I am reading a superb book at the moment, with the title
"It Must Be My Hormones" by Dr. Marion Gluck and Vicki Edgson (ISBN 978-0-718-15430-1 by Penguin). This is a short chapter from the beginning of the book which describes very well the term "Heilpraktiker" which is the qualification I earned in Germany before coming to England.
"Opening my eyes - As a young doctor in Germany I would occasionally trade the stress and excitement of the emergency room for the plodding predictability of a GP's office where I would work as a locum. It was during this time that I became aware of the role of
Heilpraktiker. These German healers-cum-naturopaths where not, unlike their colleagues in other developed countries, marvelled at and then belittled by patients as just another breed of strange fish in the medical sea. On the contrary, many German patients would see their
Heilpraktiker even before they'd see their GP.
The fact that German patients regularly visited their naturopath didn't mean that they shunned conventional doctors, or that they blindly placed their faith in that one form of treatment. It just meant that they sought what they considered to be a more natural and less invasive solution. Naturopathy to them was not a replacement for conventional medicine as such, but rather provided another perspective on it.
By this time, I'd been exposed to the hospital environment long enough to become familiar with some of conventional medicine's biggest shortcomings. My first experiences of being a doctor were the medical profession's overly black-and-white approaches to decidedly grey problems. It began to irk me the way body parts were treated in isolation, with no consideration of the effects on other parts, as if they were all chopped up and organised neatly on a doctor's desk. Thus, curious and already somewhat disillusioned with the medical franchise as it was, I paid a great deal of attention to what those naturopaths were up to.
What I found was something that provided a fantastic complement to conventional medicine - a whole bunch of issues would be addressed while adding a pinch of that which is often sorely lacking in medicine: common sense. I had found myself on the path to integrative and holistic medicine.
This type of medicine is labelled 'integrative' because it feeds on the largest possible pool of medical knowledge. It combines the relatively new techniques of orthodox Western medicine with those of homoeopathy or traditional Chinese medicine, whose proven efficacy does not come from wildly expensive, large-scale drug-company-funded studies but from thousands of years of implementation and success. And it's called holistic because it considers the effects of treatments in terms of the entire body, rather than the body's isolated parts."
