Fourth Year Vignette

I remain busy with school, now spending more time in clinic than in the classroom. Clinic work is amazing: there’s so much that natural medicine can do, and it’s wonderful to see patients in recovery from medical issues that have dogged them for years. We aim for correction of maladapted physiology, so that symptoms don’t disappear temporarily just to reappear later, often more strongly than before. I am fortunate to be on a mentor shift this year with a doctor who requires that we write a case analysis weekly. In the best tradition of naturopathy, this requires that we reflect carefully on the patient’s history and presenting issues, why these issues have arisen and how we can best address not just the symptoms but the cause. This is not an easy task because chronic health issues often result from developmental trauma or insidious environmental insult, and more often than not have a mental/emotional component long submerged beyond conscious awareness. The irony is that it’s usually the patient, not the doctor, that ultimately discovers the cause, and the process sometimes takes months or years. But it’s by making the effort to know the tale, by patient and doctor being open to it, that we allow the unfolding to occur. And in every case the story reveals a wonder of Nature: how it wants more than anything to support life, and the lengths it’s willing to go to to do so. Even more marvelous, Nature itself provides us the means to rebalance ourselves. There is healing in food, in plants, in minerals, in water. Our sustenance is at our doorstep, if we are wise enough to see it and farsighted enough to preserve it. And there is healing within our walls as well, in the love we manifest in care of one another.