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Mother Nature, M.D.

by Laura Lewis, CCN

Chamomile, garlic, olive oil, vinegar… what’s In your medicine cabinet?

When Barbara’s 2-year-old toddler, Tucker, was diagnosed with his sixth ear infection in four months, she decided enough was enough. The antibiotics obviously weren’t working that well. It seemed to take more and more "rounds" of medication to take care of the pesky problem. And in addition, her child didn’t seem to be as healthy as before; he had bouts of diarrhea and skin rashes which corresponded with each new prescription.

A friend of Barbara’s told her about a natural remedy using garlic oil. She told her you simply place a few drops in each ear, several times each day. In addition, she also told her to give Tucker the homeopathic remedy Chamomilla to calm him down and to add Junior Acidophilus to a small cup of water each morning and encourage him to drink it down. Within two weeks, Tucker’s health improved dramatically.

This is Mother Nature at her best.

As a parent, you want your child to be healthy. Giving your child the best health care possible is a truly important and vital aspect of raising her so that she may grow up to be a healthy, happy and thriving human being. From 0 to 18 years of age your child may experience a wide array of typical childhood "ills" including aches, pains, bumps, bruises, colds and flu. For almost a century, we, as Americans, have been encouraged to take care of the symptoms of illness. We’ve been conditioned to give acetaminophen for fevers or decongestant/ antihistamines for stuffy noses, usually without considering natural alternatives. Now, increasingly, parents are seeing that natural remedies not only help their children feel better, but also help treat the cause of the discomfort, whereas conventional "western" medicines are typically designed to treat only the symptoms.What are these alternatives? And how "alternative" are they? A recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine reports about a third of the population has sampled Mother Nature’s offerings in the form of herbs, homeopathy, aromatherapy, chiropractic and other less "conventional" natural treatment.

In fact, for almost 3 billion people outside of the 50 United States, "natural" or "alternative" medicine has been considered mainstream for centuries. A peek into the medicine cabinet of a British royal family member, for example, is going to look very different from yours. Theirs would include a wide array of homeopathic and herbal remedies – gifts from the English countryside. In India, Ayurvedic oils may line the medicinal shelves. And in China? Herbs and acupuncture have been the status quo for thousands of years.

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The Whole Child

To integrate a more natural health-oriented approach to taking care of your child’s health (vs. Symptom-dictated treatments), you must first be motivated to adopt a new approach to taking care of your child as a "whole." Secondly, parents need to be fully aware that to implement an alternative approach properly and safely, they must explore the wealth of knowledge available. The ultimate goal is to create a home medicinal program which incorporates using alternative medicines as your "front line of defenses," and going the more conventional route when necessary.Conventional medicine does an outstanding job in treating physical trauma and injury, fighting "bad" bacterial infections, diagnosing illnesses via CAT scans and other high tech measures, as well as surgically repairing damaged tissues. However, medical experts are finding that the more technical our medical system gets, the less optimal the results and they’re recognizing that we, the general public, are becoming somewhat disillusioned, especially if it is the eighth time in five months you’ve had to take Susie to the pediatrician’s office for the same ear, nose and throat problems!

Natural medicine advocates say it’s time to address the cause – which leads to the following prediction: Prevention-based health care is the wave of the future, and we will, increasingly, be seeing natural medicine and self health care even more widely accepted in this country for minor illnesses, injuries and even behavior problems.

Just The Facts Ma’am

Take a look at the following facts:

• The American Medical Association in resolution No. 514, is encouraging its members to become better informed regarding alternative/complementary medicine and to participate in appropriate studies of it;The World Health Organization estimates that between 65 to 80 percent of the world’s population (about 3 billion people) rely upon what we think of as "alternative" health care, as their primary form of medicine; and
• 74 percent of Americans say they desire a more natural approach to health care.

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Get Smart, Get Motivated

"Information is power," states Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, for 10 years a medical historian and medical librarian for the American Medical Association, and now the developer and founder of the Cybrarian service located on the internet at Health World.Sullivan-Fowler considers herself an "information bridge" between the conventional medical world and the alternative health-care arena. "People should have access to really good health and medical information, regardless of their own medical background, hence, the Cybrarian service. Having quality information makes people feel more empowered about taking care their health – instead of feeling like they are just being taken along for the ride."Sullivan-Fowler believes alternative medicine is here to stay. – "Big time!," she says. "What we know as conventional or traditional medicine only came to be less than a century ago. Up until the late 1800s, M.D.s were traditionally using herbal-based medicines and other therapies which we would now deem as alternative. They used whatever worked."Indeed, it was quite common to find the practice of homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, water or hydrotherapy, botanical therapy and naturopathy being used at the turn of the century. With the discovery of antibiotics, (sulfa drugs and penicillin) in the 1930s, came the belief that treating the symptoms was the way to go. And antibiotics are, without a doubt, life-saving drugs. However, when you discover that more than $500 million dollars worth of antibiotics are prescribed each year just for ear infections in children, you have to realize something isn’t quite right.The bad news is that more and more bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics – hence, the high amount being prescribed, as physicians try to "hit the jackpot," matching the right antibiotic to the right bacteria. Dr. Michael Schmidt, author of Childhood Ear Infections: What Every Parent and Physician Should Know, sees the trend in bacterial development of antibiotic resistance as not unlike the increasing resistance of agricultural pests to pesticides. In 1938, he says, scientists knew of just seven insects and eight species that had acquired resistance to pesticides. By 1984 that figure had climbed to 447 and included more of the world’s major pests.

Another $500 million-plus dollars is spent each year on antibiotics prescribed to remedy other pediatric illnesses. Economics (Mutual of Omaha says they save about $6.50 for every dollar spent covering nonstandard or alternative treatments), frustration or sudden awareness that treating symptoms and not the cause won’t cut it in the long run, are among the reasons many American are now turning to alternative pediatric health care.

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Give ‘Em A Boost

According to Lendon Smith, author of How To Raise A Healthy Child, "The most important thing you can do for your child is to give them a great immune system, especially in these modern times where many factors work against your child’s health." Poor nutrition, poor air quality, higher level of air pollutants and toxins in our homes are just a few conditions which can adversely effect the health of your child. So how do you, as a parent, even begin to implement caring for your child from a health-based foundation, i.e. before he or she gets sick?

Here are some simple suggestions:

1. Learn all that you can from reputable sources on how to take care of your child using alternative methods.

2.Be motivated to change your lifestyle and your child’s in order to enhance health. This could include removing toxic substances from the home (cleaning products, glues, oil-based paints, etc.) and modifying diet by removing all junk foods and dairy products if your child is allergy-prone.

3. Get active! Encourage your child not to be a couch potato.

4. Get fresh! Be sure he gets regular doses of fresh air and sunlight. These too, have been scientifically proven to enhance immune function.

5. Create a natural arsenal. Learn all that you can related to using food supplements, homeopathic remedies, herbs, aromatherapy oils, etc., and keep the "basics" on hand.