Lifestyle Medicine: Treatments with the help of nature
I remember thinking to myself: why do most doctors not live longer and healthier lives than the rest of the population? Shouldn’t they know better than anyone how to do that? How to look after themselves better?
Over the past 50 years researchers and pioneering doctors have begun to analyze why it is that:
There are populations wherein the life expectancy is higher than in the western world, and where there are more people who live to over 100 years old than here in the west.
Populations in which the average centenarian makes their very first visit to the doctor after they are 90 years old!
Populations in which the dogma, that we get sick as we get old, collapses….
Because these people live in a natural way and keep themselves healthy in a natural way.
In those parts of the world the cost of medical care is much lower, whilst in the western world, depsite having ever more doctors, medicines, operations, etc, we can predict that the generation below us, our children, will die before us.
This is very sad, but there is hope:
It is estimated that if our chronically ill people (those with high blood pressure, diabetes, angina, rheumatism, certain cancers, and many other things) went to live in those same parts of the world, called “Blue Zones” by National Geographic, then 80% of those chronically ill people would manage to reduce or even cure their illnesses, just by living in the same way that the Blue Zone populations live.
The study of this field is called lifestyle medicine, and this area of medicine teaches us to go back to living in a natural way, so that we can return in a natural way to being healthy.
Lifestyle medicine is a new field in medicine; in the USA it is already recognized as an independent
specialism. Although it is part of conventional medicine, i.e. based on evidence and on science, it also belongs to complementary or alternative medicine. Why?
Because it is based on clinical studies and it uses the following nature-based things as therapies:
- A whole foods plant based diet
- Sleep and relaxation which repair the body
- Physical exercise
- Nature and sunshine
- Annual fasts
- Absence of harmful habits: harmful foods (animal products, added fats/salt/sugar), tobacco, alcohol, drugs, medications.