Naturopaths guide body to good health

Naturopaths guide body to good health

Patients are not just a series of body parts, Stuart R. Hoover says. Nina Rao For the News-Leader

Stuart R. Hoover is a natural health doctor with a degree in Natural Health Sciences and Naturopathy. He owns Essential2Health Advanced Natural Health Center in Springfield.

Q: How did you get interested in naturopathy?

A: Like most, I really didn't pay much attention to my health when I was younger.
I played a ton of sports, and due to sports injuries, I had several back and knee surgeries. By my mid-20s, I found myself in chronic pain, fatigued and generally felt bad.
After my fourth knee surgery, I asked my doctor for the long-term prognosis on my knees. He told me I'd probably have knee replacement by the time I was 40 and pain management until then.

That did not sit well with me and I began to look at what alternatives were out there, if any. To my surprise, there was a whole field of medicine I had never heard of, natural health or naturopathy.

I began exploring this field, making changes to my diet, drinking water and getting more rest and within a very short period of time I noticed substantial changes in my health. Then I started reading more, attending lectures and doing anything I could to help educate myself about how I could help myself improve my own health.

I was in the physical therapy field at the time and started talking to patients about little things that I had learned, and their health began to change too. At that point I decided to go back to school to earn my degree in Natural Health Sciences.

Nearly two decades later I have worked with thousands of people from all over the country and even internationally and have had tremendous success in helping people improve their health.

Q: What are the philosophical underpinnings of naturopathy?

A: Naturopaths understand that healing occurs naturally in the human body, if it is given what it truly needs -- proper diet, pure water, fresh air, sunlight, exercise and rest.

In naturopathy, the emphasis is not on finding a disease and killing it, but rather on helping the body establish its own state of good health.

Allopathic philosophy (which underpins much of traditional Western medicine) holds that disease is caused by external agents and that a cure will result when offending agents are eliminated. In addition, the allopathic approach tends to look at the symptom and the disease as one and the same, so that when the symptom has been eliminated, it is presumed that the disease is cured.
The naturopath, however, sees a symptom as nothing more than a signal that something is wrong. According to naturopathic belief, when a symptom alone is eliminated, it is most likely being suppressed. Unless the original cause has also been eliminated, the symptom may return later in a chronic form.

Q: Are there certain conditions that you cannot treat?

A: Well, first we do not treat. Naturopathic medicine, or functional medicine, seeks to uncover the root causes of symptoms, allowing the practitioner to recommend intervention strategies that will solve the chronic problem.

Among the basic tenets of this type of practice is a belief that each client is unique, that minor symptoms should not be ignored and that the whole body must be treated.

Thus, treatments are custom-tailored to meet each client's unique needs by analyzing subtle differences in an individual's molecular biochemistry, hormonal secretion patterns, cellular environment, immune responses and so forth.

Even slight imbalances in the body can set the stage for more serious diseases. This often happens by virtue of a "ripple effect," whereby a "minor" imbalance sets in motion a cascade of biological triggers that eventually leads to sub-optimal health, chronic illness and degenerative disease. For this reason, a "let's-wait-and-see-if-this-develops-into anything-serious" attitude is not an acceptable approach in functional medicine.

The body is best examined and treated as an integrated whole, not simply an isolated set of parts. Moreover, by assisting and augmenting the body's natural mechanisms of healing, the practitioner works with the dynamic process of homeostasis (balance), rather than against it.
This powerful strategy offers a much more effective way of achieving long-range results than that afforded by temporary damage-control.

Emergency or crises situations, like broken bones, require medical care by an allopathic doctor.

Q: What does naturopathic treatment entail?

A: We always do a free initial consultation with our clients allowing us to get a detailed health history, address goals and what assessments may be used to help understand the client's functional state of health.

Remember that we are not looking for disease. Our medical system today is best at identifying disease and then managing it. When someone has routine blood work done and their numbers are all within range, that doesn't mean that this person is healthy, it just means that he or she is not diseased yet.

Our medical system has become very fragmented in that most doctors today are specialists. Each body part is being treated for its specific set of symptoms. But the body is not a bunch of individual parts that work independent of one another.

We work with clients with every type of health challenge from cancer and diabetes to arthritis and auto immune conditions.

More than 90 percent of all chronic disease in our country is preventable and directly linked to poor nutrition and lifestyle. The body must be addressed as a whole in order to achieve complete health.

Naturopathy is not a replacement for conventional medicine; it is a complement. As our health continues to decline in America, I think people are beginning to understand the role that a natural health practitioner can play. Statistics show that more and more people are incorporating functional medicine in their health.

We are the health coaches.