Scott J. Banks

The natural cures approach to healing and wellness relies primarily on nutrition, nutritional supplements, and herbs to give the body what it needs to achieve optimal health and to prevent and fight illness. This cheat sheet brings you up to speed on the fundamentals of natural medicine, recommends which foods to eliminate and add to your diet, and provides protocols you can follow to maintain healthy digestion, prevent or cure leaky gut syndrome, and fight off infection.

Acne is related more to what you put into your body than what you put on it. Therefore, the most effective approach to treating acne is to adjust your diet. Here are some suggestions: Lower the glycemic load in your diet by avoiding sugar, bread, rice, cereal, pasta, and all flour products. Stop drinking cow milk, because it has high levels of androgens, which have been linked to acne outbreaks.

A rash is an outbreak on the skin characterized by discoloration and inflammation. Keeping the affected area clean and dry and exposing it to air as much as possible is usually sufficient for clearing up most rashes, but if that’s not enough, try one or more of the following treatments: Bentonite clay: Apply extra‐virgin, untreated bentonite clay over the affected area several times daily.

Natural medicine is any healing practice that harnesses the power of nature, including the human body’s self‐defense and self‐healing mechanisms, to ­prevent and cure illness. Natural medicine includes the following practices: Aromatherapy: Essential oils extracted from plants are used in numerous preparations, including massage oils and bath salts, to enhance physical and psychological well-being.

Do you just grab whatever vitamin is on sale? You may want to consider buying their better forms for a true natural cures approach. Not all vitamins and minerals are created equal. Here’s why: Certain forms of a vitamin or mineral are more bioavailable than others. Bioavailability is a measure of how readily the body absorbs the nutrient and delivers it to the targeted cells or tissues in the body.

In functional medicine, knowing what kind of patient has the disease is more important than knowing what kind of disease the patient has. With conventional medicine, health is the absence of illness. Your doctor diagnoses what ails you and then prescribes a medication to treat it. This approach is usually fine for acute illnesses, trauma, and infections, but it falls short in the treatment of chronic illnesses, including allergies, hormonal imbalances, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, neurological conditions, and cancer.

Eating junk foods isn’t simply a matter of “garbage in, garbage out.” The natural cures approach encourages you to think about the effect this food has on your body. Junk food is bad for your body and your health because of the long-term and possibly irreversible damage it can do to your body as it passes through your system.

Natural cures can help with lots of different ailments. Leaky gut syndrome is a condition in which the small intestine becomes more porous and permeable than normal, allowing irritants, such as toxins, undigested food particles, waste products, and microbes, to leak into surrounding areas where these substances shouldn’t be.

Natural cures can help fight infections. Conventional treatments for the common cold and other infections target symptoms and tend to impair the body’s own defense mechanisms. These mechanisms are designed to purge the viruses or bacteria from the body. Although you may need to alleviate symptoms to make it through the day at work or school, you can speed your recovery by giving your immune system a boost.