Talk:Natural health

message: 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)
thread_title: you

message: 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)
thread_title:  Natural Health -- POV/Consensus-Seeking explained 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: I made my last two replies in the article itself. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 13:46, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Wording problems

message: 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)
replies: text: See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Natural hygiene. MastCell Talk 20:11, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  What happened to [[Natural hygiene]]?