expose our bodies to a lot of electromagnetic radiation and most
importantly the mechanization of our food production that depletes most of its
nutrition in the process.
Most people, when they seek out a naturopathic physician, come to us as a commercial synthetic garden depleted in every way. I educate people about the basic principles of naturopathic medicine that help turn their body’s garden into an organic one! This involves drinking pure alkaline water (not distilled), getting rid of toxins in the diet and environment, and detoxifying. Stop the ingestion of foods that are made with bad fats and sugars synthetic and real; begin eating organic foods whenever possible to reduce the ingestion of hormones and pesticides; and detoxify using herbs and medicines that cleanse the lymph, liver, kidney and bowel.
Jewel, age 35, came in recently complaining of fatigue, one
of the most common complaints of medicine. Before I started treating an iron
deficiency and an under-active thyroid that I had diagnosed using a
comprehensive chemistry panel, I had Jewel stop the ingestion of wheat, dairy
and meat and gave her my two-week herbal detoxification program. She came back
for follow up treatment and felt so much better already! What we had done with
Jewel is start to prime her body’s garden into an organic garden and when I
then gave her remedies for her anemia and thyroid they worked a lot quicker and
better.
In the late 1800’s there were two rival scientists, Bechamp and Pasteur, who were developing theories on the cause of disease. Pasteur was the one who blamed all illnesses on a certain bacteria or noxious agent and initiated the thought that if you kill the bug you will cure the patient. This is the basis of conventional medicine and the use of drugs to treat disease. Bechamp on the other hand, was of the belief that the source of illness was the “soil” or the milieu of the individual and that if you improved the patient’s immune system that the bug wouldn’t survive in the body and thus the disease was treated. This latter theory is the basis of naturopathic medicine. On his death bed, Pasteur is quoted as saying that Bechamp was right about the milieu!
Wouldn’t you rather have an organic garden growing in your body than a chemical
one?
Dr. Pincott has been practicing naturopathic medicine since 1985 and is currently practicing in Campbell River. She can be reached at (250) 286-3655 or www.DrPincott.com