Talk:Natural health

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[edit] you

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)

[edit] Grossly POV

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)

I will remove all traces of concerns of POV in the natural health article by doing a major re-write of it that will be based on the accepted format of the Naturopathy article. No issues of NPOV have been raised over at Naturopathy. I will tone it done a bit too, so that it does not read like a press release for my web site. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 15:24, 21 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)

[edit] 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 was 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)

[edit] happy to discuss

Happy to discuss to discuss what? -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 14:55, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I changed the key definition of a page you have fixed up lot. but we I think we have more to discuss on Talk:Conventional medicine--Erich gasboy 15:05, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I am capable of carrying on more than one conversation at a time. So, I think that I will work on this issue, now.
Does medicine aim at diagnosing, does it aim at treating disease, or does it aim at preventing disease? Of course not, it simply does it. The same goes for natural health.
I could just as easily have said that natural health succeeds at building health. So, kindly justify, here, your edit or please reverse it! -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 04:12, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
well medicine does always aim to do the things you list - sometimes it succeeds too. but not always. the medicine page does not state blankly in its definition that it achieves a particular outcome either--Erich gasboy 04:29, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I read medicine stating: "Medicine is an area of human knowledge concerned with restoring health."' The word restoring states blankly in its definition that it always achieves a particular outcome. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 14:38, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I am very happy with your consensus seeking definition. One could legitamately say that alchemy was concerned with converting lead to gold and that would be true. I think you have written a perfectly NPOV definition. If it satisfies you then are we both happy? best wishes --Erich gasboy 15:37, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] American natural health

This article is specifically about the natural health movement in America. I think it should either state that right up front, or be expanded to include the rest of the world. Thoughts? heidimo 16:34, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I am glad that you brought this subject up.
Our project needs an editor, like yourself, that is familiar with alternative medicine in the Eastern cultures. We are in real need of many additions from the Eastern cultures, such as:
  • Famous People in
  • Ideas for articles to be written in the Philosophy of
  • Historical events that should be associated with alternative medicine (I will be creating the History of Alternative Medicine, article today.)
  • In our Index of Topics in, please put in any already written articles from Eastern cultures that are related to CAM.
What I want to see at this point are plenty of links to unwritten articles added to our menu articles as an informal to do list for any editor to write. Of course, if you know of anything already written that would even be better. But, please do not add any unwritten stuff to our Index. The Index will be our master list of what has actually been written on the subject of CAM.
I wrote a history of CAM on my web site that was 100% about the Western culture. I have bragging rights about figuring out the History of alternative medicine in Europe. So, feel free to enlighten our project about Eastern history and practices.
Back to the original point of your comment. Natural health is strictly about Western culture. Of course, in the modern ERA there have been Eastern influences that are best viewed, in my opinion, as a modern extension to the core beliefs of the very Western concept of Natural Health. Natural health is an American invention due to the American Health Reform Movement of the 1830s and 1840s; which was really both the start and high point of Natural Health.
Feel free to enlighten me about any possible natural health movements in the East. I am sure that the development of alternative medicine / natural health in Australia, Africa, and Central & South America would prove interesting, too.
In Europe, the nature cure was developing into Naturopathy. Of course, Naturopathy was not actually called Naturopathy till it was imported to the US. Hence, it was another American invention so to speak. In Europe, it is still largely referred to as the nature cure. In the modern ERA of modern communication methods, such as the Internet, everybody is mudding up language by calling everything as being everything and anything, whether it actually is or not.
Of course, Natural Health is mostly about the Quackery of vitamin peddlers and the commercial operation of health food grocery stores. There is really not too much glamor in that, is there? -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 14:30, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wording problems

I've been doing some minor copyediting, but this sentence makes no sense to me:

All natural health healing practices will claim that a physician can kill an infection with antibiotics, perform surgery, put a broken limb in a cast, or suture a wound, but all healing is performed by the patient.

This concept can be traced back to the Middle Ages and even to Ancient Greek History to the fundalmental conept of all Western alternative medicine philosophies that it is the human body that actually performs the healing process rather than the physician. Physicians would say that they actually do the healing and that mother nature gets in the way of their healing the patient.
This may not help you any, but I was trying to emphasize this fundmental Western concept of alternative medicine. I do not have time to comment more, now. I will post another reply, perhaps tonight. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 17:40, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)
John, it wasn't the concept I was questioning, it was the way the sentence is worded. It doesn't make sense, especially the first half of it. I know you're very busy with the new project, but since you put the infoboxes on articles, I decided to read those articles and tweak them a bit, and this is the first one. This is purely a language problem, from the point of view of copy edit, not so much content. When you get a chance, I hope you will rewrite these sentences to improve the language. I appreciate the tremendous amount of time you must be putting into the wikiproject. heidimo 17:55, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I made my last two replies in the article itself. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 13:46, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If I knew what it was trying to say, I'd reword it. It is from the "Vitalism" section. heidimo 16:46, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

This sentence from "Prevention" also has problems I'm not sure how best to fix:

Secondary prevention activities are concerned with early detection and intervention in the potential development or the existence of an illness.

heidimo 17:04, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] What happened to Natural hygiene?

Why was the article Natural hygiene (Natural Hygiene, Orthopathy) deleted and redirected here without merging any of its contents? Natural hygiene was practised by Herbert M. Shelton and is not mentioned in this article.nirvana2013 (talk) 15:17, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Natural hygiene. MastCell Talk 20:11, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Deleting the article was a drastic measure. It needed improving or merging into this article. Also there seems to be a lot of keep requests listed, but still it was deleted. Does not sound much like WP:consensus to me. nirvana2013 (talk) 11:29, 21 February 2008 (UTC)