My patients want to know how natural cures work. That's because, for the most part, they have very serious medical conditions and in many cases they have been told by their doctors that "nothing more can be done" for them. Often, I am the first natural doctor they have ever met. Up until that point, they have only had doctors who rely on drugs and other interventions that are designed to twist nature this way or that. It's understandable that these patients expect a natural cure to look like the kind of treatment they've already been getting, only "natural" in some way -- but it's not like that.

The first thing for them to understand is that natural doctors view diseases quite differently from the way orthodox practitioners do. Diseases are collections of symptoms that have been classified into "diseases" by medical doctors -- who are in the business of eliminating symptoms and thereby "curing" diseases. Disease, in fact, is the exclusive franchise of orthodox doctors.

Natural doctors, in contrast, do not regard symptoms as the beginning and end of the issue. They see symptoms as signs put forth by the body that show it has gone out of balance. The goal of treatment is not to suppress symptoms but to restore the balance in the body that gave rise to the symptoms in the first place. It's a bit like how you would respond to an engine light coming on in the dashboard of your car. Conventional doctors want to put out the light; natural doctors want to fix the engine.

So rather than treating a panoply of diseases, natural doctors treat people and show them how to restore the fundamental balance that their bodies' constantly strive towards. The orientation is to work with nature, which is viewed as wise and powerful, rather than to attempt to outsmart nature with tricks and gimmicks.

This means that patients may need to make some adjustments in the way they are living. For instance, American adults are now consuming 185 pounds of refined sugar every year. This results in an environment in the body that strongly favors sickness - which can express itself in all sorts of ways, from cancer to diabetes. The path to a natural cure has to address habits like this.

That's why I tell patients that the way a natural cure works is by stopping things that make them sick, and starting things that make them well. Once they stop poisoning themselves with harmful junk food and drink and start truly nurturing themselves, then the tide turns and they move onto the path towards health. Until they make this switch, my experience has been that no amount of products and supplements, whether "natural" or not, will do much good.

However, once a patient decides to support his or her own body's natural drive to wellness, there can be a lot of benefit from whole food products that support the detoxification and immune-building processes that then start to occur naturally.

My point is that a natural cure is a process, not a product. And natural cures come about when patients follow a natural cure plan or protocol that sets this powerful process in motion. When this natural cure process unfolds, I have seen it, time and again, bring patients back to full health, even after their medical doctors have "done all they could" and told them their condition was "terminal".