The Unique Approach of Naturopathic Medicine, Part 2: The Therapeutic Order
The therapeutic order of naturopathic medicine is where the six principles of naturopathic medicine begin to come to life.
As a reminder, the six principles of naturopathic medicine are:
Not harming.
Trusting in a person's innate ability to heal.
Finding and addressing obstacles to healing.
Helping people understand how to support their natural ability to heal.
Treating each person as a whole and unique individual.
Preventing disease before it begins.
To follow these principles, naturopathic doctors must be organized, have many options, and treat according to our unique talents. The therapeutic order is how we manage our workups, diagnoses, and treatment plans while keeping them unique to each person who seeks our assistance.
Level 1: Ensure basic life needs are being met.
At this level, we make strides to eat healthy foods, move our bodies, get sleep, practice personal hygiene, foster supportive relationships, avoid toxins, find meaning in life, and find safe living conditions. All other treatments depend on meeting our basic needs. This level of care includes a person’s individual, social, political, and environmental circumstances. A naturopathic physician who fails to acknowledge and address this level of care is missing significant opportunities to help their patient. Tools such as lifestyle medicine, social support systems, public aid programs, and patient education can all help at this level of care.
Level 2: Stimulate the person’s innate ability to heal.
Once the basics have been assessed, the next step is identifying obstacles to a person’s innate healing ability. Some can be addressed, while others cannot. Hydrotherapy, craniosacral therapy, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and behavioral changes can all act at this level.
Level 3: Support and restore weakened systems.
Let’s face it: living is stressful and takes its toll on us. Sometimes, this toll comes as organs or systems that sustain damage and have difficulty keeping up with demands. It’s up to the naturopathic doctor to recognize the signs of a dysfunctional organ and create a therapeutic plan. This may look like targeted nutritional support, changes in lifestyle, herbal medicine, craniosacral therapy, hydrotherapy, the use of medical devices, hormone replacement, prolotherapy, or other treatments prescribed to restore function.
Level 4: Address physical alignment.
In the human body, structure creates a function, and when the body is out of alignment, that function is compromised. We may see this at the level of a joint that has pain and a limited range of motion. Still, we may also see this at the spine level, where a nerve root responsible for sending and receiving signals from a specific body area is pinched, resulting in miscommunication between that area and the brain. This can result in quite a few issues, including pain, dysfunction of an organ, or even dysfunction in the autonomic (automatic) nervous system. To address body misalignment, naturopathic physicians utilize spinal manipulations, targeted exercises, and other physical medicine therapies.
Level 5: Provide symptom relief using natural substances.
Sometimes, we need relief from the symptoms of dysfunction in the body while we wait for healing to happen! While these treatments do not provide healing, they do provide comfort. This is where we find therapies such as herbal and nutritional anti-inflammatories, cough suppressants, pain relievers, sleep inducers, anxiolytics, and antidepressants.
Level 6: Provide symptom relief using synthetic substances.
Sometimes, we need more robust and faster-acting symptom relief than what natural medicine can provide. This is where we introduce pharmaceutical symptom relief treatments. You will notice that this is usually the step where conventional care begins.
Level 7: High force interventions
At this level, naturopathic physicians refer their patients to other medical professionals for more extensive and suppressive pharmaceutical management, surgery, or other treatments that are out of our scope of practice.
Conclusion:
As you can see, naturopathic medicine has a different approach to treating patients than what many people are used to. It is a system of medicine with its philosophy rather than a trade of a synthetic substance for a natural one. Some naturopathic doctors prescribe pharmaceutical medications, while others do not. The same can be said for herbal medicine, physical medicine, injection therapy, hormone replacement, homeopathy, essential oils, hydrotherapy, etc.
What makes naturopathic physicians different isn’t the tools we use; it’s why we use them when we use them, and how we use them.
I hope this has been enjoyable and given you a better idea of how naturopathic physicians work.
As always, to our health!
Reference:
https://aanmc.org/featured-articles/therapeutic-order/
https://lifestylemedicine.org/
