Can natural medicine work for you?
Chloe Lambert, freelance journalist based in London/Gulf News
Andreas Michalsen urges combining mainstream treatments with fasting and forest bathing
Dr Andreas Michalsen was a successful young cardiologist at one of Berlin’s busiest hospitals. He specialised in emergency and critical care medicine, publishing respected papers on heart failure, and a glittering career lay ahead — but he was already growing disillusioned.
Michalsen felt the world was entering a “crisis in medicine”, fuelled by stress, poor diets and sedentary lifestyles, which his profession was ultimately treating with a sticking plaster: “I was doing a lot of expensive and painful interventions, which the data told me would not lead, in the end, to a real, significant improvement in health,” he recalls.
To the derision of his colleagues, he decided to train in natural medicine. Today, as professor of clinical naturopathy at Berlin’s Immanuel Hospital and the Charite — the largest university hospital in Europe — he applies his unique dual-training to thousands of patients with a wide range of diseases. Alongside surgery, chemotherapy and modern pharmaceuticals, patients at the Charite receive acupuncture, forest bathing and therapeutic fasting. And as interest in alternative medicine grows, so do the waiting lists.
Alongside his reputation for natural medicine, Michalsen, whose book The Natural Prescription was a number one bestseller when released in Germany in 2017, and is also published in the UK, is considered a world leader in fasting. Believing it to be far more than a weight-loss method, he prescribes it for conditions ranging from diabetes to migraines to arthritis. He is even investigating whether fasting may aid the treatment and prevention of cancer, having shown that patients who undergo a short fast before chemotherapy tolerate it better. His theory is that when temporarily deprived of energy, cells may enter “a state of hibernation … which can protect them like a shield from external attacks”.Regardless of your weight, Michalsen says fasting — by regularly cutting out breakfast or dinner — is one of the best things to delay ageing and protect themselves against disease. “There is now research that underlines that periods of restricted eating are a recovery for the body. Stem cell production, hormone regulation, our metabolic systems — they all recover when we introduce this technique into our life,” he says.
It’s also, he adds, an excellent way to break the bad habits so many of us have fallen into, such as snacking and constant overeating.
In his book, Michalsen makes a passionate case for mainstream and complementary medicine working in synergy, rather than opposition. Not only is this how more and more patients want to be treated, he says — it’s also the only way we’ll meet the challenge of increasing life expectancy in the developed world.“Conventional medicine is very successful in treating acute diseases like heart attacks or trauma,” he says. “But about 60 to 80 per cent of the medical burden is now caused by chronic disease — osteoarthritis, diabetes, hypertension — and here it is not as successful. It leads to escalating costs, escalating use of medication, and it’s no solution for the patient.“What we are doing in Berlin is reintegrating [complementary treatment] into the system.”As ageing populations place more pressure on hospitals and concerns grow over the overuse of medications such as statins, calls for a more holistic approach to health are increasing. In December, MPs in the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Integrated Healthcare published a report warning that chronic illnesses could cripple the NHS unless the service began to embrace more natural alternatives.