VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2017 by Andreas Michalsen
Copyright © 2017 by Insel Verlag Berlin
Translation copyright © 2019 by Andreas Michalsen and Insel Verlag Berlin
This work was originally published in German as Heilen mit der Kraft der Natur by Insel Verlag Berlin. This Viking edition is published by arrangement with Insel Verlag Berlin.
This work was translated by Laura Wagner.
The German-language edition was edited by Friedrich-Karl Sandmann.
Illustrations by Tom Menzel, tigercolor: 1, 2, 3, 4.
All other illustrations: Sofarobotnik, Augsburg & Munich.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Title: The nature cure: a doctor’s guide to the science of natural medicine / Andreas Michalsen, MD with Petra Thorbrietz.
Other titles: Heilen mit der Kraft der Natur. English
Description: New York: Viking, 2019. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011636 (print) | LCCN 2019018339 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561286 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561279 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Naturopathy. | Alternative medicine. | BISAC: HEALTH & FITNESS / Naturopathy. | MEDICAL / Holistic Medicine. | MEDICAL / Alternative Medicine.
Classification: LCC RZ433 (ebook) | LCC RZ433 .M5313 2019 (print) | DDC 615.5/35—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011636
Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Readers should seek personal medical, health, dietary, exercise, or other assistance or advice from a competent physician and/or other qualified healthcare professionals. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.
Version_1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Valter Longo, PhD
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
The Basic Principles of Naturopathy
CHAPTER TWO
Therapies of Antiquity Rediscovered
CHAPTER THREE
The Healing Power of Water
CHAPTER FOUR
The Value of Restraint
CHAPTER FIVE
The Key to Health
CHAPTER SIX
Stagnation Is Cause for Illness
CHAPTER SEVEN
Yoga, Meditation, and Mindfulness
CHAPTER EIGHT
Global Medicines
CHAPTER NINE
My Treatment Methods
CHAPTER TEN
Strategies for a Healthy Life
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Future of Medicine
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Foreword
By Valter Longo, PhD
For hundreds of years health has been managed, on one hand, by official medicine, based on the teachings of medical schools at the most important universities, on the results of clinical studies, and on the decisions of government agencies. On the other hand, health has also been managed by complementary medicine—sometimes based on ancient traditions, sometimes of dubious origin. In The Nature Cure, Dr. Andreas Michalsen combines the teachings of official medicine and science-based complementary medicine to help readers live healthier while minimizing the need for medication. Dr. Michalsen starts with the story of his personal journey to naturopathic medicine and then comes to discuss a variety of naturopathic therapies ranging from the use of leeches, hydrotherapy, yoga, exercise, diet and fasting, and how they can prevent and even cure major diseases. Dr. Michalsen, head of the naturopathy department at the Immanuel Hospital and Charité Medical University in Berlin, is one of the best doctors of natural medicine I have ever known. His therapies are based on solid scientific and clinical pillars. In the field of therapeutic fasting, his clinic in Berlin is among the most prestigious in the world and is at the forefront of experimentation and implementation of new scientific discoveries on patients with diseases ranging from hypertension, diabetes, and cancer to multiple sclerosis. This is a book that brings us toward a new approach to medicine, a book that is not to be missed.
Introduction
Fasting, yoga, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, meditation, mindfulness, a vegetarian diet—the subjects of naturopathy are more topical than ever before. But it’s difficult to find scientifically-founded guidance on naturopathy. Some things that have long been recommended in the world of natural medicine should be questioned critically. On the other hand, effective methods of naturopathy are often too quickly dismissed by conventional physicians. Yet it’s become increasingly clear that many people are interested in exploring naturopathy and integrative medicine. It is high time, then, for an evaluation that takes experience, practice, and research into consideration in equal measure.
Medicine needs naturopathy—now more urgently than ever before. An increasing number of chronic diseases is becoming widespread, and conventional medicine’s method of treating these illnesses in the same highly technologized manner as emergency cases—with surgeries, interventions, and new medications—leads to more and more side effects and unaffordable costs.
The traditional treatment methods of naturopathy have kept people alive throughout the centuries and have addressed various illnesses with astonishing efficacy—even though the methods were based solely on practical experience. Then modern medicine came along with its scientific approach and its extraordinary possibilities for diagnosis and therapy, and a lot of ancient knowledge was left by the wayside because it was considered outdated or even wrong.
Yet today, the latest research methods of modern biology and medicine show that naturopathy is not a thing of the past, but highly relevant. In the crisis of medicine we’re now facing—with its increasing costs and rising proportion of chronic illness—naturopathy offers solutions, showing us new ways of preventing and treating diseases. The central focus is not on the illness, but on the individual.
As professor of Clinical Naturopathy at the Charité Berlin, the largest university hospital in Europe, with about three thousand inpatient beds and more than twelve thousand health professionals and scientists working there, I hope to share the enormous potential of naturopathy with the public and to close the gaps that continually seem to open between “high-tech” medicine and practical knowledge. At the Charité, our focus is not on setting divisions between different ways of medical practice, but on integration and combination—on a scientific basis. Employing this concept, we treat thousands of patients to great success every year.
MY JOURNEY TO NATUROPATHY
I was born in a small village in the southern part of Germany, on the border of Austria and Switzerland, near the Alps. My father and grandfather were both MDs who specialized in internal medicine. As a child, listening to my father talk about his workday at the dinner ta
ble, I realized that there was something special about his medical practice. Following in the tradition of my grandfather, my father treated his patients not only with conventional medication and surgery, but also with naturopathic and integrative medicine. He often advised lifestyle and diet changes for his patients, such as fasting or reducing stress. He didn’t just prescribe conventional drugs, but also herbs and supplements. Growing up I was accustomed to seeing his patients stop by our home to express their gratitude and sometimes to drop off a present—usually something nice to eat. On the other hand, I also grew up hearing my father talk about the suspicion with which his colleagues regarded his approach to medicine.
My two siblings and I grew up in a loving home, surrounded by the principles of naturopathy. Our home had hot tubs and a Finnish sauna. My father would take cold baths in the swimming pool in our garden—even during the freezing German winters. We were encouraged to eat vegetables, fruit, and nuts. To drink herbal tea when suffering from a cold. So naturally, this felt like the norm to me—the way medicine should be.
After graduating from high school I decided to study economics and philosophy. Trying to understand the grand scheme of things has never ceased to fascinate me. But unlike other disciplines, medicine seems to be something that puts theory into practice directly, entirely hands-on. And like many young people, I wanted to find a calling that would allow me to help others. Or maybe it was just the family tradition that had me firmly in its grasp. In any case, I kept finding myself in biology lectures and realized that I felt much more comfortable there. So, it was to be medicine, after all.
Back in the eighties, when I was studying, the worldview of scientists was extremely mechanistic. For example, in one of the weekly sessions that were part of my training as an internist, I remember introducing a study exploring how psychological stress could cause a heart attack. As a result, I was ridiculed. “How do you imagine that would happen, Michalsen?” I was asked with pointed derision. “Like, would anger spontaneously create a blood clot?” Yet since then, countless studies have proven that anger and fear actually do constrict the arteries, which can cause blood coagulation and the dangerous blood clots that form the basis of a heart attack.
When I was training to be a doctor, eminence-based medicine was in the process of transforming into evidence-based medicine. Just before, the “demigod” doctor, the eminence, was able to do whatever he thought was right. But suddenly, he was required to prove that his therapies were effective by conducting studies and through properly and systematically documented clinical practice. Evidence-based medicine introduced more rationality into medical practice. But it also began to ignore very simple knowledge and wisdom that wasn’t supported by existing studies. Knowledge such as the fact that people fall asleep better when their feet are warm rather than cold. Later it also became clear that research is conducted mainly where there is a return on investment—patentable drugs, in other words. There is little money to be earned from hot footbaths, and it’s accordingly difficult to obtain research funding for it.
My superior at the time, Walter Thimme, MD, however, was always open to new findings. He was a very experienced and science-oriented professor, who turned each patient’s course of treatment into an exam during rounds. In addition, he was the editor of the pharma-critical magazine Der Arzneimittelbrief, and it was he who taught me that chronically ill patients take far too many drugs and that it’s always obligatory to examine what benefit each and every pill actually has for the patient. We had very constructive arguments and he would say, “Why don’t you write an article about . . . .” That way, I learned to describe the effect of medicinal plants or the importance of nutrition. On the occasion of his retirement in 2001, he asked me to give a grand round lecture about complementary medicine in cardiology. Those were very positive experiences I had in dialogue with conventional medicine.
No one in my classes shared my background in naturopathy, but there was a study group where we learned about the work of Viktor von Weizsäcker. He advocated an anthropologic-biographical approach to anamnesis—he was concerned with understanding a person’s entire history when it came to their medical treatment. This study group was a colorful mixture of aspiring internists, neurologists, and psychiatrists. I still keep in touch with some of them today. All of them are committed to seeing patients in their entirety.
I have always maintained the idea that traditional knowledge and modern medicine don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Ideally, they complement each other. The internistic-cardiologic ward of the Humboldt Hospital in Berlin where I trained was huge—ambulances, 120 beds, an intensive care unit—and fascinating, holding all the possibilities medicine had to offer. Our professor had high scientific standards; every week we had to read and discuss the newest relevant articles from the New England Journal of Medicine. I thought this scientific aspiration was wonderful. What was practiced in our department was very ambitious conventional medicine, but with a focus on reducing medical intervention—not everyone taking ASS blood thinners, for example, also received a stomachic. And not everyone presenting with chest pains was summoned to the cardiac catheterization lab immediately. Instead, we examined everything in an individual, subjective way.
Unfortunately, cardiology has strayed far from these standards. Because hospitals make money from cardiac catheters, for example, doctors in Germany are quick to insert them—624 times a year per 100,000 citizens. In other OECD member countries this happens only 177 times on average. Is it possible that we are better cared for in Germany than in other comparable countries? Not in this regard. The statistics also show that on average, life expectancy doesn’t necessarily rise after a catheter procedure. For acute heart attacks, widening a coronary vessel can save lives—but not if, as it so often happens, it is carried out as a preventative measure. Why do doctors perform a procedure that suggests to patients that their blood vessels can be repaired like ordinary pipes and that they don’t have to change anything about their lifestyle? The money insurance companies spend on it would be of much better use elsewhere.
As a young doctor on the cardiologic intensive care unit and in the cardiac catheter lab I began to ask questions like: “What therapeutic consequences does this treatment have for the patient?” This is not an obvious question, because specialized high-performance medicine primarily focuses on the alleviation of acute symptoms. Whether or not a person benefits from a treatment in the long run is not a major concern.
I learned a lot in the “cleanroom,” where patients spent about ten to fifteen minutes after their heart catheterization. It was common practice for the doctor carrying out the catheterization to compress the artery in the groin during those ten to fifteen minutes after the tube was removed so that there wouldn’t be any bleeding later on. The patients were happy to have come out of the procedure unscathed and glad to have someone to talk to. I often asked patients what they thought had caused their heart problems—a sort of subjective disease evaluation. Every person had a reason to share: “I was under a lot of stress,” “I’ve been unemployed for a while,” “It runs in the family,” and so on. Even though evaluations like these are often only partially accurate, they still offer crucial details that would never have been mentioned in a normal consult during which the patient is primarily required to listen.
By this time, I had spent eight years mastering the tools of modern cardiology, such as performing heart catheterizations and implanting pacemakers. I had become a certified specialist in internal and cardiovascular medicine as well as in emergency and critical care medicine, and I’d published scientific works on heart failure.
But during this period I came to realize that although I had these impressive technical treatments at my disposal, I wasn’t addressing the real cause of the underlying diseases I was treating. A coronary stent is a great help to a patient with a myocardial infarction. But it doesn’t treat the underlying cause of this disease—atherosclerosis. We advised our pati
ents to stop smoking, to change their diets, to exercise, but advocating for lifestyle changes was not the focus of how we practiced medicine.
It was then that I decided to engage in clinical research in nutritional medicine, traditional and herbal medicine, lifestyle-based medicine, and mind-body medicine. I contacted the head of the clinical department of integrative and naturopathic medicine at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Here I had my first experiences with clinical naturopathy—with fasting, hydrotherapy, acupuncture, and leech therapy.
In 1999, I was appointed deputy director of the first large specialized hospital for naturopathy and complementary medicine in Bad Elster, Germany. Then in 2001, I moved to the University Hospital in Essen, Germany, where I was appointed deputy director and head of clinical inpatient care in the newly founded department for naturopathic and integrative medicine. There I finished my PhD in 2006 and received further certifications in nutritional medicine, physical medicine, and rehabilitation.
In 2009, I became head of the Department for Naturopathy at the Immanuel Hospital in Berlin and was called to the endowed professorship for Clinical Naturopathy at the Charité University Hospital, Berlin, the largest university hospital in Europe. We treat more than eight thousand patients a year with naturopathic and integrative medicine across all diseases, but mainly internal diseases. It is the largest academic department of its kind in Europe and America. In fact, more than half of the German Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology have come from the Charité.
WHAT IS NATUROPATHY?
I believe that every single one of us can benefit from incorporating the principles of naturopathy into our lives. But what is naturopathy? For me, naturopathy is the foundation of medicine, particularly in treating chronic illnesses. Naturopathy uses natural elements in treatment, such as diet, fasting, exercise, massage, stress management, sunlight, herbs, and water. All of these things are “natural,” so to speak. The principle is always to apply natural support and stimulation to the mind and body, with the aim of enhancing self-healing.
The Nature Cure Page 1