Therapeutic Order
- Re-establish the basis for health
- Stimulate the healing power of nature.
- Tonify weakened systems
- Correct structural integrity.
- Prescribe specific natural substances for pathology.
- Prescribe pharmacological substances for pathology.
- Prescribe surgery, suppressive drugs, radiation and chemotherapy.
developed by Jared Zeff, ND and Pamela Snider, ND
A Reflection on “The Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics”
By Lauren Deville
Probably like many of you, I grew up with the basic assumption that the causes of most physical ailments were idiopathic, and therefore the only way to treat any given physical ailment was to address the symptom directly. But my first week at SCNM involved an intensive course on the philosophy of naturopathic medicine, and that marked a turning point for me. Like all truth, it had that unmistakable quality of obviousness about it, as if I should have been able to guess it from the first, on the basis of what I already knew about the way the world works. For instance: there are laws that govern the physical world, and those laws cannot be violated. If you try to violate them, you’ll usually end up in some form of trouble. (You could jump off a roof, but it probably wouldn’t work out too well for you.) There are also laws that apply to biological organisms that are just as broad and all-encompassing as the law of gravity in physics, and attempts to violate them have equally devastating, if slightly less dramatic consequences. These consequences include lowered vitality (due to poor habits, over-indulgence, overwork and the like), abnormal composition of blood and lymph (due to nutritional deficiencies primarily), and the accumulation of waste matter, morbid materials and poisons (as a result of drugs, poor dietary choices, environmental toxins, pathogens, and so forth). With very few exceptions, the myriad diseases we are taught to recognize and combat come down to permutations of these three causes. According to Henry Lindlahr in The Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, “There is no suffering, disease, nor evil of any kind anywhere unless the law has been transgressed somewhere by someone.”
As so often happens when one finds answers to questions he never knew how to ask, I felt as if a two dimensional world had suddenly acquired depth. But in my first week of school, of course I did not yet know what to do with the information, and three years later, I discovered that it was easy to forget this moment of inspiration in my struggle to learn the “ologys” and become more familiar with physiologic processes than I ever thought possible. So this past summer I picked up the aforementioned title from Lindlahr and revisited the paradigm with a new question: what does this dramatic simplification mean for us as future practitioners of naturopathic medicine?
Lindlahr’s interpretation reminded me of Occam’s razor, a philosophical principle which asserts, more or less, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. To restore health, we must identify the law that has been transgressed and put it right, insofar as it is within our power (and that of our patients, of course) to do so. This translates into the first step of what we now call the therapeutic order: remove the obstacle to cure. Even if we do nothing else, as an organism built for homeostasis, the body should be able to correct itself, assuming the presence of conditions conducive to the restoration of health. This is where the next steps in the therapeutic order come in. According to Lindlahr, the role of the physician at this point is to “establish normal surroundings and natural habits of life in accord with nature’s laws; economize vital force; build up the blood on a natural basis: that is, supply the blood with its natural constituents in right proportions; promote the elimination of waste material and poisons without in any way injuring the human body; correct mechanical lesions; [and] arouse the individual in the highest possible degree to the consciousness of personal responsibility and to the necessity of intelligent personal effort and self help.”
It is important as we move through our education to take the time to reflect on the simplistic, self-evident laws that underlie all of our treatment modalities and inform the fundamental principles of Nature Cure. As one who tends to miss the proverbial forest for the trees, I know I must step back from time to time and remember what brought me to this profession in the first place!