WATER
It’s not yet been scientifically clarified how much fluid we should consume ideally, or what the optimal fluid requirement is. Currently, the estimation is two to three liters, depending, of course, on outside temperatures and one’s activity level. Severe headaches or concentration difficulties often disappear after drinking two to three glasses of water. Mental performance at school improves. Avoid plastic bottles, especially when they are heated, as they contain BPA, which is suspected to cause cancer. Coffee and tea are, despite earlier assumptions, healthy. Coffee helps prevent Parkinson’s disease and diabetes and improves liver function—as long as it’s unsweetened and no milk is added. (Even soy milk reduces the positive effects.) It only heightens blood pressure temporarily and the slightly diuretic effect that coffee has can be compensated by a glass of water, which in Viennese coffee houses is served along with the coffee as a matter of course. Green tea is equally stimulating and even healthier. Mineral waters rich in bicarbonates counteract an acid-rich diet.
I myself follow a lactovegetarian diet, i.e., with vegetables and a small portion of dairy products, but without eggs. I try to eat two or three of the aforementioned superfoods every day, not as a snack but as part of my meals. (Nuts are the only thing I ever snack on.) For my intermittent fasting, I personally have two variations: If I eat late at night, I don’t have breakfast and only drink an espresso with a little almond milk the following morning. If I eat early in the evening, I have some warm porridge with flaxseed (shredded), oatmeal, berries, nuts, and sometimes a little ginger and turmeric (the Ayurvedic kind) for breakfast. In the mornings, I have a whole-body Scotch hose treatment, switching between cold and hot water.
To sum up, these are my recommendations:
Two filling, solid, meals a day, with no snacks.
A vegetarian diet wherever possible, with lots of berries and nuts.
Two superfoods every day, alternating among them, with your meals.
Daily intermittent fasting (fourteen to sixteen hours of not eating, e.g., if dinner was at 7 p.m., the next meal should be after 11 a.m. the following day).
One week of therapeutic fasting once or twice a year.
A cold stimulus every day (whole-body or Scotch hose treatment).
Practice yoga regularly.
Meditate daily. (If you can’t find thirty minutes, you can also do a “mini” meditation on the train or in the office.)
Integrate physical activity into your daily routine: Walk places more often, take the stairs, take your bike, go on walks in the woods. Overall, 10,000 steps a day are advisable (about 5 kilometers). For endurance training, 45 minutes three times a week is recommendable.
Avoid sitting for too long; I recommend a standing desk.
Get sufficient sleep. (I sleep eight hours every night.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Future of Medicine
What Needs to Change
Every day, millions of people take medications that ultimately don’t help them, because medicine doesn’t work in a way that focuses on the individual enough. The ten most-prescribed drugs in the United States help only one out of four patients in the best-case scenario, and only one out of twenty-five in the worst case. In an article in Nature, Nicholas Schork calculated these numbers and spoke about “imprecision medicine.”1 Maybe modern medicine is going to succeed in becoming more precise with the aid of genetics and molecular biology. But it would be sensible to draw upon the experiences of naturopathy, which has always taken an individualized approach.
Today, a considerable number of people are already suffering from chronic diseases by the time they are fifty or sixty years of age. Living longer but simultaneously being sick for longer isn’t an appealing perspective. Some illnesses are inevitable—not everything in life can be controlled. But we could do a lot to prevent chronic diseases from developing, and thus enjoy reaching a greater age in good health. But this cannot be achieved without naturopathy. Why?
HYPOTHESIS 1: DOCTORS SHOULD PREVENT DISEASES INSTEAD OF MERELY TREATING THEIR CONSEQUENCES
Without a doubt, most of my colleagues would like to choose this path, but many obstacles, including remuneration, block them from that goal. If a physician motivates someone to give up an unhealthy lifestyle, eat healthy, and get enough physical activity, they should be paid more than someone who performs a bypass surgery ten years later. It’s high time for prevention to stop leading a life in the shadows. But many physicians lack the knowledge to do so—modern naturopathy can remedy that.
HYPOTHESIS 2: NATUROPATHY NEEDS TO RECEIVE MORE FUNDING
Modern medicine is relatively young. It has prematurely dismissed centuries-old practical knowledge on how to remain as healthy as possible. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on the measurability of natural sciences and thus suggests objectivity. But life isn’t always objective. Medicine isn’t an exact science, either, even though it sometimes creates the impression that it is. Therefore, practical knowledge needs to maintain its place in medicine. It can provide impulses for research, as leeches, bloodletting, and fasting have shown. But naturopathy and integrative medicine clearly also need to examine their therapies scientifically and develop them further. The holistic approach of naturopathy requires elaborate studies, which call for more extensive research funding. The return on investment for scientifically supported naturopathy and its utilization in prevention and the therapy of chronic diseases is undoubtedly given. In the long run, we can’t afford to keep treating the incessantly growing number of chronic diseases with ever more surgeries and new, and therefore very expensive, medications.
HYPOTHESIS 3: MEDICINE CAN DO MORE THAN JUST PRESCRIBE MEDICATIONS
Upon close examination, a large part of the seemingly objective conventional medicine is treading on thin ice—at least in regards to scientific evidence. The power of scientific evidence is often weak. It’s also problematic that many doctors and scientists who determine treatment guidelines in the responsible commissions receive money from pharmaceutical companies for research or consulting. Even though they profess their independence, it’s just not likely.
Finally, there is the problem of the side effects of medication. If the right drugs have been prescribed for the right indication, side effects must be accepted—because in return, the patient receives relief or a cure. But if medications are prescribed haphazardly and for too long, as is the case in many chronic diseases, the relation between benefit and risk is no longer appropriate.
Many patients instinctively feel a resistance toward medications and refuse to take them, and this insufficient “compliance” holds especially true for major widespread diseases and it carries risks. It’s not a rare occurrence that we have to painstakingly convince patients in our naturopathic integrative department that it can be important to take, for example, antirheumatic drugs or to opt for the suggested chemotherapy. This advice is more readily taken from us “naturopaths,” maybe because we devote more time to listening to patients. So, we should at least reduce the intake of drugs by supplementing naturopathic methods, if not make them completely redundant if at all possible. Misuse undermines their lifesaving function, as you can see in the example of antibiotics.
Preserving therapies using medicinal plants and preventing them from disappearing due to excessive regulation needs to be another goal. Especially the medicines of traditional healing methods, which often consist of a mixture of active substances, and are blocked on the European market even though they possess enormous potential. Pharmaceutical manufacturers that produce plant-based drugs cannot take out a patent on them and are thus unable to afford the expensive research programs that are increasingly demanded by authorities. That’s why there needs to be more funding from independent institutions.
HYPOTHESIS 4: WITHOUT A HEALTHY DIET, HEALTH IS IMPOSSIBLE
What you eat should alw
ays be your individual choice. But the labeling of food often serves to deceive rather than be transparent. The percentage of unhealthy fat and sugar in any food item should be presented in a clear manner. And where nutrition is concerned, it’s important that professional recommendations are made independently. Recommendations by federal authorities or expert associations should never fall under the influence of lobby groups, such as the agriculture or food processing industry. It’s not right that a population should suffer from a heightened risk of chronic diseases because of these particular interests. Likewise, the content of suspicious environmental chemicals like glyphosate has to be reduced. Animals should no longer be “produced” in mass husbandry, but according to farm animal welfare and housing specifications. Vegetarian or vegan food options should find their way into hospitals, kindergartens, schools, cafeterias, hotels, and restaurants.
HYPOTHESIS 5: A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE IS A PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Great hope is placed on “wiping out” diseases with the aid of genetic therapy. But this is only going to succeed in very few cases, if only for the reason that most diseases affect multiple genes and take different courses. The genetic material is only to “blame” in 10 or 20 percent of the cases at most.2 Even if you have “bad” genes, you can significantly reduce your risk of disease by adopting a healthy lifestyle. This even has an influence on our children and grandchildren, as epigenetics shows. The manner in which we live therefore doesn’t only concern us: We have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren. And it’s not a question of austerity, but of finding a lifestyle that is in harmony with our biology. We must become more sensitive to what is good for us.
HYPOTHESIS 6: MEDICINE NEEDS TO ENCOURAGE PEOPLE
If we can’t drive back chronic diseases, medicine will inevitably become two-tier medicine, because it cannot be financed otherwise. Therefore, we have to succeed in motivating people to lead healthier lives. People want agency, and as patients they should have the right to contribute to their convalescence. The medical system, however, almost completely excludes patients from participating in the process. New keywords like “shared decision making” obscure the fact that all players of the healthcare system have more power than the patients themselves: lawmakers, hospitals, health insurance companies, inspectors. This needs to change. Mind-body medicine offers important techniques and practices to enable people to take care of themselves better and especially to reduce stress, which just makes everything even worse.
HYPOTHESIS 7: “CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE” AND NATUROPATHY BELONG TOGETHER.
“Conventional medicine” needs to start taking naturopathy seriously. That this is beneficial for both sides is shown by the example of the Charité Hospital in Berlin—after all, it is here that half of the German winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine have worked. With two professorships, modern naturopathy is an important feature of their profile. Different naturopathic schools need to evolve from “eminence” to “evidence,” as conventional medicine has already been doing for two decades. Both sides should learn from one another and break fresh ground together.
Acknowledgments
First, thanks to my wife, Ileni, herself a general practitioner and naturopathic MD, who made valuable daily exchanges on many topics possible and who contributed her practical experiences. For so many evenings and weekends, she had to live with me writing and not always being attentive, and I appreciate the motivating support all the more!
Furthermore, I would like to thank:
The entire team of physicians, therapists, nursing staff, and researchers of naturopathy and other departments at the Immanuel Hospital in Berlin and especially the management team of Dr. Rainer Stange, Dr. Ursula Hackermeier, Dr. Christian Kessler, Dr. Barbara Koch, and Dipl.-Psych. Chris von Scheidt for the fruitful and successful years of cooperation.
The executive board of the Immanuel Hospital in Berlin and the Immanuel Diakonie for the establishment and ongoing support of the department and the center for naturopathy.
The Charité University Hospital in Berlin and its faculty for the integration of naturopathy and integrative medicine into research and teaching, and many colleagues at the Charité Hospital for the numerous instances of exciting research cooperation.
The donors and foundations for their generous funding, which made the research that advanced naturopathy over the last two decades possible in the first place.
The private donors and the members of Nature and Medicine e.V., who are making an important contribution to the research and dissemination of naturopathy with their donations and membership fees.
Prof. Dr. Gustav Dobos and his core team at the Department for Integrative Medicine Naturopathy at the hospitals of Essen-Mitte for the many shared years of inspiring research and practice.
Special thanks to Dr. Petra Thorbrietz, who was able to structure my manuscripts and our conversations due to her great expert knowledge, and who has combined it all into a wonderful text.
And last, but not least: my dear mother, who provided me with the basic trust and who sometimes has to struggle with my nutritional recommendations today.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE: THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF NATUROPATHY
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