Any practitioner that seeks to understand the processes of health and healing can only use observed natural laws and principles to outline expected observations while supporting a client to go through what has historically been referred to as “nature cure.” Philosophy is the key difference between naturopathic and traditional medical models of disease and healing; whereas naturopathic philosophy outlines a process of health restoration based on observation and patterns of health, the traditional medical model considers the constructs of masking symptoms, destroying or removing abnormal cells, and slowing the processes of progressive degenerative and systematic diseases. If you seek health restoration, you must first ask if there is a way to analytically measure improvements that correlate with the patterns of observed natural laws and principles. Can you have a seemingly healthy functional medical assessment without observed health restoration? In other words, how do we explain when an improvement in lab assessments does not correlate with improvement in client complaints?

When I attended NCNM, Dr. Jared Zeff taught philosophy and has since written several articles that outline the observed patterns of healing in nature, along with a hierarchical approach to therapeutic support based on the principle of “First Do No Harm.” Dr. Zeff’s “model introduced illness and healing as processes of reaction, elimination and restoration in response to disturbing and health promoting factors.” He stated that the “intrinsic process is dependent on vitality and the vital force, which aims to restore health when the basis for health is established.”¹