What is Naturopathy?

“Naturopathy” means natural therapy in Japanese, and it is alternative treatment aimed to increase natural healing ability people have by rights.

Naturopath helps people to restore the unbalanced body due to living practice and diet to healthy condition.

Doctor gives medical treatment focusing the illness itself in western medicine, but naturopath examine the physical and mental status of the patients holistically, and explores the underlying cause of the illness or disorder.

Naturopath (Natural therapist) is a specialist of the naturopathy (natural therapy).

The role of Naturopath

Naturopath explores the underlying cause of the symptom or illness by consultation or various preventive medical tests, and is good at seeing the whole person not only the physical symptoms, but also mind, emotion, sprit, environment, and constitution.

Naturopath plays a role to guide the patient to restore his/her health condition by treating the underlying cause of the symptom with a holistic approach, using medical herb, dietary therapy, homeopathy, improving living environment.

Naturopath thinks there is always a reason to get ill, and does the work to explore it with clients like a detective.

In order to restore the balance of the body

In modern life, people lose the ability to cure themselves due to stress, neglect of health, luck of nutrition, and internal contamination of the body by heavy metal or environmental hormone.

The true health is not only the body but also emotion, mind, and soul are all balanced and good condition.

Including us, human beings, the entire creature in the universe needs harmony and balance.

You are not healthy if you are mentally ill, even if you do not have physical disorder at all. You could be mentally depressed when you are physically sick, even if you have no mental issues.

Western medicine is good at acute condition treatment; I feel naturopathy is good at cure chronic medical condition.

It is important to take the all aspects of individual patients into consideration.
Naturopathy focus attention on symptom, history of medication or disease in the past, genetic factor, age, gender, social status, as well as on trauma in the past, emotional and mental problem.

It is more of my philosophy than teachings of naturopathy; I think it is important to focus attention on where the soul of the patient belongs to or the soul itself, feel the nature by bare hands and foots, regain the innate animal-like instinct, sense the abnormal change of the body quickly, find your home within you, understand the cycle of the birth and the death during the process of healing.

I am a practitioner of naturopathy, but I am loyal to the integrated medical care rather than the alternative medical method.

Sometimes we need to take medicine and sometimes we need to have an operation.

Sometimes medicine alone does not work, and sometimes operation alone does not work.

I think we could have synergetic effect and prevent the side effect of the medicine, if we incorporate the medicine with the improved eating habits and the usage of herb.
Of course, there are herbs or nutrition which is contraindication to certain kind of medicine or illness; therefore, it is necessary for naturopath to have knowledge about that.

Circumstances of naturopath in Australia

It is said that there are one naturopath per 6,000 people in Australia. Some work for drug store or health food shop, and others work for alternative treatment clinic or integrated medical institution. There is naturopath who works together with doctors.

Integrated medical care center is not so common in Japan, but there are relatively a lot in urban location in Australia. Each clinic has doctor, naturopath, acupuncture and moxibustion therapist, dietician, bodywork therapist, and they introduce each other when necessary, and stay in the same building supporting each other, which is ideal.

I myself started to practice as naturopath at a small clinic located within the health food shop where I have worked since I was a university student.

I gained the confidence to practice in the clinic afterwards from the experience to provide simple counseling and prescribe vitamin, mineral, herbs to many customers at the health food shop.

Naturopath in Australia conduct preventive medical examinations such as blood exam, urine check, stool analysis, and often make a request of analysis to functional pathological test institution.

It is also an important role of naturopath to contact with the primary care doctor of the client who has chronic disease of serious illness, to ask for conducting a test, decreasing the dosage amount, monitoring the test result regularly.

Naturopath sometimes writes a letter of introduction to a doctor to request a test or inform the prescribed herb or supplement.

Natural therapy in Japan seems like to provide relaxation or healing, but natural therapy in Australia is more chemically and medically.

In an effort to improve the QQL of Japanese

I was attracted by natural therapy in Australia, and decided to leave everything and flew to Australia to study in 2001.　

It has been 15 years after that, I am busy managing Naturopathy on line store and clinic, and have no time to do consultation to clients now, but hope to return to the field as clinical naturopath in the future.

Ideal is integrated medical care.

I would like to contribute to improve the QQL = quality of life of the people in hands with modern orthodox medicine. That is my hope.