In alternative medicine, natural health is an eclectic self-care system of "natural therapies" concerned with building and restoring health and wellness via prevention and healthy lifestyles. Natural health includes herbalism, natural hygiene, naturopathy, and nutripathy and these techniques are sometimes viewed to be useful as complementary therapy to conventional medicine. Natural health - History of Natural Health. Although the term natural health did not become part of common usage until the late ...

Including:

• Natural health - History of Natural Health
• Natural health - New World
• Natural health - The Popular Health Movement 1830 - 1840
• Natural health - Antebellum America
• Natural health - Progressive Era of Health Care Reform 1890-1920
• Natural health - The Modern Period
• Natural health - Basic Core Tenets
• Natural health - Natural philosophy
• Natural health - Vitalism
• Natural health - Holism
• Natural health - Individualism
• Natural health - Victim-blaming
• Natural health - Prevention

Read more here: » Natural health: Encyclopedia - Natural health

See also:

Natural health, Natural health - History of Natural Health, Natural health - New World, Natural health - The Popular Health Movement 1830 - 1840, Natural health - Antebellum America, Natural health - Progressive Era of Health Care Reform 1890-1920, Natural health - The Modern Period, Natural health - Basic Core Tenets, Natural health - Natural philosophy, Natural health - Vitalism, Natural health - Holism, Natural health - Individualism, Natural health - Victim-blaming, Natural health - Prevention

Read more here: » Natural health: Encyclopedia II - Natural health - Basic Core Tenets

Although the term natural health did not become part of common usage until the late 20th century, many of its core beliefs developed in Europe and were brought over to the New World. Natural health - New World. Medical self-care was often the only health care available, and until the 1750s, most folk healers in the United States had little medical education beyond apprenticeships. Around the time of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the practice of medicine was seen as more of a part-time av ...

See also:

Natural health, Natural health - History of Natural Health, Natural health - New World, Natural health - The Popular Health Movement 1830 - 1840, Natural health - Antebellum America, Natural health - Progressive Era of Health Care Reform 1890-1920, Natural health - The Modern Period, Natural health - Basic Core Tenets, Natural health - Natural philosophy, Natural health - Vitalism, Natural health - Holism, Natural health - Individualism, Natural health - Victim-blaming, Natural health - Prevention

Read more here: » Natural health: Encyclopedia II - Natural health - History of Natural Health

A healer is someone who purports to aid recovery from ill health. Some practitioners of alternative health practices seek to restrict the term to themselves, claiming they work with the natural recuperative self-healing properties of the body, which they term vitalism. They assert that other approaches work against the body's own healing abilities. Healer - Other meanings. In the fantasy genre, a healer is a character with healing powers, usually magical involving the laying-on of hand ...

Including:

• Healer - Other meanings

Read more here: » Healer: Encyclopedia - Healer

Breema is a practice of Being Present. When the tensions of mind, body, and feelings fall away, one returns to their Natural State of Being. One's Natural State of Being is a harmonious place full of vitality and health. The practice of Breema is something that is easily applied to one's daily life. It is said: "Breema is a teaching for the marketplace, not the monastery," meaning that it complements one's life without the need of withdrawing from society and entering a cloister ...

Including:

• Breema - The Nine Principles of Harmony
• Breema - Related publications

Read more here: » Breema: Encyclopedia - Breema

The doctrine of the vital force: According to this principle, the vital force (for which Hahnemann coined the word dynamis) is the source of all biological phenomena, it becomes deranged during illness, and homeopathic remedies work by restoring it.

(See also: The doctrine of the vital force, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

vital energy healing (energy healing): a 6,000-year-old means of removing disease, negative energy, and toxins from internal organs without dietary restrictions drugs, surgery, or side effects. Its theory posits vital ki energy and inherited energy blockages.

(See also: Vital energy healing, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

vital force: a energy that is the cause of life and is necessary for its continuation.

(See also: Vital force, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

Vitality Fasting and Rejuvenation: Program advanced by Edward Bauman and designed to cleanse the body, mind, and spirit. It involves emotional release, meditation, and fasting with juices and broth.

(See also: Vitality Fasting and Rejuvenation, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

ife force: 1. (elan vital) The vital force affirmed by French philosopher and Nobel Prize laureate Henri Bergson (1859-1941) as a source of evolution in nature. 2. Vital force. 3. (life potential) In Buddhism, the latent energy for a lifetime of a certain length.

(See also: Ife force, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

homeopathy (homeopathic medicine, homeotherapeutics, homoeopathy): Form of energy medicine (vibrational medicine) developed by German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who coined its original name.

The major homeopathic theories include:

(a)           The law of similars ("like cures like"): According to this principle, the most effective potential remedy for a particular disease is that substance which in healthy persons has effects similar to the symptoms of the disease if the substance is applied in quantities that render it bioactive.

(b)          The doctrine of individualization (the rule of the single remedy): According to this principle, the ideal potential homeopathic remedy for a particular ill person is that substance which induces in healthy persons all the health problems, mannerisms, and dispositions the ill person has related if it is applied in quantities that render it bioactive.

(c)           The doctrine of the minimum dose ("less is more"): According to this principle, selected substances trigger healing without side effects when they are applied in quantities that render them nonbioactiveor even when they are only seemingly, spiritually applied.

(d)           The doctrine of potentization (dynamization): According to this principle, successively diluting a potentially therapeutic solid spiritualizes the substance, thus increases its curativeness, and detoxifies it.

(e)           The doctrine of the vital force: According to this principle, the vital force is the source of all biological phenomena, it becomes deranged during illness, and homeopathic remedies work by restoring it.

(See also: Homeopathy, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

BIOENERGETICS

holds that repressed emotions and desires affect the body and psyche by creating chronic muscular tension and diminished vitality and energy. Through physical exercises, breathing techniques, verbal psychotherapy, or other forms of emotional-release work, the therapist attempts to loosen this character armor and restore natural well-being.

(See also: BIOENERGETICS, Alternative Health, Healing, Body Mind and Soul)

Tantric Toning: A workout that balances the natural flow of one's energy and, is a means of getting in touch with one's tantra (innate vitality). It includes guided imagery.

(See also: Tantric Toning, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

BIOENERGETICS: holds that repressed emotions and desires affect the body and psyche by creating chronic muscular tension and diminished vitality and energy.

Through physical exercises, breathing techniques, verbal psychotherapy, or other forms of emotional-release work, the therapist attempts to loosen this character armor and restore natural well-being.

(See also: Bioenergetics, Alternative Health, Body Mind and Soul)

Disease Broadly stated, disease is a disordered or inharmonious vital state of the organism, with more of less excess, defect, or perversion of functional activity. The condition may be some chemical or mechanical wrong which renders the body unable to respond naturally to the psychoelectric and other forces which play through and sustain the physical person.

Moreover, the material and immaterial elements of the human constitution react upon each other for health or disease, because the mind and emotions on the one hand, and the organs and their functions on the other, are interrelated parts of the same entity. As a rule, this interplay between the material and the conscious person becomes a vicious circle in disease. Mental or emotional shock or strain can so affect function as to result in organic disease. Long continued selfish emotions cause a distorted and inharmonious interaction of the pranic or vital currents of the body, resulting in one or another disorder, according to the type of the emotions and the individual karma.

In view of the electric nature of matter, physical disorder may be regarded as an electrical disharmony or wrong, since disease always changes the polarity of the body, more or less. The vital currents of human electricity connect the conscious person with his body by the living wires of nerves. The rhythmic motion or natural harmony vibrating in each cell and organ at its own rate, is responsive to the universal vibration or Great Breath which in other modes of motion manifests as heat, light, sound, density, etc. But beyond the electrical and vibrational states of the body, and above the mental influence, is the essential self, the source of all harmony or rhythmic procedures in all below it, keyed to harmony and striving to raise the lower nature to act in unison with its finer and greater powers. When the instinct of the animal body, the mental reasoning faculties, and the reimbodying ego's intuition are functioning together, the person is keyed to health, sanity, and wisdom. Otherwise, the real inner conflict manifests in some form of disorder.

As the human being, then, is a dynamo of balanced forces, some disorder in their operation is the basic wrong in human diseases. Moreover, as all matter is alive, conscious in some degree, and vibrationally responsive to the laws of nature, the same general principle applies also to disease in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. In mankind, the organic vital fluid of the reimbodying ego is the cohering factor for the entire constitution, dominating over all minor vital expressions of the life-atoms. The intense and ceaseless activity of these life-atoms builds and composes the body, and as age comes on, and the physical vehicle naturally and normally weakens, the uninterrupted activity of the vital power becomes too strong to be held in check by the gripping influence of the vital-electrical field. Thus the atomic forces, really the vital energies, continuing unabated within the body structure, slowly weaken it and finally destroy it, and this is death.

"It is likewise these internal vital activities of the life-atoms held in insufficient check by the organic vitality which bring about many if perhaps not all of the various forms of disease of a lasting character. Cases of malignant disease are due to the same general cause but on account of specific and unusual circumstances are localized in some portion of the body where the power or control of the organic vitality becomes greatly weakened" (ET 813n).

(See also: Disease, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

naturopathy (natural healing, natural health, natural medicine, natural therapies, nature cure, naturology, naturopathic healing, naturopathic health care, naturopathic medicine): Miscellany that encompasses auriculotherapy (ear acupuncture), Ayurveda, balneotherapy, bioelectronic diagnosis, biofeedback, cupping, electroacupuncture, fasting, the Grape Cure (and other mono-diets), hair analysis, herbalism, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, internal hydrotherapy (e.g., colonic irrigation), iridology, Jin Shin Do, Jungian psychology, macrobiotics, moxibustion, Oriental medicine, Ortho-Bionomy, orthomolecular psychiatry, thalassotherapy, Tuina, and zone therapy.

Naturopathy originated in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in Germany. Dr. John H. Scheel, a German-born homeopath, coined the word naturopathy in 1895, when he opened the Sanitarium Badekur in New York. Vitalism is fundamental to naturopathy.

(See also: Naturopathy, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

Sotai (Sotai Therapy): Natural system of bodywork developed by Keizo (Keiji) Hashimoto, M.D., in Japan, and endorsed by Kenzo Kase, D.C. It enables one to adapt to one's environment by harmonizing breathing, eating, thinking, and moving. Sotai uses a sensitive point on the liver meridian (an channel or pathway for vital energy). The word Sotai combines two Japanese characters: So, which means to manipulate, and Tai, which means body.

(See also: Sotai, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

Natural Hygiene (Hygienic Health System, Life Science): Variation of Nature Cure represented by proponents as the legacy of Sylvester Graham (1794-1851). Graham, the originator of the graham cracker, began his career as a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer.

He professed the following.

(a)           Frequent involuntary discharges of semen presage debility.

(b)           Ingestion of improper foods or overeating cause seminal discharges.

(c)           Masturbation brings on pimples and potentially fatal sores.

(d)           Digestion entails an expenditure of vital force.

(e)           Diet is a means of economizing the vital force.

(f)             A diet is healthful if it narrowly prompts the digestive organs to function normally.

According to Hygienic literature, the first hygienic doctor was Isaac Jennings, M.D. (1788-1874), who taught that obedience to physical law facilitates obedience to moral law. Natural Hygiene's principle is that disease is a process of purification and repair. The major Hygienic practices are fasting, food combining, and a form of veganism that emphasizes uncooked foods. Some Professional Natural Hygienists do not subscribe to food combining.

(See also: Natural Hygiene, Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

Vitality The jiva or life-force which manifests through the different principles of the human septenary being, as well as through the multiform hierarchies of nature. It animates the cosmic entity in which we live as vital monadic units and in man manifests as the pranas: "there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our [solar] system, of which the Sun is the heart -- the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body . . ." (SD 1:541).

The lowest principle of cosmic jiva is diffused through all nature and, among its innumerable activities on all the cosmic planes, on our plane produces all living beings and entities -- man, beast, plant, mineral, and the three kingdoms of the elemental world. "The animal tissues only absorb it according to their more or less morbid or healthy state," matter being the necessary vehicle for its manifestation on this plane (SD 1:537).

On cosmic planes of consciousness, the corresponding aspects of jiva are the vehicles of cosmic thought or ideation which manifest more or less consciously in entities, and automatically as the laws of nature. Likewise, in the human being the psychoelectric field of life-currents, vital fluids, or pranas provides the vehicles or avenues for transmitting his thought, feeling, emotion, and instincts. The tension of this life principle -- in one sense the liquor vitae of Paracelsus -- may be too high or too low, owing to the nervous changes in the matter it invests. Thus, an equilibrium of the vital currents of the body means a state of health, as disturbed or disordered conditions make for disease.

Vitality is not created by the nutrition and functional activities which afford conditions for its play in the body. Too much or too little of the lifestream may produce fatal convulsions or collapse, it being a neutral force with a potential action for both life and death -- for death is but a manifestation of life, and can as easily supervene from a vital excess which tears the body to pieces in time, as through a pranic defect therein. When its cohesive role is neutralized after death, it begins its dispersive "work on the atoms chemically" (SD 1:538).

The source of jiva manifesting as the human pranas is in the divine monad or atman, a reflection of the same fact on the cosmic scale where cosmic jiva originates in Brahman or paramatman.

(See also: Vitality, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul)

QIGONG: Qigong (also referred to as chi-kung) is an ancient Chinese exercise that stimulates and balances the flow of qi, or vital life energy, along the acupuncture meridians (energy pathways). Like acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine, the qigong tradition emphasizes the importance of teaching the patient how to remain well.

In China, the various methods of qigong form the nucleus of a national self-care system of health care maintenance and personal development. Qigong cultivates inner strength, calms the mind, and restores the body to its natural state of health by maintaining the optimum functioning of the body's self-regulating systems.

(See also: Qigong, Alternative Health, Body Mind and Soul)