The Nature Cure

by Andreas Michalsen

  These concepts of natural medicine can be found in different cultures around the world from Europe to America to India to China to Japan. The principles remain the same—they always revolve around the use of natural factors. I do want to say here that other frequently used alternative methods, homeopathy for example, are not naturopathy. This is important to underline in scientific discussions.

  I’m continuously surprised by the negativity or controversy surrounding naturopathy. A common misunderstanding is that naturopathy may advise patients to avoid conventional treatment. This is not the purpose of true naturopathy. Naturopathy aims to support or complement conventional medicine—it’s the best of both worlds!

  In Germany, this is made clear by regulation, as all naturopathic doctors are MDs and have to have a certified specialization in a field of conventional medicine of the German medical association.

  Of course it might be possible that the use of naturopathy results in a reduced need for medication. For example, a patient who switches to a plant-based diet might experience a normalization in blood pressure, resulting in a decreased need for medication. This does not put naturopathy at odds with conventional medicine—it’s simply a sign of supported self-healing. Similarly, an herbal treatment may result in a reduced need for painkillers, which will help a patient avoid potential serious side effects such as renal failure or gastrointestinal bleeding. These are positive consequences of naturopathy and integrative medicine, and do not mean that naturopathic medicine is opposed to conventional medicine. It’s pure synergy.

  This combination of conventional and science-based naturopathic medicine is also how more and more patients want to be treated. Over the past several years I’ve witnessed an increasing demand for naturopathic and integrative medicine. About 60,000 of the 300,000 MDs in Germany already practice some kind of naturopathic and integrative medicine. Accordingly, naturopathy is taught and practiced in the best university hospitals and medical schools in Germany, as the Charité Medical University in Berlin.

  I believe that the biggest challenge for twenty-first-century medicine will be the increasing life expectancy in the developed world. If we do not succeed in staying healthy for longer, our increased lifespan will only result in more years of living with disease. Who wants that?

  Natural healing, with its complex biological approach, seems to be the right answer for the increasing number of chronic diseases that are the result of stress, an unhealthy diet, and a sedentary and nature-deprived lifestyle. The fact that nature and humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years in close interdependence explains why natural methods are so powerful in lifestyle-related diseases. As a doctor, medical director, and researcher, I have seen tens of thousands of patients become cured, or at least much improved, through the use of natural integrative therapies such as leech therapy, cupping, acupuncture, Ayurveda, fasting or a plant-based diet, forest bathing, hydrotherapy, yoga, meditation, and tai chi.

  The healing power of nature is amazing. Science-based naturopathy can help us live longer and stay healthy as we age. Up to 80 percent of chronic diseases can be prevented or treated by naturopathy and lifestyle methods. Hypertension, diabetes, inflammatory and immune diseases, depression, and many age-related diseases can be avoided.

  During my years in medical residency the stress of life had a grip on me. Due to the intense workload, I was eating poorly and grappling with high stress levels. As my cholesterol and blood pressure increased, I thought of my grandfather and father and their approach to health. I switched to a plant-based diet and started to meditate and practice yoga, and experienced the profound effects of these methods. Soon my blood tests and blood pressure normalized.

  Integrative medicine is a truly global medicine, a “one world” medicine. We have modern fasting techniques from German and American doctors, as well as traditional religious fasting practices in Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. There are the very healthy “blue zones”—where people typically live longer than average—found throughout the world. Leech therapy was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China, India, and in the Amazon. The same is true of cupping. If we look at herbs, they are recommended in a similar way all over the world, from present-day China to ancient monks from Germany. With this book, I’d like to share all the knowledge of science-based naturopathy. My interest in naturopathy has changed my life, and my hope is that this book might motivate you to try naturopathic medicine yourself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Basic Principles of Naturopathy

  Boosting Self-Healing Powers Through Stimulus and Response

  The basic principle of naturopathy—and of all traditional therapies—is the interplay of stimulus and reaction.

  For example, let’s say you are suffering from a cold. Your doctor is worried that a bacterial pneumonia could attach to the viral infection you already have, so he prescribes an antibiotic as well as an antipyretic. It’s his intention to kill the pathogens and to relieve your fever. Maybe you’ll also receive a mucolytic—to thin mucus—and zinc or vitamin C to strengthen your immune system.

  What approach would naturopathy take?

  You would receive a cold, damp chest compress, wound tightly around your body. You would then be wrapped in layers of blankets. This treatment will cool your feverish body down to the point where you might start to shiver, but shortly afterward you’ll feel nice and warm, because your body’s regulatory systems will have started to fight the cold impulse intensively—and not only locally, i.e., on the surface of the skin, but also on a cellular level. If your temperature continues to rise, leg compresses can be used to counteract the fever. To induce sweating, you’ll be given linden blossom and elderberry tea to drink.

  STIMULATING THE HUMAN BODY

  Many stimuli operate in an “unspecific” manner—meaning one particular stimulus can elicit a variety of different reactions in different people based on their individual nerve reflexes and hormone levels. That reactions can differ so greatly on an individual basis—depending on a person’s physical constitution and the intensity and frequency of the stimulus—leads some conventional practitioners of medicine to believe that naturopathic treatments don’t work. But they’re misjudging the principle: While conventional medicine eliminates disease from the outside and often attains quick (but short-lived) successes in doing so, naturopathy works by teasing out our self-healing powers. It aims at stimulating the human body so that we regain our health on our own.

  This requires patience. Through deliberately placed and well-dosed stimuli, the body is given a wake-up call to heal. To continue our example from earlier, a patient undergoing a naturopathic treatment for his cold would have to endure his fever (within reason). By doing so he gives his immune system the chance to fight the pathogens itself. He might drink linden blossom tea, which induces sweating. And instead of taking vitamins and antibiotics, which wouldn’t help against a virus anyway, he might have a slow-cooked vegetable soup and drink a ginger-turmeric smoothie. Ginger and turmeric contain the best micronutrients in their natural state, which is why they can be more effective than pills.1, 2

  It’s important to place the right stimuli at the right intensity. For a healthy child, fever is important training for the immune system. For an elderly person suffering from a heart condition, fever can be dangerous. The relationship between dosage and effect has become a topic of current international research under the term hormesis (from the Greek, meaning “stimulus” or “impulse”). In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus, one of the first pharmacologists of the modern era, realized that a small dose of a poisonous substance can have a positive effect—because the body is introduced to the negative stimulus (noxa) and develops defense mechanisms against it. This same principle is also present in radioactivity, where it’s been observed that a low amount of radiation can actually have a positive effect within the body.3

  However, because there curren
tly just isn’t enough data on the exact relationship between dosage and effect of unspecific stimuli, measuring an individual’s response is critically important in naturopathy. The most crucial questions about a naturopathic therapy are these types of questions: Did you react well to the broth or the juice cocktail—could you digest it without any problems? Or are your feet getting warm quickly when you’re wearing a compress? If the answer is no in both cases, either the dosage or the therapy is not right for you—regardless of whether this dosage or therapy worked on another person in similar circumstances.

  IDENTIFYING THE PATIENT’S PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION

  In naturopathy, deciding what stimulus to use depends less on the illness and more on the individual person and her physical constitution. A person’s physique, psyche, and bodily regulation are interrelated in a way that can cause certain symptoms and diseases. Though it’s sometimes possible to predict what symptoms or diseases a patient might have based on her constitution, such typifying is helpful mainly only as a point of reference. Most people do not fall neatly into categories. Not every obese person with a round belly (the “endomorph”) has type 2 diabetes, just as not every overly thin person with pale skin suffers from depression.

  So, I would never prescribe a powerful hyperthermic treatment (such as infrared hyperthermia) to someone who generally doesn’t like heat, even if the person in question suffers from fibromyalgia, which is often soothed by such a treatment.4 By the same token, staying in a cold chamber—two to three minutes at negative 166 degrees Fahrenheit—is not helpful to patients with rheumatism, who constantly feel cold despite their propensity to inflammation.

  THE RIGHT DOSAGE: USING THE SUN AS AN EXAMPLE

  Over the course of evolution, two things were extremely important for human survival: sunlight and temperature. We can still observe how dependent we are on these two kinds of stimuli as soon as the days grow darker and the nights grow colder. During the winter, many people find themselves getting tired easily. There is even seasonal depression that manifests itself in the winter months, which can be immediately relieved through exposure to bright light.5

  The sun is an excellent example of hormesis—the biological phenomenon we discussed earlier—in which a small dose of a stimulus is beneficial, but a larger dose of the same stimulus is harmful. A couple decades ago, dermatologists realized that the risk for certain kinds of skin cancer, especially for basal cell carcinoma, is increased by the sun’s ultraviolet light—as is the risk for melanoma. We know that it’s not sunbathing in and of itself that causes cancer, but the number of sunburns suffered, though it’s still a mystery why melanoma often appears on parts of the body that are hardly ever exposed to the sun, like the soles of the feet.6 New theories suggest that our immune system constantly fights melanoma cancer cells all over the body, but a sunburn keeps our immune system so busy that cancer cannot be sufficiently warded off in another part of the body.7

  The popularity of tanning salons is diminishing because of the undisputed fact that ultraviolet light facilitates skin aging and wrinkles and increases the risk of cancer. But scientific studies also indicate that sunlight makes us happier and increases our well-being.8 Tanning on UV-A sunbeds is enough to achieve this.9 UV-B sunbeds are even better, but they cannot be found in normal tanning salons. Decades ago, sunbathing was prescribed for patients with tuberculosis or for people who worked underground. Since 1980, it’s been known that sunlight has a positive effect even in cases of severe illness: In his research, Cedric Garland, epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego, found that in areas where the sun shines often, many types of cancer occur far less frequently.10

  Many autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, but also heart attacks, some types of cancer, and diabetes, occur more frequently in areas that lie farther north and at a greater distance from the equator.11 Taking other factors into account, such as a difference in nutrition or social systems, there remains hardly any doubt that the migration of prehistoric humans to the north roughly forty thousand years ago came at the price of an increase in chronic diseases.

  Sunlight is also important because it contributes to the creation of a vitamin in our skin that fulfills many essential functions: vitamin D. Vitamin D regulates our bone metabolism, prevents osteoporosis, and also helps protect us from cardiovascular diseases, cancer, depression, and autoimmune diseases. According to recent surveys, 26 percent of the general population in the United States have low levels of vitamin D.12 A vitamin D deficiency is problematic in old age since the body’s ability to synthesize it decreases. This is especially critical because cancer and many other chronic illnesses occur more often in this stage of life. Muscular strength—a key factor for mobility—also diminishes with age. Naturopathy’s insistence that it is important to go outside has a purpose. Being outdoors is how we soak up the power of the sun, even when the sky is overcast. Nutrition covers only about 5 percent of our need for vitamin D.13, 14 You simply cannot substitute time spent in sunlight with a special diet.

  The sun presents us with a classic dilemma regarding dosage of stimuli. On the one hand, too much sun exposure can cause skin aging and even skin cancer. On the other hand, we need sunlight for our well-being and the prevention of chronic diseases and cancer. We have to find a compromise.

  The Principle of Hormesis

  Hormesis is the interplay of stimulus/dosage and reaction/effect. Dosage determines whether a stimulus is beneficial or detrimental. Using sunlight as an example: Up to a certain dosage, sunbathing is beneficial and advantageous to our health. However, once the peak of the beneficial dose is exceeded (1), the reverse effect sets in (2), and exposure to the sun’s radiation leads to damage to skin and genetic material (3).

  LIVING IN HARMONY WITH NATURE

  Naturopathy means living in accordance with nature, rather than against it. Recent studies show that it’s not a simple romantic longing that lies behind this recommendation, but physical fact. There is an evolutionarily shaped connection between our bodies and the natural world. For example, our bodies’ biorhythms change according to the seasons. In a 2014 study, researchers from Cambridge and Munich were able to demonstrate that our genetic activity changes depending on the season. About a quarter of our genes react to climate and geographic features; this can even be observed in infants.15 Nature has provided our bodies with the flexibility to adapt to our environment—an important factor in the success of human evolution.

  There exists a sensitive balance between stress factors and protective reactions: Our bodies have a higher propensity for inflammation during winter—probably in order to fight the heightened number of germs and bacteria at that time of year. But as a result, the risk of heart attacks, rheumatism, and diabetes also rises. The control gene ARNTL is tasked with staving off inflammation in the body, but it refrains from doing so in winter to better fight cold and infections. It also regulates body temperature and sleep behavior. This explains why we like to sleep in as the days grow shorter and are generally more lethargic in winter than we are in summer.16 All in all, there’s always a balance that our immune system has to maintain in the midst of seasonal influences.

  If we now think about temperature—to what point is the cold a positive stimulus and when does it become unhealthy? Can we train our bodies to be less sensitive to cold temperatures? The answer is yes and no. Compared to the possibility of training a muscle, our ability to adapt to heat and cold is rather low. This is particularly noticeable in the summer, because our bodies struggle to deal with high temperatures over prolonged periods of time. One way our bodies deal with heat is through sweating. Since sweat evaporates quickly, we can lose about 3.5 liters of liquid an hour. If we find ourselves in a hot environment for several weeks, our ability to sweat can double.17 There’s an additional advantage to sweating, in that it makes us lose salt. For those who have a diet high in salt, which is probably most of us, sweating creates a neat of
fset and enables us to enjoy a buttered pretzel every now and again. People who barely sweat should use the salt shaker with restraint.

  To the cold, on the other hand, our bodies react by shivering. First, muscles in minuscule skin vessels contract: This reduces the blood flow to the surface, minimizing the loss of heat. (We sometimes notice this happening when our hands or feet are particularly cold.) The internal organs, however, receive increased blood supply, whereby the body’s core temperature is held consistently. If this is still not enough for the body to resist the cold, the muscles underneath the skin tense up. This tension creates warmth. From a certain degree of tension onward the muscles also begin to shiver. Through this forceful contraction, the body tries to turn on a sort of central heating system. Finally, our bodies react to temperature stimuli by changing the isolation layer: In a Japanese study, women were asked to wear either short or long skirts during winter. Using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers were able to show that the women who wore short skirts and presumably had been colder had more fat on their legs by the end of the winter.18

  THE POWER OF COLD AND WARM STIMULI

  To a certain degree, we can influence our own heat production and train ourselves to be less susceptible to the cold. Sebastian Kneipp, one of the forefathers of modern naturopathy, advised his patients not to stay in heated rooms all the time, but rather to expose themselves to comparatively cool temperatures of 64 to 66 degrees. Cold stimuli—such as Scotch hose therapy using cold water (see page 56), treading in cold water or snow, and cold baths after a sauna—can send signals to the body to make it increase its own heat production. As children, many of us experienced the sensation of burning hands when we returned to our warm homes after a snowball fight. In that scenario, when we suddenly move from a cold to a warm environment, our body dilates or opens its vessels so that blood can flow more easily. This fluctuation between vasoconstriction (in the cold) and vasodilation (in the warmth) is one of the basic principles of Kneipp therapies.