“Feed a cold and then you will have to starve a fever”
At the beginning of each New Year many of the articles written will revolve around dieting, creating a new you, and most often detoxifying. But why detox, what does it do and how does it work? I wanted to take a slightly different slant on these topics and so I present to you here the basic naturopathic principles on how we can re-create our own health and also what factors can lead to disease in the first place. This article is more along the lines of educating you on how your body works rather than what to eat and what not to eat. I find this subject extremely interesting and with these basic principles in mind you can adjust your lifestyle as you see fit.
So lets start with the Naturopathic Triad, a way of looking at how we can help ourselves recover from illness by re-creating our health and also a way to see how we may have become ill or at dis-ease.
This basically shows the three different aspects of our whole being, our structure or physical body, our chemistry or the fluids within us and our electro-magnetic or emotional side. It is easy to see how these aspects can be an entry point for us to become ill, for example if we have a fall we may injury our muscles or ligaments, if we eat poorly the vitamins and minerals in our fluids become deficient and if we are under great stress then emotionally we can become depressed. You can also include at this aspect the electro-magnetic insults we consume daily such as mobile phone frequencies or interference from wireless technology.
These are all highly interlinked and virtually all the time we will ideally require help or treatment from all three directions. When searching for a practitioner to help you with an ailment you should ideally find one that has the tools to help you on all three levels or use multiple practitioners to help you.
I’d like to illustrate this point using stress as an example and see how it could hypothetically cause us harm on all three aspects of the Naturopathic Triad. It is easy to see how stress can cause us to emotionally feel strained and most people understand that stress does this. What is less understood is that all our feelings are actually physical chemicals in our nervous system, which brings us to the biochemical side of the Naturopathic Triad. These chemicals must be constructed and then broken down within us which requires amino acids, vitamins and minerals etc. So through a period of stress more adrenalin is made and subsequently has to be detoxified once the body has processed it, which also uses up vitamins and minerals. If this goes on for some time and our dietary intake is unable to fully supply the required nutrients because of this increased need then eventually a deficiency will occur. This deficiency may then be responsible for other symptoms, such as increased tiredness or lethargy. These physical symptoms are often associated with stress, as are the very common symptoms of tight shoulders, headaches or perhaps uncomfortable anxiety palpitations.
Hopefully you can see how all parts of the Naturopathic Triad are interlinked. A patient may visit their osteopath to ease their neck and shoulder tension but really they also need advice on relaxation, for the emotional side, and nutritional supplementation to correct a deficiency, for the biochemical side. Only by looking at all three aspects can a complete restoration of their problems be achieved.
The Naturopathic Triad can also be used to look at the toxins that might have a detrimental impact on us. The biochemical side tells us we might require vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, amino acids, water or probiotics for health but it also tells us we must look here for the cause of a disease such as toxic chemicals, viruses, bacteria, parasites, radiation or poor dietary habits.
Detoxification
Another area I would like to delve into from a naturopathic perspective is that of detoxification. What is it? Why does it work? How does our body do it? I hope to illustrate this in a straight forward way so you can understand just what is going on inside you.
Let’s start by taking the image of a bath tub, it has a plug in it and it also has an overflow valve 3/4 of the way up. This bathtub will represent our own body. When you turn on the tap the water fills it and starts to rise toward the overflow valve. In this analogy the water represents toxins that fill our body every day, whether they be poor quality food or drink, toxic metal, chemicals from the environment, viruses, bacteria or parasites etc. At some point our body will become so full of toxins that they reach the overflow value and pour out. This point of overflow is an acute illness or a “healing crisis” in naturopathic terms. The body has decided to clear itself of the toxins via one of our eliminatory roots, such as runny nose, sweating, diarrhoea or vomiting. Whilst these are unpleasant it is important to view them as beneficial and let them freely occur. A common example would be if you have a nasty bug in the gut from food poisoning. The best thing the body can do is cause diarrhoea or vomiting to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
This is the body detoxifying. So if you were to do a detoxification yourself you would be purposely cleansing yourself before you reached the overflow valve. If the detox you did was quite gentle and controlled you probably wouldn’t get any of the symptoms such as diarrhoea. However, if you went to the extreme, or if you had lots of toxins stored in you then you may get more symptoms.
Now we move on to a very important part of the bathtub analogy, which is what happens when medication is used to suppress symptoms. Using medication is like plugging up the overflow valve, taking for example something to stop diarrhoea when you have food poisoning. The medication suppresses the healing crisis (diarrhoea) and so the body retains the food poisoning culprit in the bowel. The body will either continue trying to expel the bug, so causing long lasting bowel issues or after being unsuccessful it will re-divert its energy and resources to other problem areas. This leaves the bug inhabiting the bowel and unfortunately predisposes us to long-standing chronic issues. Most of the time it is more natural to allow your body to have these detoxification moments, and the most frequent healing crisis everyone suffers is the common cold. The symptoms of a cold become more understandable when viewed as a necessary cleansing process for your body; the runny nose is mucous carrying away foreign particles, the fever is your body raising its temperature to kill off viruses and bacteria and simultaneously stimulating its own immune defenses, the sweating is the skin being used as a detoxifying organ, the sore throat is your body’s way of telling you to stop eating and the fatigue is a sign to take the day off work, rest and let your body do what it needs to do!
The comment above about stopping eating is another interesting behavior on the part of our physiology and it ties in nicely with how naturopaths believe fasting works. To help understand this it is useful to view the energy requirements of the body in two parts. Firstly, we use energy going about our conscious day to day activities, such as going to work, playing sport, lifting the children etc. Then we have the requirements of our internal, automatic functions, such as our heart beating, liver and kidneys processing toxins and the digestion and absorption of food etc. This last function, relating to our bowel system requires the majority of our physiological energy and in general the whole conversion of food into energy actually requires a lot of energy!
It is here that fasting works. If you decide to take a couple of days off work to rest, stop playing sport and you also reduce the amount of food you consume, maybe even down to fruit juices only, then all the energy your body would normally use on these activities would be come surplus and it would be re-diverted to start healing other parts of the body. It might focus on the long term knee arthritis, the chronic sinus infection or whatever it feels it now has the resources to heal. This is why fasting can give such great results. However, this form of therapy is not advised so often today as we are generally a lot more toxic in the modern environment and a fast could possibly bring too many toxins back into circulation and make you feel quite unwell. I personally use in practice specifically designed metabolic clearing supplements which support the organs most under stress, such as the liver. I also use a Biomeridian Vantage machine to highlight specific organs that need support before any sort of detoxification, this allows me to apply drainage remedies to those organs so they can cope with the increased toxin excretion. This is why is is preferential to detox under the supervision of a practitioner
I hope this brief look at the naturopathic principles which I find most interesting you can get a feel for how your body works to rid itself of toxins. You might even be able to cope with that annoying common cold that comes along, understanding that by the end of it you will be in better health than at the start, as you have drained your own bath tub.
And now, perhaps you are wondering about the title of by segment, and are perhaps wondering if I have written the old phrase “Feed a cold, starve a fever” incorrectly? Well, they are both correct, in the title I have just re-phrased it so it reads how it was originally meant to. In fact, if you feed a cold you will make it worse, because you are adding burden to the body at a time where it wants rest and heal itself. If you do feed a cold then you will progress the symptoms to a fever which you will be forced to starve. So in fact this old saying is telling us to starve (or reduce food intake) for both the cold and the fever.
Christian Bates has been an osteopath and naturopath for over 20 years. He has added other modalities and techniques to his repertoire to ensure he can treat his patients as much as possible on all sides of the Naturopathic Triad. He uses a meridian stress analysis system to easily and accurately find the correct organ system to treat first in complex problems. He specialises in bowel problems having had surgery himself many years ago.
Call 01444 410944 for more information.
