contributed by Rajiv Aricat, 15 March 2023

Biomedicine’s presence in modern day life has been so pervasive that other medicinal systems are often relegated in status to ‘alternative’ and ‘complementary.’ This reification has been challenged, both at the discursive as well as at the practice levels in the contemporary era, especially in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. One such criticism is raised by naturopathy, a medicinal system rooted in the natural healing powers of the body. Naturopathy is the science of disease diagnosis, treatment, and cure using natural therapies including dietetics, botanical medicine, fasting, exercise, lifestyle counselling, detoxification, and spiritual healing (Ministry of AYUSH under Government of India).

Figure: Logo of the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy)

The study I conducted among a group of naturopathy practitioners in Kerala, a state in South India, helps provide a more nuanced picture on how truth claims are made in naturopathy and how the practitioners invoke discourses on natural and self-healing powers of the body to give legitimacy to the system. The objective of the study was to unpack and deconstruct the meta-narratives that supported the universalisms of ‘naturalness’ and ‘well-being’ that are widely followed in this system. The study did not challenge the claims made by naturopathy, instead its scope was limited to unpacking the strategies followed by the practitioners to rationalize, and to assert the supremacy of the discourses and practices in this system.

Restrictive practices in naturopathy

The strict dietary regimes and health practices in naturopathy have been well documented. Discourses on the ‘ideal’, ‘natural’, and the ‘scientific’ are often invoked to claim legitimacy for these practices. Naturopaths assert scientificity by highlighting the ways in which they acquire knowledge from nature, which they believe are direct and unmediated. Alternatively, the practitioners observe that systems like biomedicine have to deal with a number of contradictions between theory and practice, as it has often been swayed by commercial interests.

Restrictive practices are often communicated to a layperson with the help of metaphors. Imageries of machines, battles, and ‘toughing it out’ are invoked to highlight individual efforts made by naturopaths to maintain health, or to recover from illness. One respondent likened ‘deviant’ food habits to incompatible fuelling in automobiles.

“A diesel car will run for at least a short distance even if we fuel it with petrol. It is the same case with the human body fuelled with junk food and medicine. It will function as though everything is normal for the time being, but it will break down sooner or later.”

These restrictive practices have resulted in a kind of moral and lifestyle puritanism among naturopaths. ‘Dilution of principles’ is considered as resulting from lack of willpower and lack of integrity. An idealized higher goal, a telos, for human life is cherished and pursued.

Restrictive regimes have the support of a number of naturopaths who have gained health benefits by following them. Naturopathy does fulfil the supportive and therapeutic needs of the public.      However, when these restrictive regimes work with a binary logic, they impose ideological frameworks leading to divisions in society.

Faith as the inner core of social relationships

Naturopathy practitioners often associate the strict dietary regimes and restrictive practices followed in the system with spirituality and religious faith. However, an analysis based solely on individual agency and self-responsibility will be insufficient to understand how faith is embedded in the principles and practices of the naturopaths. The findings of the present study move beyond self-responsibility and individual agency frameworks to understand the complex ways in which faith and trust are intertwined in the day to day practices of the naturopaths.

In Kerala, one naturopathy practitioner in his late 40s was trying to get hold of a COVID-19 vaccination exemption certificate. As a civil servant, Patrick needed the certificate to offset potential disciplinary action from his employer. This was when the Government of Kerala issued a series of orders pressuring employees to get vaccinated, apprehending a third wave of COVID-19 vaccination in the state in February 2022. Patrick called up naturopathy hospitals, and they agreed to issue a formal exemption certificate. As these hospitals were quite far away from his hometown, Patrick looked for alternatives. Leveraging his social networks, Patrick located an Ayurveda doctor only a few kilometers away from his home and approached the doctor with the request. The doctor did a quick background check and issued the certificate to Patrick. However, the certificate only described the individual’s exemption in relation to allergies. Confiding in Patrick, the doctor revealed to him that he too is against the vaccination. Later, Patrick found out that the doctor was a follower of a lesser-known sect of Christianity which had been active in the region for some years. Most of the followers in the doctor’s sect were vaccine hesitant, Patrick learned later.

The ethnographic vignette brings to fore the dynamics of the social processes, often rooted in faith and trust, involving vaccine hesitancy, as follows:

• While the doctor certainly did not have the authority to certify that a particular individual may be exempted from vaccination, he wanted to help Patrick.
• The doctor’s faith in a particular religious sect provided him with the personal conviction to support people like Patrick, helping the latter to offset the threat of a disciplinary action by the government.
• However, it was ultimately his professional status as a doctor that gave him the authority to issue the certificate, albeit a vaguely written one. In other words, the doctor’s professional status helped him to exercise and execute his personal conviction.
• Given the intense strife among Christian sects in the state, the doctor could have easily turned down the request from Patrick, who is from another sect. Instead, vaccine hesitancy became a binding force between Patrick and the doctor, in spite of, or as a result of their faith.
• Trust was indeed a common thread that ran through the entire episode: Mutual trust between the doctor and Patrick played an important role in their interaction (the way the doctor is trusting Patrick with the information that he is against the vaccine; the way Patrick is using his own network to find a doctor he can trust to support his beliefs about the vaccine).

The need to focus on both discourse and practice

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that had a lasting impact on the health and well-being of people globally, medicinal systems like naturopathy challenge the inherent contradictions of the dominant paradigm of biomedicine, while exposing the commercial interests that undermine the gains made by the system. Although naturopathy’s criticism of the dominant medical system is based on essentialized notions of the natural healing powers of body, self-responsibility of individual and self-actualization, it nevertheless plays an important role in challenging the certainties held by biomedicine, which is supported by the global capital on the one hand, and the governance and regulatory structures that are in alignment with the interests of the global capital, on the other.

Research can engage with both the discourses and practices within naturopathy. Analyses of discourses can bring to fore the truth claims, restrictive metaphors and rhetorical devices used by the practitioners for gaining legitimacy. An investigation into the practices can also help reveal the embeddedness of faith, self-healing, trust and self-responsibility — values that are often associated with traditional medicine — in the day to day lives of naturopaths.