ABOUT US

ABOUT THE ACADEMY:

The Naturopathic Medicine Academy, formerly known as the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Institute, is an international and intergenerational team of more than 300 authors, 33 editors, 11 colleges and universities, and 13 agencies of the global naturopathic medical community.

People refer to us as the Foundations Project or the Academy.

Vision

To advance health in individuals, communities, our environment, and our world through fostering and disseminating innovation in education, scientific inquiry, public policy and clinical practice, resulting from investigating and understanding the nature of health, illness and healing.

Mission

To codify, transcribe, publish and distribute naturopathic medical knowledge, concepts, models and their applications to benefit, vitalize, and sustain our health, humanity and biosphere for present and future generations.

Aim

To contribute to health creation and a thriving profession through codifying and unifying distinct knowledge held within the naturopathic medical community; integrating traditional knowledge with modern science; rapidly disseminating codified resources, teaching tools, learning platforms, and nearly lost traditional knowledge; and informing the therapeutic order of global health.

Why we do this work:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, naturopathic medicine experienced ‘near death’ - There were only 200 NDs left in North America. This left students in the modern era with a huge gap to fill—a near “broken lineage” of knowledge transmission. There were few specifically naturopathic books and fewer ND journal publications and articles. NMA (formerly FNMI) has been not only writing, codifying, synthesizing and editing, we have been finding, amassing, interviewing, transcribing, and organizing this lost body of knowledge. This “knowledge” then has had to be“codified” through a unique and resource intensive process. Our work matters because:

1 Codification of knowledge is necessary for the viability of a profession.

2 The lineage of naturopathic medicine and experience remains at risk of being lost.

3 A common foundational knowledge base will help to unify and advance the profession.

4 This work contributes to creating healthy people, a healthy nation and world.

AUTHOR’s GUIDE ADDENDUM:

• ✓ Naturopathic Physicians work with nature to restore people’s health. AANP Position paper 1989

• ✓ The physician’s high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure as it is termed. Hahnemann, Paragraph 1, The Organon of Medicine

• ✓ The physician is the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore it behooves the physician to follow the will of nature. Paracelsus

The primary question the textbook seeks to answer is: How does the naturopathic physician work with nature to restore health?

In the vitalist tradition, health is seen as balance. Movement away from balance results in the adaptations that we call symptoms. The Vis Medicatrix Naturae/Vital Force is that quality or aspect of living organisms that is always striving to maintain or restore balance. The naturopathic physician works with the Vis in its effort to restore balance, not against it by treating or suppressing the adaptations or symptoms generated by the attempt by the body to restore itself.

Our book takes this fundamental question and lays out the theoretical basis of our medicine and examines it in detail. We include an examination of the principles by which we have defined our medicine. We examine the clinical theory which has grown out of these principles. We examine the various specialty and modality aspects of the medicine and discuss them in relationship to the fundamental question: how they are applied and integrated to help the naturopathic physician restore health. For example, chapters on modalities should address how each modality works with nature to restore health rather than discuss the technical details of the application of this modality. If medicine is an art as well as a science, the naturopathic physician must be an artist well schooled in a number of different therapeutic modalities, whose expertise integrates the many healing modalities into the restoration of health.

How does any therapeutic intervention further the goal of restoring health and integrate with the overall objective of the naturopathic physician?

All other goals and objectives defined in this textbook initiative rest on this fundamental question. Answering this throughout the text is the voice of the text, which is also the further development and articulation of our understanding of naturopathic medicine into the 21st century. The Naturopathic Medicine Academy, formerly known as the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine, will bring the voices of almost two hundred doctor/artists to answer the prime question. These many voices are stitched into one by this common thread: The physician assists nature in restoring the sick to health.

(This short message grew out of discussions with several of the working groups in trying to articulate more clearly the unifying theme or voice of this project.)

Jim Sensenig ND, Jared Zeff ND, Pamela Snider ND

the Academy