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Your Body Already Knows How to Heal Itself
Your body has an amazing ability to protect you from harmful microbes and substances like viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites. When you can learn to work with it, you can help to optimize its healing power.
Your body is already equipped with the natural ability to protect you through powerful functions, which help to keep harmful substances out of the body. You know these exist through the specific immune system and non-specific immune system. Our non-specific immune defence system comes in the form of our skin. As the largest organ in the human body, it acts as a barrier from harmful substances entering the body. Phagocytes are organisms, which engulf and destroy any invading organisms. They are found in many of our organs such as the liver, lungs, and intestinal tract. Natural killer cells recognize cells that have been invaded by viruses. They bind to these cells and destroy them. Your specific immune system is your body’s ability to produce antibodies throughout the process of recognizing and destroying harmful cells. The antibody does the job of recognizing the harmful cell and phagocytes and then destroy that part of the cell. Antibodies are made by white blood cells called B lymphocytes within the immune system. These come in thousands of varieties of strains, specifically for recognizing different antigen markers.
Fig 1.1, Phagocytosis diagram. Copywrite Helen Barnshaw
Learning to understand and work with your body is easier than you think. Throughout this book I will help you to learn and optimize your health to achieve the highest mental, physical, emotional, and social well-being possible. You have nothing to lose here!
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The Importance of Balance
Balance in all things is crucial. When it comes to your body, it already has natural intelligence within its core cells to sustain this balance; it is your lifestyle and environment that are the controlling factors between health and disease. When you have the right knowledge and will to succeed, you truly hold the power to your own health and happiness.
Chinese naturopathy has always fascinated me, and I believe they discovered the answers to balanced and healthier living centuries before western society. While studying to earn my Western Naturopathic Nutrition diploma, I was often able to recognize elements of Asian nutrition beliefs and tips popping up throughout the studies.
Asian naturopathy, specifically Chinese naturopathy, invented the use of yin and yang as a way to better understand and equate balance in health and living. They created a term for the energy of all things, called qi (pronounced chee) which refers to the vitality and energy within a person. Qi holds the essence of yang, which is responsible for warming elements of food, air, and organs in the body, representing movement. Yin is the opposite of yang and is responsible for all cold aspects representing stagnancy and blockage. It focuses on cold, interior, and deficiency. Yang conversely revolves around heat, exterior, and excess. An example of this relationship in food is the use of raw food, which is considered to have cooling effects on the body. Cooked food eaten cold also has a cooling effect. Hot foods have a warming and moving effect on the body.
Seeing warming and cooling elements as yin and yang helps you to better gauge the effects of certain foods on the human body. Too much of any one element will cause an unbalanced stasis. Therefore, yin and yang is, and has been for some centuries, a helpful gauge in keeping a balance in health and lifestyle.
Aelius Galenus, also known as Galen, was a Greek physician, writer, and philosopher during the period circa 130 AD to circa 210 AD. He created the understanding of the four humours.
Humour theory (meaning juice or sap), is the concept which states all four of the humours are to be kept in balance. These humours are blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, and Galen developed theories for how various foods affect the humours differently. If someone was suffering from phlegmatic symptoms, warm, dry foods would help to rebalance the body. When one or more of these humours comes out of balance, disease prevails. Galen created purging, bloodletting, cupping, and emetics, as curative measures to help keep humours in balance.
Current science and complementary medicine have now advanced so far as to recognize the importance of maintaining a balance in everything. You can better understand now how many aspects are responsible for your health. The study of epigenetics dives into the effects of the environment, food, and upbringing on cellular changes within your body, focusing on family history, genetics, birth environment, upbringing, lifestyle, diet, mental health, learned habits, and exercise. We will talk more about this in Chapter 4: Epigenetics and Influencing Your Genes for Better Health.
Homoeostasis is the state of the body’s systems constantly rebalancing itself from internal and external factors. As defined by Walter Cannon in the late 1800s, “Constancy in an open system, such as our bodies represent, requires mechanisms acting to maintain this constancy.” (Walter Cannon in Biochemical Imbalances in Disease, p30). Homeostasis helps you to understand how the body is made up of many cooperating systems working together to keep the body regulated among states of constant change. When the amount of work your body has to do to keep this healthy balance is overloaded, illness or disease can set in. In functional medicine, this stage is called allostasis, a condition proposed by Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer in 1988.
With so much historical knowledge and current scientific research, you have all the evidence and support you need to make the right decisions in living a more balanced lifestyle. Food, exercise, and mental health are some of the most influential factors within your control. You have the power to keep these elements in balance, ensuring a healthy and happy life.
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Why Naturopathy?
When you have tried everything in front of you to heal and nothing has helped, when you want a better solution and feel there has to be something more sustainable, you are right—there is something beyond the traditional methods in current medicine. Those of you who have been brave enough to step beyond yourselves have discovered more evolved and faster ways to heal—and it requires an acceptance of where you are now and believing that there is a better way to heal beyond what you know.
Traditional medicine has come a long way since the beginning. It has given us a way to tackle disease, reduce pain, restore needed cells, and more. It has evolved as you have and offers a powerful way to help stop illness in its tracks if you use it right. Medicine was only ever meant to be used as a temporary support to help reduce the symptoms and not to tackle the cause. The thought processes encompassing traditional medicine, which you’ve been brought up with, are not for the purpose of tackling the cause of disease and sustaining health for the longer term.
There are a handful of early doctors and physicians who began to discover better ways to treat patients that went beyond traditional medicine. They were the founders and early influencers of naturopathic medicine.
Hippocrates, born circa 460 BC, separated illness from religion, establishing that illness is the product of living habits, diet, and environment. He asserted that the human body has the power to rebalance itself when treated within the right environment. Dr. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872) introduced the concept that the knowledge and history of a disease could be found using clinical trials. His work, which represents the earliest accounts of clinical trials, involved taking detailed case histories to build a more complete picture. He believed that the physician’s role was to do everything possible to help people to recover naturally from disease. In 1854 Florence Nightingale (1820–1920), discovered that the unsanitary conditions of the Crimean war hospital barracks contributed to ten times more deaths than the war itself. She eventually trained nurses and hospitals to improve their cleanliness, which brought better sanitation, better sewer and enhanced ventilation. She also understood that diet and activity were important to help the human body in its job o...
