Talk:Natural health
you have written a very studied take on natural health. I had been pondering writing an article but the task was too daunting. I am a Holistic Health practitioner in Atlanta. Your web site is jam packed. thanks for the work
Thanks!
I feel that this article represents an academic definition of what the definition of natural health should be based upon the various branches of philosophy. -- Mr-Natural-Health 11:40, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Grossly POV - it reads like a press release. Marking accordingly. (If it were NPOV, it wouldn't need a disclaimer.) - David Gerard 20:38, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)
- Also, the prior comment regarding: "If it were NPOV, it wouldn't need a disclaimer" is so far off the wall, that is too silly to respond to." -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 13:53, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- Andrew Weil, MD wrote a book called _Natural Health, Natural Medicine_. In his book, Dr. Weil fails to define Natural Health. I run a Natural Health web site. I write a weekly newsletter that offers commentary from the Natural Health perspective. I am, also, the Ring Master of a WebRing on Natural Health. I felt that if I am going to write about Natural Health, I should be able to define the term. So, I did research on it. And, I conducted several public discussions on the topic in newsgroups. The article Natural Health reads like an academic definition of the term Natural Health, in my opinion. Nothing POV about this article, in my opinion. It is simply a serious definition of but one branch of Alternative medicine. My short dictionary size definition of Natural Health is as follows:
- Natural health is an eclectic self-care system of natural therapies that builds and restores health by working with the natural recuperative powers of the human body.
- but it was edited out of the article.
- --John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 04:40, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Parts of this page can be found at http://tutorials.naturalhealthperspective.com/glossary.html and http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/talk.politics.medicine/msg02694.html.
- Could be because I wrote all of the above? -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 04:30, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Natural Health -- POV/Consensus-Seeking explained
Does the phrase Natural Health even exist? The answer is an obvious yes, if for no other reason than that there are literally thousands of natural health web sites.
So, the next question would be: How does one then define the term? There is no dictionary definition to refer to. So, I would propose that the easiest way to define the term is to examine existing fully developed models that primarily center around the phrase natural health. However, you must bare in mind that each of these models has added their own extensions to the concept of natural health.
There are only 5 possible choices, to choose from:
- Naturopathy
- Extension 1: Professionalized as a form of medicine.
- The Natural Hygiene movement.
- Extension 1:Principle of naturalism: doing what seems 'natural' or avoiding what seems 'unnatural.'
- The book Natural Health, Natural Medicine written by Andrew Weil, MD.
- Extension 1: Eastern philosophies.
- Extension 2: Interest in psychedelic drugs.
- The Popular Health Movement (1820 - 1870)in the United States.
- The common theme behind this movement was the advocation of prevention and healthy lifestyles. They had many ideas about good nutrition, clean water and air, exercise, sunshine and herbs. The Popular Health Movement was a reaction against the role of elitist, formally trained physicians who promoted heroic medical treatments.
- An operational definition of what is wrong with allopathy.
- As expressed in the books: Health and Healing and Spontaneous Healing, written by Andrew Weil, MD.
I would immediately discount the Natural Hygiene movement. It never professionalized. Nor, is natural hygiene training provided at any accredited college of higher learning. However, the Natural Hygiene movement were clearly the first group to use the word natural.
From here, it is simply a matter of hard thinking to reason out the specific philosophies that comprise the philosophical basis of natural health.
The only real debatable issues, in my opinion, are the principle of materialism and issue of the mind-body connection. Is natural health strongly rooted in materialism just like medicine is? Or, does it follow a more water-down version of materialism?
How does the mind-body connection come into play? Is it part of the core natural health philosophies, or is it merely only a modern extension to it? Natural health is clearly Western in its approach, as opposed to an Eastern philosophy. The earliest link to the mind-body connection would be interest in relaxation or stress reduction. Psychosocial treatments would clearly be a modern extension. But, a basic stress reduction technique could be traced back to relaxing in ancient Roman spas some 2,000 years ago. Naturopathy came from the water cure in Europe, and the water cure came from the ancient Roman spa.
Further, saying that natural health is as strictly biological in its approach to health as medicine is tantamount to saying that it uses the biomedical model of health which clearly rubs me the wrong way. Seems to me that there should be a major divide between natural health and medicine on this core issue.
So, this basically leaves the yet to be answered question of: What is the best philosophical term to refer to the water-down version of materialism that is core to all natural health practices? -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 15:35, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)