There is no "bad" medicine

There is a dangerous assumption in the natural health world that all things conventional medicine is BAD. And I get it (of course I get it -- there is clearly I reason I quit medical school).

But I need to make something clear. 

There is no "bad" medicine. 

Medicine just IS, and the point of medicine is to help make us better.

But here is what any medicine CAN be: inappropriate, ineffective and unsafe. 

Let's explore some scenarios...

• If you were in a serious car accident and were bleeding internally and externally, would you want to go to the Emergency Room or would you call me to make you an astringent herbal tincture? 

• If you were a single mom experiencing the worst pain of your life and were in such debilitating pain that you were throwing up and unable to care for your children, would you opt to take an ibuprofen or would you make golden milk with turmeric?

Just as inappropriate as those natural therapies may be in those situations, there is also a grossly inappropriate use of surgery and pharmaceutical drugs in conventional medicine: 

• If you develop diabetes from years and years of lack of activity, stress and eating a high sugar diet, would you pop a pill every day for the next couple decades to tuck the problem away and call it good, or would you try to shift the very behavior that caused the disease in the first place? 

• If you develop a condition caused by a hormonal imbalance, would you take a birth control pill every day to shut off your body's production of hormones all-together, or would you take a herbal tincture shown to rebalance hormones? 

See how ridiculous it all is, regardless of the lens you look at it through? Every case of disease is nuanced and complicated and there is no simple right or wrong.

I have read and experienced some miraculous effects of natural medicine, even in seemingly emergent situations. But for the most part, I think that as patients and doctors we simply must move away from good guy/bad guy and start appreciating the art of learning what tools to use, when. 

In Naturopathic Medicine we use the Therapeutic Order to guide our thinking process. This is a set of guidelines to help physicians resolve the patient's symptoms and address the underlying cause while using the least force safely possible. In other words, we meet the pathology where it's at. 

I really like this representation of the therapeutic order from http://www.lilacnaturalmedicine.com/naturopathic-medicine.html

My prayer for health is that as doctors we learn not to act out of fear and ignorance and trust the body's ability to do what it does when we learn to support it and get out of the way: heal.