Alternative Medicine College of Canada

Professional Distance Education

The Practitioner’s Role

 

The practitioner's role

The health practitioner’s role is to teach life principles, which give patients responsibility for their own health. As practitioners, we need to educate our clients about the biological laws that govern us. In this way, the patient is the chief artisan of his own healing.

The Practitioner’s Role

The Individual at the Center of the Approach

“It is primarily within himself that the sick will find his first therapy, the most faithful, the most effective, because it is the therapy that is born of him.”
– Hippocrates

We at  AMCC feel that Naturopathy is the best preventive medicine available because of its patient-centered focus.

In conventional medicine, the doctor views illness as the body’s imperfection. Only only surgery or medicine can fix the body. The  patient is under the total authority of his doctors.

Consultation | Education | Reform

In the conventional view of illness, doctors must come up with a precise diagnosis. Then they prescribe treatment, which may be surgery, or a lifelong dependence on drugs, or both. It’s a classic “consultation-prescription” scenario. 

For the alternative health practitioner the approach is whole body, and aims for lasting results.

  • A vital health consultation consists of  evaluating the state of the patient’s  organs and systems, which are his body’s natural defenses. The patient will have a health plan to follow, but the practitioner will also educate him so he understands how to keep himself in good health.
  • The first job of the practitioner is to make sure the patient understands the results of his examination.  Understanding his own “reactive personality” and imbalances is vital to his long term health.
  • Lifestyle reforms require the the patient to take responsibility for his health and the real causes of biological disruptions.

Treating the Body and the Role of Remedies

In the traditional “consultation-prescription” pattern, the patient depends entirely on the physician, whose knowledge becomes synonymous with power. This dependence can make the patient feel helpless and fearful. Modern psychological research shows that this mental attitude can affect illness.

Naturopathy is not merely the prescription of “natural remedies”. Remedies are viewed as helping a patient toward a cure, but aren’t a cure in and of themselves. When naturopathy succeeds, it is the patient who has become stronger than his illness.  In fact, we say that the patient freed himself from the illness, and that the health practitioner was only his guide.

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