Clinical Nutrition

Nutrition is the mainstay of health and preventative medicine. An adequate diet should include all the essential nutrients to support healthy metabolism, physical growth and repair, and provide the abundant energy to support activity and a feeling of well-being.

A good diet is centred around the consumption of nutrient-dense wholefoods which should be as free as possible from industrial contaminants, pesticides and other additives. The ultra-processed foods that are a staple in the modern urban world are the proven cause of the epidemic of degenerative diseases and should be reduced as far as practicable to a bare discretionary minimum.

Clinical nutrition involves the use of specialised diets and the supplementation of nutrients to address deficiencies in the diet that have produced symptoms of disease such as scurvy, depression or thyroid underactivity. Over-nutrition may also require intervention such as a ketogenic diet for weight-loss, a Mediterranean-style diet for heart disease, or the elimination of refined carbohydrates in diabetes. Specialised antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic or antihypertensive extracts are also used to treat common disease processes.

Mineral Therapy

Cells salts were developed by Dr William Schussler in Germany and comprise the twelve minerals essential to metabolism. These are compounds of calcium, iron, sodium, magnesium and silica, prepared in low homeopathic potency. These preparations can be used to stimulate the absorption of minerals from the diet as well as correct pathological states caused by mineral imbalances in the body or arising from a constitutional weakness. These remedies are also mostly available as crude bio-chemical compounds created by Dr Blackmore called celloids.

Herbs

Herbs have been used as medicine since the advent of civilisation. In fact, herbs that were in common used by Hippocrates and Dioscorides are still in used today for treating acute and chronic ailments, examples being garlic, sage, peppermint, wormwood, milk thistle, wild carrot and yarrow. The Chinese and Ayurvedic medical pharmacy is even older.

Herbs can be gathered wild or grown in the garden, and the parts used to make medicine include the root, bark, flowers, fruit or whole the dried plant. Herbs are then prepared into teas, decoctions, tinctures, ointments and essential oils, and were the mainstay of medicine until the development of chemical and synthetic medicines. Herbs are widely prescribed by mainstream French and German doctors.

Herbs are also used in homeopathy, the first preparation of the alcohol tincture being designated the mother tincture. A dilution of 1:10 is considered the lowest homeopathic potency and these are used to support organ function much as a herbalist prescribes them, but usually in drop doses. It may seem hard to believe, when compared to the large crude doses of pharmaceutical medicines routinely taken, but a few drops of a well-selected herb taken several times a day is potent medicine.

Homeopathy

Homeopathy is a safe system of medicine used by hundreds of millions of people today in Europe, South America, Australia, America and India. It has a proven track record of curing acute and chronic diseases supported by an extensive case literature reaching back two centuries. Unlike conventional medicine, homeopathy is individualised to the patient and not necessarily the disease.

Homeopathy is difficult to understand using the conventional medical paradigm which relies on the use of crude medicines being administered in a dose-response relationship to achieve a pharmacological effect. By contrast, homeopathic medicines are usually diluted to the point where there is no physical drug present in the solution, and so the remedies do not work in the same way. A process of activation during dilution, called dynamisation, converts the remedy into an energy medicine which works through resonance, a straightforward concept in physics. The remedy also grows in strength with greater the dilution, a difficult idea for the layman to understand who is used to synthetic pharmaceutical drugs.

The principle of ‘like cures like’ upon which homeopathy works, also known as the Law of Similars, is probably as old as medicine itself; however, it was Dr Samuel Hahnemann who first systematically trialled the used of medicines in this way. He built a thorough methodology from his experiments, extensive case experience and drug provings, and provided a considerable body of supporting literature which continues to increase.

Dr Hahnemann originally practiced orthodox medicine before abandoning the bleeding, purging and mercury dosing that were the mainstay of 19^th century medicine, for much less-dangerous methods. He in fact developed the method of dilution and dynamisation in order to make the remedies safe and it is still used today to produce potent homeopathic remedies from just about any source of material including plant, animal or mineral substances.

The homeopathic physician must take a detailed case in order to match a remedy to the patient while treating acute or chronic conditions. Treating a cold or flu, for example, requires that the physician ask questions which define the particular kind of flu that is experienced by the patient who may require a different remedy to another family member experiencing the same illness. This experience is  often a novel experience to the patient who soon learns to appreciate the meticulous attention. Symptoms repertories and extensive volumes of materia medica support the remedy selection process.