Vitalism: Your Life Force is Your Health
What is Vitalism?
Life is defined as energy production (respiration) at the cellular level in the mitochondria ; it is your vitality or life force. Whether that energy is called chi, prana, spirit or vitality, it is that which separates a living animate thing from an inanimate object. If energy production stops, the organism dies. Life is energy.
Abundant energy production is the signature of any vibrantly healthy plant, animal or person, while low energy production is the underlying common hallmark of all diseases. In western culture, this viewpoint of health and disease has historically been known as Vitalism.
The 21st Century Vitalist
Vitalism is an ancient idea found in Greek, Chinese, and Indian medicine, where it was believed that a life force or vital energy governed all living beings. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates called this energy “pneuma” or “spirit,” is the life force essential for health and healing. This understanding remained central to healthcare for centuries, with thinkers like Paracelsus of the 1500’s and then later with the founders of the nature-cure methods such as naturopathy, natural hygiene, osteopathy, homeopathy, and chiropractic; each of which were founded upon the principal role of this innate energy and intelligence to restore health when properly supported.
However, with the rise of reductionist science and the monopolization of healthcare by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 20th century, Vitalism was replaced by a symptom-focused approach. As a result, many natural medicine schools today have lost their foundational principles, leaving practitioners with no clear understanding of the true cause or cure of disease.
Despite this, all living things continue to operate on the same vitalistic principles. To achieve true health, you must re-incorporate this understanding of the life force into your healthcare.
Vitalism and The Natural Laws of Life
Vitalism teaches us that health and disease can be understood through the natural laws and innate intelligence that govern the growth, development, or degeneration of all living things.
Let’s look at what that means.
We instinctively know that a plant needs the right environment to thrive. It requires optimal:
Light
Food/Soil
Water
Air/Temperature
When our plant isn't thriving, the first thing we do is assess these four elements of its environment to determine what may be stressing the plant. We also know that by correcting the unbalance/stressor in its environment, the plant will thrive again. This is the effect of natural law—life thrives under optimum conditions, and this process is hardwired into the DNA of every living thing. It’s called homeostasis, it is a natural law of biological organisms. A more complex organism, like a human, is governed by precisely the same common sense natural laws but with a 5th environmental factor- our complex psyche which can be a major stressor, influenced by our thoughts, worries, and past trauma- the Mind-Body Connection.
Do we need fancy vocabulary, universities, and research studies to tell us that? No, it’s common sense.
The Vitalistic Theory of the Cause and Cure of Disease
Stressors, which means anything that is out of balance in the environment of the organism, results in lowered energy production and reserves. People refer to this low energy state by many different names such as fatigue, low vitality, weakened immunity, or devitalization but in the past it was called enervation.
Now, of course, the lowered vitality has effects on the optimal function or health of the living thing. The primary initial effect is that the cells and the intercellular fluids begin accumulating the auto-generated by-products of metabolism, such as lactic acid and cytokines, as well as cellular debris from dying and dead cells. In Vitalism, this accumulation of toxins in the terrain of the body is called Toxemia.
The effects of the low energy and the toxic terrain then manifest as symptoms, which are mistakenly identified as separate diseases. In reality, they all have the same origin: an unbalanced stressful environment that lowers your life force and vitality causing toxemia or a polluted inner terrain.
Here is the domino effect equation:
Stress- Enervation- Toxemia- Symptoms
In 2013 a consortium of modern pioneers, leading institutions, practicing doctors and clinicians in the fields of aging and disease, like Dr. David Sinclair with his book Lifespan, identified 12 underlying dysfunctions in chronic and degenerative diseases which they named “The 12 Hallmarks of Aging and Disease”. They serve modern medicine as a valuable scientifically validated framework for identifying and diagnosing various dysfunctions and to guide treatments.
“You cannot get well in the same environment in which you got ill”
From the Vitalist Naturopathic perspective, these 12 hallmarks are all effects, not causes. None of them appear by magic or on their own, they all require an initiating trigger or cause. In Vitalism there is only one trigger or cause of disease- devitalization, which then exhibits itself through the 12 hallmarks.
This is paradigm shifting knowledge.
Disease treatment methodologies of the old paradigm continue to suffer only marginal success because they are still locked into seeing symptoms as disease rather than effects from an originating cause.
Some revolutionary thinkers like Dr. Thomas Seyfried, in his work on cancer treatment Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, and Dr. Christopher Palmer of Harvard, in his research on cognitive dysfunctions in Brain Energy, have broken free of the old paradigm and are achieving previously unimaginable results by recognizing that these diseases are actually caused by the common denominator of low energy production.
In other words, modern science with its cutting-edge technology, is simply rediscovering what humanity has always known: it’s all about the life force. Your life force is your health.
The beauty of vitalism and this paradigm shift is not just that the cause of disease is now known and understood but that it also reveals the process for the reversal and cure of disease.
All we have to do is correct the domino equation of Stress- Enervation- Toxemia- Symptoms.
If we remove the causes of stress- the unbalanced environment of food, water, light air, and mental stressors the energy returns and the innate intelligence of the body cleans itself out of the toxic terrain through its own auto-directed detoxification process which then reduces and eliminates the symptoms and optimal health is the natural law result.
“Health is the result of healthful living” -Dr. Herbert Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene.
The cause and natural cure of diseases are all the same. One disease, devitalization, with one cure, revitalization.
Therefore, the equation in Vitalistic Naturopathy for natural disease reversal and optimal health is:
Remove stressors- raise vitality – the body detoxifies – symptoms disappear.
By focusing on raising the vitality of the individual, all 12 Hallmarks are approached simultaneously. In other words, cognitive issues, digestive problems, insulin resistance/diabetes, inflammatory conditions, immune weakness, and the full spectrum of diseases all share the same cause and the same cure: restoring the body’s vital life force—re-vitalization.
That is the science and natural law of living things. The “How to” is the art of Vitalistic Naturopathy.
By combining Vitalism with the breakthrough discoveries of modern scientists, we are now in a position to understand healing and disease like never before and with advancements in technological revitalizing therapies, molecular biology, and advanced nutritional supplements, we have powerful therapeutics at our disposal—not only for preventing aging and disease, but also for rapidly reversing them and restoring the body’s natural energy and capacity for self-repair.
Vitalistic-based Naturopathy reverses the disease equation. This is Vitalism in action.
“It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine... The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of nonmaterial principle in organisms.”
“Ernst Mayr is one of a handful of the greatest scientific minds humankind has yet produced…Bloomsbury review.”
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