Naturopathyworks.com
Choose your foods like your life depends on them.
April 2004 newsletter

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Carsick or seasick? Ancient Chinese medicine can help

Try pressing Pericardium 6 whenever you find yourself in the miserable sloshing of endless ocean waves or as a passenger being thrown back and forth on a winding mountain road with many hairpin turns.

Pericardium 6 may be found from the center of your wrist crease, two thumb-widths up (toward the shoulder). Once you've located that general area, press and massage as needed for relief during your journey.

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On the other hand, you may be more carsick than you think. The chemicals in a new car can worsen many health problems. See http://www.3docs.org/InTheNews.html

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Let others know about Naturopathic Medicine!

Weil to Medical Profession: Learn Nutrition

At a recent Tucson Arizona conference of 450 health professionals, Dr. Andrew Weil, MD of the University of Arizona Program of Integrative Medicine challenged conventional physicians to face the following:

• According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition less than 6% of all medical school graduates receive adequate training in clinical nutrition. Weil said, "the current state of nutrition education of health professionals is non-existent to substandard."
• More than 20% of hospitals have fast food restaurants on their premises.
• Obesity is quickly becoming the #1 cause of preventable death in the U.S.

As consequence of poor nutritional training physicians are unable to counsel patients about optimum diet or make use of dietary change as a primary therapeutic intervention. Nor can they help patients become educated consumers of dietary supplements.

Unless it establishes its credibility regarding food choices and nutrition, the conventional medical profession will be unable to act as a social and political force to counteract the commercial pressures that have led to the ubiquity of fast food restaurants, soft drinks and low-quality vending machines in public schools and hospitals.

Nutrition in the Naturopathic Medical Schools: Way Ahead of Other Health Professions

Medical students at the five accredited naturopathic medical colleges across North America have an extensive education in nutrition. The curriculum at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine includes eight successive courses in clinical nutrition, which is standard for the profession.

First to define clinical nutrition, it consists of prescriptive nutritional treatments applied specifically to the health needs of individual patients. What many laypeople and even conventional physicians are unaware of is that clinical nutrition is actually advanced biochemistry. It is the knowledge of chemical interactions between and among molecules imported from food and molecules generated from within the body. The complexity of all these relationships for the numerous categories of food molecules and the various organs of the body is immense. But it is also vitally important for good health. To gain such an understanding and to be able to apply it to patients, a naturopathic student must spend four years in academic and clinical training in biochemistry/nutrition. MD and DO schools on the other hand, typically have only one to two courses in biochemistry/nutrition, totaling 3 to 6 months of instruction.