Using the Earth's medicines to rewire brain
Naturopathic medicine dates back to prehistoric times, when humans were very much in touch with nature. Food, medicine, and clothing all came from the earth. Man-made chemicals and plastics didn’t surround everything we touched. Wireless internet wasn’t going through our laptops and disrupting our own energetic fields. Food wasn’t loaded with preservatives and artificial colors.
A lot is the same too. Sick people went to the local healer for help. Today they go to the doctor. Medicine men and women were well-versed in the local plants, animals, and minerals for treating various ailments. This knowledge is still utilized today. In fact, many of our modern medicines came directly from studying native cultures. Did you know that aspirin was discovered from Ancient Romans treating headaches with white willow bark?
Plant medicines carry over into mental health as well. Valerian Root and Xanax work similarly. The herb St. John’s Wort and the drug Prozac work on the same serotonin receptors.
Naturopathic medicine’s philosophy is really what sets it aside from your run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. It comes down to believing in the body’s own innate ability to heal itself. If you fall down and scrape your leg, you grow new skin. Science is proving that you can do the same thing in the brain too. It’s a matter of providing the correct conditions for the brain to heal.
As a student in medical school, I studied all the basic sciences taught in any other medical school across the country. Biochemistry. Anatomy. Physiology. Pharmacology. I learned about how drugs from the pharmacy help the body and the brain.
But I also learned about traditional healing modalities that have disappeared from the curricula of most modern medical schools. Things that used to be taught. But still work. Oftentimes better. Things like environmental medicine, nutrition, hydrotherapy, physical manipulations, homeopathy, and botanical medicine. Regardless of if you believe the narrative that pharmaceutical drugs are the only way to a sound mind, or believe that it’s a money-making conspiracy, there are other options.
Let’s talk about the difference between a run-of-the-mill psychiatrist and a naturopathic doctor who specializes in mental health. First, how is anxiety treated by a psychiatrist? Typically, you go in, get a diagnosis, and then go through some steps to find the right drug. Step 1 is take “Drug A”. You wait a couple months, and if you still aren’t feeling good, you move to Step 2, which is to take “Drug B”. Every single person that goes to the psychiatrist with anxiety is going to be treated the same way.
The beauty of naturopathic medicine lies in its individualized treatment. If 10 people come into my office with anxiety, all 10 will leave with a different treatment plan. My goal is really 2-fold. First, lay the foundations for health which will provide the right terrain for the brain to heal. And second, stimulate the brain to fire the way we want it to.
Sometimes connections between areas of the brain start firing in a way that causes anxiety. We want to weaken those connections, and reroute them into a different pattern. In the end, after we are all said and done, those anxiety-free connections will fire without the need for drugs, or even an herb. It's a simple concept, and it works. So you can go back to being a brain Jedi.
