Natural Medicine ie Nutrition, Herbal Medicine,Lifestyle counseling, Soft Tissue Manipulation all of the things that are required to be classified as a Naturopath, all of these modalities are moving into a new era, as is mainstream medicine -- is it too pretentious to call conventional medicine mainstream medicine when the World Health Organisation says more than 75% of the worlds population still use herbal medicine as their prime source of medicine for treating illness, disease and discomfort? The Barefoot Doctor in China still has a huge role to play in their health. Ok, let us leave the philosophical questions for some other time.
The dawning of a new era in medicine has arrived, we are entering the realm of personalised medicine, where the medicine will be tailor made for you. Everybody knows that not everyone benefits from a drug therapy, if a drug works 80% of the time it's a good drug, forget red herrings such as side effects at this point they are only a distraction. Why do you think a drug might only work for 8 out of 10 people?
In 1956 Roger J Williams published a book that was to change the worlds thinking about disease and nutrition, that book was titled "Biochemical Individuality" and it explained how we are all chemically different, why some people become drug addicts/alcoholics, why some people require more nutrients than others to remain healthy, why some peoples immune system functions better than other peoples at detoxifying chemical toxins, how some people express genes differently to other people. He looked at the molecular level of disease, and opened up a whole new erea of exploration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_J._Williams
http://bioinst.cm.utexas.edu/williams/
Roger J Williams was one of my earliest heroes - he graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry in 1919 and along his life's journey named folic acid and discovered pantothenic acid a lot of other things, he became Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas in Austin in 1971 and remained there until he retired in 1986 at age 92 years, he died in 1988.
Now this new dawning of medicine relates directly to Roger J Williams, because now finally after 54 years we are going back to make medicine suit our biochemical individuality, and the medicine will be made with this in mind.
Naturopaths/Herbalists/Nutritionists will all need to find the courage to learn more about science, and they will need to embrace an attitude of let us go and find out - how it works, if it works and why. We will need this knowledge in order to treat nutritionally, herbally the requirements of people that do not fit into the one size fits all category of treatment, we may even find, in fact, we will almost certainly find even exercise works better when it is made to suit human uniqueness.
Cheers
