Naturopathic Philosophy - Interview with Dr Jared Zeff

welcome back to another episode of christian natural health today i am very excited to have dr jared seth with us dr

zeph is a licensed doctor of naturopathic medicine and a licensed acupuncturist in addition to maintaining a private practice dr zeph currently

teaches at bastier university college of naturopathic medicine in seattle dr zeff is a considered a traditionalist

practicing a classical form of naturopathic medicine he began a private practice in mcminnville oregon based

around obstetrics and family medicine he was named naturopathic physician of the year in 1989 for his contribution to the

development of naturopathic clinical theory in april 2002 he was given the first lifetime achievement award in the

northwest naturopathic physicians association for his contributions to the naturopathic medical

education welcome dr zeff thank you so much for being with us my pleasure thank you for inviting me

absolutely so um in your time in naturopathic medicine what's changed

since you started practicing like have you noticed that cases have changed from the beginning to now i would characterize it differently i

began practicing 42 years ago and 42 years ago there were six states

that licensed naturopathic medicine the two most liberal were oregon and

washington excuse me oregon and arizona in terms of our practice privileges or

practice prerogatives in oregon for example the law specifically stated

you may not pierce the skin or mucous membrane for a therapeutic purpose

which meant now there were exceptions because we were licensed to do obstetrics we were licensed to do minor

surgery but in general we could not do any kind of injection or iv treatment it was

against the law okay now that has changed dramatically right

we we could prescribe a few pharmaceuticals

but only those which were directly from natural origins such as belladonna or even penicillin which is a

mold extract now in oregon in washington in arizona

in many of the states that licenses i think there are 27 states which license us now

we can do iv treatments those were clearly illegal 42 years ago

i can prescribe in the state of washington any pharmaceutical that any general

medical doctor can prescribe so in washington in oregon in arizona i

could practice almost indistinguishable from a medical doctor that was clearly not the case 42

years ago it would have been impossible so 42 years ago naturopathic physicians

had to practice what i would call traditional naturopathic medicine

which is defined as a philosophy and a set of therapeutics which include

dietetics herbal medicine homeopathy physical medicine of various types

so 42 years ago there were only what you might call traditional naturopathic

physicians today many of my colleagues practice a naturopathic medicine quote

unquote that i wouldn't even recognize as such they practice their their primary practice is based upon

prescribing drugs and doing iv therapeutics which again was illegal 42 years ago so

there's been a dramatic change in the practice and in the education of naturopathic physicians

uh from when i started until now gotcha gotcha and so the individual cases that

you see aren't different it's just that the ways that you can approach them are different than they used to be way back

another thing that's different more in terms of the question you're asking is that when i started

most of my patients were what i might characterize as well hippies or people who were desperately ill

people who had been told they had no further options in conventional medicine

so they were desperately looking around for alternatives today my my practice is based on what you

might consider average typical people with all kinds of health care problems

uh even medical doctors come to see me as as patients

so that the basis the acceptance of naturopathic medicine has dramatically changed

the the scope of patient population has what you might

call normalized and we are accepted in ways that we were not accepted 42 years ago

now in terms of the kind of patients i see i see a broad spectrum from well babies

to desperately ill seniors every every kind of of illness that's

not a surgical emergency or basically a surgical or surgical orthopedic type

case that's what i say gotcha and so um over the years as you know there's at

least my practice consists of a lot of people who have chronic disease and also lots of toxicity from the environment

right right and so that i think is also at least in my much more limited experience um has

potentially changed over time is there a way that you would approach those who are really really sensitive to like

everything in the environment that might be a little different than what you would do with you know somebody that was

potentially able to handle a lot more like from your from your philosophy in a sense there is in that when i see

somebody who is extremely sensitive part of my task is to try and determine

why are they still sensitive and what can we do to make them less sensitive people that can't walk into a grocery

store because it makes them sick or can't walk down the soap aisle because they get a migraine or something

like that now most of the time these people have a severely congested liver or a

reduction in the capacity to detoxify so part of the task then is to improve

liver function but that's not the only possibility but i would say it's common in those cases gotcha

so in the kind of traditional uh naturopathic philosophy there's this concept of healing crisis can you define

what that is relative to like a disease crisis how can you tell the difference between them and what are they

yeah this is gonna take a moment okay i think it's important to the

overall discussion um conventional medicine is based upon a

simple and elegant paradigm the diagnosis and treatment of disease

so the task of the doctor is to you come to the doctor you're not feeling well you expect the doctor to

tell you what's wrong and to fix it okay and so

in that context we have the icd 10 now which lists something like 44 000

diseases and based upon the disease there is a prescribed treatment that's considered

the standard of care some of these things are in development but most of them are fairly well said even though

they may change as time goes on so in conventional medicine you come to

a doctor you may have five different diagnoses you get five different treatments you may even be seeing five

different doctor one for each different diagnosis and the treatment is designed to

impact the specific diagnosis that you have in traditional naturopathic medicine or

what i would call real naturopathic medicine

that's not what i do certainly i'm aware of that i'm trained and licensed to diagnose and treat

disease but the way i think about it is quite different for instance my assumption

as a vitalist and we can talk about that later if you want is that the body heals itself

the body is constantly trying to heal itself if you cut yourself you don't have to consciously do something about

it if you do nothing the cut's going to heal and if it doesn't i need to figure out why because it should everybody

expect if you break a bone the bone is going to heal the orthopedist sets it so that when it heals hopefully it heals

straight but it's going to heal because your body does that your body heals okay

if you come to me and you're chronically ill in particular my assumption is you

should be healthy why aren't you healthy so the first thing i'm looking for is what has

disturbed your health most of the time a principal disturbance

of health is wrong diet or other what we might call hygienic

hygienic uh elements such as you're not resting you're not exercising you're under too much stress etc

so the the where where i begin with most people with chronic disease

is to try and remove or reduce or moderate those

things that are disturbing health most commonly get the diet right then

i begin stimulating that self-healing mechanism or self-healing wisdom using

hydrotherapy homeopathy maybe acupuncture things that don't add substance but

stimulate or push on that internal wisdom about how to heal

now if you are burdened by a lot of toxicity that has generated your illness

or if you've been suppressed a lot with with pharmaceuticals which have literally taken acute diseases and

turned them into chronic diseases then as we re reduce or remove disturbing factors

and stimulate healing you'll start to feel better and better and better but there but

that disturbance some of that disturbance some toxicities may be in the system that have to be

removed and as you feel better and better and better you'll reach a point where the

body now can discharge some of that disturbance and so you get a

you this is typically what i see the person starts to feel better and better and better then they say i feel better

than i've ever felt and the next day they're sick they have a fever they're doing some kind of a discharge mucus

maybe diarrhea maybe some other kind of discharge and as they go through that fever discharge thing which looks like

the flu or maybe a cold they come out of that at a much higher level of health that is a healing reaction or a healing

crisis you've set the stage you've cleared away some encumbrances you've improved how

the bodies function how the body functions as it starts to function better and clear away the

disturbance it gets to a place where it can now dump a bunch of garbage out and get to a

higher level of healing we call that a healing crisis or a healing reaction

that's a that's different from a disease crisis or a disease reaction in a disease crisis

although it can look the same fever and discharge you you have not created the

circumstances for healing you haven't removed disturbances you've

been treating the patient and suddenly they appear to get worse but they haven't gone through a phase of getting

better and better and functioning better they're just they suddenly have a downturn um you can

see that one of the common ways you see that is is with uh bronchitis you're treating the bronchitis all of a

sudden the person spikes a fever they have trouble breathing now they have pneumonia and they're

getting rid of a bunch of mucus that's not a healing reaction that's a disease crisis gotcha you have to understand the theory

though to understand the difference right and also it sounds like understand what's preceded it in order to identify

which which likely is this manifestation yeah you're looking at the whole patient through time

how they've been treated are the treatments suppressive or are the treatments truly healing and liberating

and and in the in that case you'll move into sometimes a healing reaction

although not everybody does that but if you haven't done that and suddenly the patient gets worse it's a disease crisis

or a worsening of the disease and so is there a difference with homeopathic aggravation when you get the

remedy right sometimes people can aggravate is that the same thing as a healing crisis or is that difficult it's

difficult and have you noticed that over the years

that healing crises have taken on a different manifestation than they used to or are basically the same as they've

always been the teacher of my teacher one of the predominant naturopaths a hundred years

ago was dr otis carroll otis carroll taught and experienced he

had a very large clinic he employed 22 nurses doing hydrotherapy on patients

all day long at a huge clinic in seattle i mean in spokane he said

that typically it took 25 hydrotherapy treatments to reverse cancer

my teacher his student told me typically he found it took 75

treatments to reverse cancer interesting my experience is it takes 150 to 300

treatments to reverse cancer wow now what we're seeing is a combination

of things one of them is the vitality of people has reduced

to a great extent because the the medicine that most people have been exposed to is ex is increasingly

more powerfully suppressive so most people have had lots of vaccines

lots of antibiotics they're taking three or four i have people come to me take the the top one i ever saw was

taking 50 drugs many people are taking 20 25 drugs when they come to see me

with chronic disease all of those are toxic they all burden the system although they

may be maintaining the person's life can have helped them but as we truly precede

the healing we've got to move them away from those drugs which we can do as as they improve they don't need them as

much um but that wasn't the case 100 years ago or 50 years ago plus

the food supply is different yeah plus i don't i don't know that the stress load is different it's always been stressful

to be a human but um we're surrounded by

more toxicity there are there are literally thousands of

industrial toxins in the environment and in our bodies that that wasn't the case

certainly a thousand years ago it wasn't the case 500 years ago there were some it wasn't the case

200 years ago but it is the case now

so um we can still find for instance ddt in the best bulk of most print mm-hmm

even though ddt's been outlawed in the united states for what 50 years right

yeah so it just persists so these birds didn't exist in people

then so the vitality of the population i think has reduced yeah

well and so that alludes to what you were talking about before the concept of vitality and vitalism can you define

that concept yeah vitalism is a

an old concept it was it was discussed by the the classical

greeks 2 500 years ago basically the concept is that

i mentioned this earlier in a sense when i said there's a natural healing wisdom in the system

vitalism is based upon the understanding

that life is not simply a mechanical process

there's an element to life a vital element that is um

ineffable you can't see it you can't

find it it's difficult to define but you can describe it

it's the living nature of the living being what's the difference between a live

person and a dead person the the physical mechanics are the all the stuff is still there in the dead

person but something's not there anymore that vitality that living aspect that

living principle is gone vitalism is based upon the idea

that any living system has a vital element almost supernatural

that animates it that uh the

the opposite concept is what we might call mechanism that life is an accident

that occurred accidentally three billion years ago when molecules began bumping together and accidentally

uh dna formed and living beings could come into existence it's all an accident

it's all a mechanical process there is no living principle there is no

ineffable life force it's just a mechanical process so a vitalist

observes nature and sees this vital element in living systems

naturopathic medicine is fundamentally or all has been a vitalist tradition

in that we work with this wisdom that's built into every cell

that promotes healing that moves toward healing and that is that is difficult to

define and is beyond the simple mechanics of the organism was that clear

i think so so here's um tell me if this is if this understanding is is right or not so

identify and remove obstacles to cure that's the toxicity part that you talked about build up the blood on the you know

with it with the the building blocks that it needs so that's get your diet right and all of those kinds of things

and then there's the third leg which is that stimulate the vitality and that's where things like hydrotherapy and

homeopathy and acupuncture fit in is that right exactly when you when you when you give somebody a homeopathic

medicine you're not giving them a material substance right you're not giving them a molecular or mass effect

like you are with an herb or with a drug you're giving them simply an informational

package that stimulates this healing wisdom or healing potential to

which this living vital organism responds and reacts it's not substance it's this other thing

like direction so along those lines since you mentioned botanicals so those cannot be used in

the same way that a medication would work from a suppressive standpoint but then there's this eclectic tradition of

botanical medicine can you just define the difference how does how does eclectic medicine fit into

the naturopathic philosophy eclectic

botanical medicine is somewhere between

homeopathy and the the pharmacology of botanical

substances in our schools now most of the teaching

in botanical medicine has to do with the pharmacology of the constituents of the botanicals

and botanical medicines are prescribed

mostly on that basis as packages or combinations of

certain pharmacologic uh molecules produce bind contained in

the plants and in that regard most dosages

are um significantly higher than i was taught in school for instance

john bastier famous naturopath of the generation above mine

uh was one of my teachers of botanical medicine and one of the common prescriptions he

taught me was what he called heart drops this is two parts cortegas one part

cactus and the prescription was 10 drops before meals three times a day

to improve heart function now most current

botanical prescribers would think that's ridiculously low

dosage you got to give at least a teaspoon full if not more than that

to have a pharmacologic effect but the eclectic effect is based in part

upon the energetics of the herb which which puts it in the realm

close to homeopathic medicine so when you're when you're prescribing eclectically you're looking at

the whole herb in its whole context boracy's materia medica and pharmacopia

which is one of the [Music] homeopathic prescribing guides

is an eclectic botanical book where the dosages of the of the are

often drop dosages of the mother tincture or tenth drop dosages of the mother tincture which is a botanical

preparation and you're looking at the energetic picture as well as

the biochemistry and pharmacology of the substance so eclectic botanical prescribing takes

into account those other aspects and the result of that is often the

dosages are lower but the effect is amazing so

what would be the difference like if you had a homeopathic dose of a botanical

versus an eclectic dose is it just that the the scale is slightly higher like you're

getting some of the substance left in the eclectic dosing versus with homeopathy or not is that the only

difference no it's not the only difference okay let me contrast it this way consider

homeopathic cactus cactus is a major

cardiotonic herb similar in many respects to digitalis

uh it would it would be you could easily prescribe 30 drops three times a day

some people might even consider that low to effect the cardiotonic

bio chemical biophysiologic impact on the heart

muscle okay but dr bastir as i just mentioned

told me essentially use three drops so that's substantially less right and

part of that effect is going to be the energetics of cactus

the homeopathic dosage would use would start at probably

uh one part per million and a 6x so you're using in in the homeopathic

dose almost an insubstantial dose which is fundamentally energetic in its

effect in the eclectic prescription you're using a small

dosage that in part has a stimulating effect on the organ in the

conventional botanical dosage you're using a much larger dosage which fundamentally has a biochemical effect

on the organ ah okay okay makes sense so um so

give me an example of some of like if you can think of a few or one or two cases that really

stand out in your memory something that um that kind of illustrates the principle of application

okay now remember i've i've been doing this a while i know something more recent i'm guessing i

have something like 50 000 case files so reaching back into my memory right one

of the cases that stands out for me the most

is a is the man who came to me oh

probably in uh [Music] 1996 maybe around that time

he had what at the time was an untreatable form of leukemia

myosplastic syndrome there was no treatment for it then there is now conventional

he was told he had a year to live um he was a very high level

executive in a nationwide company and he said look i have to live five more years

in order to attain a pension that will sustain my family after i'm

dead so his goal was to make it five more years on a diagnosis where he was told the

prognosis is one year or less okay so

here's how i treated him first of all i determined if he had any dietary elements that were

uh fundamentally disturbing his health i found one he was fruit intolerant okay that's

fairly uncommon but it's significant i told him no fruit and explained how to do that i began him on a series of

series of constitutional hydrotherapy treatments once a day five days a week in my office

for quite a while to push and push and push that that ineffable healing force as

we're at the same time detoxifying i gave him a variety through time of

homeopathic medicines as his case changed and as things erupted i gave him

botanical medicines to improve the function of his lymphatic system

especially uh and of his immune system to try and normalize or moderate this

this uh white blood cell cancer essentially and um

i made sure that his nutrition was adequate and appropriate and tried to help him reduce the stress in his life

and in that regard i prescribed homeopathic medicines based upon his picture the first one i gave him was nux

vomica which is a fairly typical prescription for somebody in that circumstance but

that changed over time i worked with this guy for several years

and the first thing we saw was that he didn't get worse he stayed the same

his um monocyte count was quite high monocytes should be less than 10 his his

was in the 70s or above which is part of the signature of that kind of leukemia

mono monocytic leukemia in a sense and um we just kept working with him

things would happen one time he developed a uh a kind of severe edema i gave him

homeopathic apis which cleared that and we just worked through these problems over time

and [Music] to make the long story short we began to

see his white blood cell count slowly normalize the the lymphocyte he was also seeing a

medical doctor an oncologist who was a friend of mine who was following the cancer but had no treatment to offer

and so we saw his his monocyte count going to the 60s the 50s the 40s he never got below 10 i

think the lowest it ever got was 16 but he lived something like 15 more

years past retirement age he retired he and his wife bought a little organic

farm and he was working the farm for several years and one day

he died of a ruptured aneurysm that no one knew he had he didn't die of the cancer that was supposed to kill him one

year after diagnosis so that that was

that was at a time when i was trying to figure out if these traditional therapeutics could effectively treat

cancer he came to my office and we we help them and so that's that's one of

the cases that that i always think about that stands out for me i can see why that's amazing

so um and what would you say based on your experience of where you've

seen that we've come from and where we are now do you have a vision or a hope for the future of medicine generally in

the united states or beyond yeah but i said this a number of years

ago southwest college surveyed a lot of

i guess i could call this older doctors although i don't think of myself that way

john vastir was an older doctor i'm a younger doctor but my hair is not brown

anymore they they did a survey of doctors in the

field and asked us for a vision for 10 for 25 years into the future

and one of the things i said was that 25 into the future the average medical doctor

will be using a lot of naturopathic medicine that nature paths will be seen as

experts in the field of natural medicine and natural healing

rather than as this kind of pariah class of fake doctors and that's happening

one of the things i said a few minutes ago was some of my patients are medical doctors when i started in practice

the local medical community tried to run us out of town they

they owned the lab in town the medical doctors and they refused to let us use the lab

i mean i could go on about there was a great deal of prejudice against us a lot of that has reduced it's not

entirely gone but now in the state of washington

i am considered a licensed physician there's three categories of physician in

washington mds does and nds that was not the case 40

years ago in the first place there were very few of us in the second place

the conventional system didn't consider us physicians in the state of washington in oregon in

arizona in a number of places we are primary care physicians um so that's that's a substantial

difference and that change that i saw was that more and more people

particularly after covet covert was a big wake-up call for people because they saw

some of the difficulties let me say in conventional medicine and in the

regulatory agencies that did things that don't really make a lot of sense and that's all i want to

say about that but what what we're seeing is more and

more people are looking at naturopathic medicine as a system composed of a small group of

experts in healing and in the use of natural healing methods and substances

that wasn't the case 40 years ago it is the case now and i i expect it's going to be more the case

i'm having medical doctors send patients to me i'm having pediatricians recommend

some of their patients come and see a naturopath we are becoming more and more accepted

and we're starting to see some conventional medicine adopting some of our methods

even though i don't think they have the philosophical background to understand why we do what we do but some things are

obvious um and that's that's becoming more and more widespread and

another thing we see is the pharmaceutical industry is i i would say disturbed at our existence

because when i started the impact of naturopathic medicine and what you might

call alternative medicine was negligible and now we're a multi-billion dollar industry

and what we might call a competing industry doesn't like the competition we were not

a competition 40 years ago but more and more people are seeing the value of the

kinds of things we do the use of homeopathic medicine is widespread the use of botanical medicine

is widespread more and more people are interested in utilizing what we do and

that's i predicted that 20 years ago and i think we're going to see more and more of it as we move forward

yeah so is there anything that i have not asked you that you want to make sure that you leave with our audience

it's my catwalk question you don't have to have an answer um

here's one i have a very good friend who's a medical doctor we've been buddies for a

long time he's looking forward to retirement he in fact he's about 10 years younger than me and he's getting

close to retirement and to me the odd the the idea of retiring

is why would i want to do that yeah i love what i do i love watching people heal

um i i love teaching younger doctors i've got three of them in my clinic we're

about to bring in a fourth to help train people up we're even expanding our clinic in order

to do that and i find the medicine we do fast i would

do it for free why should i retire it is delightful to be to do what i do

there's no i haven't experienced burnout i've been doing this for 42 years i plan on doing

it for 42 more years and i think a lot of my colleagues feel the same way those that practice

traditional vitalistic naturopathic medicine are in love with the medicine and and just want to do more of it and

want to get better at it absolutely so where can people go to find out more

about you uh we have a website w w w www.salmoncreekclinic.com

everything they want to know they can find there that sounds great so i will link to that in the show notes and thank you so much dr zeph for all of your time

and wisdom really appreciate it thank you so much for asking me to do this

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