Naturopathic Doctor

We met with a Naturopathic doctor around 2007 – about a year after we moved here. He was super nice and seemed to have a good handle on autism and it’s various treatment options.

From the University of Maryland Medical Center ”

Naturopathy, or naturopathic medicine, is a system of medicine based on the healing power of nature. Naturopathy is a holistic system, meaning that naturopathic doctors (N.D.s) or naturopathic medical doctors (N.M.D.s) strive to find the cause of disease by understanding the body, mind, and spirit of the person. Most naturopathic doctors use a variety of therapies and techniques (such as nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy, and acupuncture).

There are two areas of focus in naturopathy: one is supporting the body’s own healing abilities, and the other is empowering people to make lifestyle changes necessary for the best possible health. While naturopathic doctors treat both short bouts of illness and chronic conditions, their emphasis is on preventing disease and educating patients.”

This was kind of my first toe-dip into the world outside of MD’s for our son. I felt like I was failing, my son’s behavior was pretty bad, his speech was awful and he had the worst stomach problems ever. I found this doctor’s name and information in a local magazine and I thought ‘why not’ I had tried the traditional route and wasn’t really getting anywhere so decided this might be an option to at least research. The first thing this doctor did was order another round of stool testing for our son, this time it came back as positive for the parasites blastocystis hominis and cryptosporidium. So started many years of trying to eradicate the blasto parasite along with the anaerobic bacteria and yeast that went along with it. After several visits over the course of a few months I began to lose faith a little, my son wasn’t doing any better, and it was a lot of money for each appointment. I had heard, and still hear great things about this practice but, like most things, it didn’t seem to work out for us.

Eventually I decided to try a D.A.N. doctor to speed up the process. Knowing what I know now of course I understand that both homeopathic and naturopathic medicine take time to get to the root of the problem and it can be argued that traditional medicine treats only the symptoms of the disease while the holistic medicine tries to treat the disease itself. Again maybe I jumped too quickly to a new doctor, maybe the 3 months I tried was not long enough, but when you see no positive changes its hard to keep the faith and keep paying the bill! This was my one and only adventure with Naturopathy – again, as always I would love to hear reviews from other people who feel they got both positive or negative results. Leave your comments below.