Dietary or therapeutic hygiene ?

Le Petit Robert gives the following definition for “therapeutic”: Part of medicine which studies and implements the means suitable for curing and relieving the sick. The term therapy is rather reserved for psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis, although used in “gene therapy”.

The use of instinct for the purpose of promoting health can be termed therapy inasmuch as improvement in general condition results in the reduction of symptoms and even remission or cure of illnesses. Since the individual chooses his own “foods”, “self-therapy” would fit more accurately.

From shamanic practices to our modern medicine, any therapeutic act has always been based on two fundamental principles: diagnosis and prescription. However, instinctotherapy is the first therapeutic method capable of bypassing these two stages with the risks of error which are inherent to them: here it is the alliesthesic mechanisms which allow the physiological and not intellectual discovery of nutritional or phytotherapeutic substances. that the body needs to perform its work of regeneration or healing.

The individual is thus able to discover for himself, through listening to the body and subject to being placed in an appropriate food and relational environment, the elements promoting natural programs of repair and return to balance. . This is why we can speak of instinctive self-therapy, in order to emphasize the autonomy of the patient who does not depend on any external authority but discovers through the play of pleasure / displeasure the useful substances and their optimal dosage.

We could also speak of indirect therapy in the sense that it consists in giving the body optimal natural conditions for functioning without aiming a priori at the cure of a particular disorder; it is secondly that functional optimization results in improvements in various pathologies. In other words: instinctotherapy works for health, and health promotes healing processes.

However, it is a targeted therapy, in the sense that it allows the implementation of natural substances with specific actions. Instinct is indeed able to determine precise food or herbal medicine choices depending on the condition of the body, without requiring a diagnosis or prescription.

Note that this is a targeted therapy, insofar as the improvement in health results not from elements imposed on the body (such as drugs, movements etc.) in order to reduce symptoms, but the removal of pathogenic factors inherent in the traditional way of life and diet. These factors include on the one hand nutritional imbalances attributable to the alteration of natural flavors by culinary or industrial preparations, on the other hand the production of all kinds of molecules foreign to natural biological cycles, such as AGEs, ALEs, acrylamide, ABBOS peptide, etc.

We can also speak of a fundamental therapy by the fact that the optimal nutritional balance obtained thanks to the implementation of the dietary instinct (alliesthesic mechanisms) ensures the regulation of the inflammatory tendency. This ensures not only the suppression of pain associated with inflammation, but also the suppression of tissue damage associated with inflammatory mechanisms (autoimmune and allergic), which prevents organ degeneration and promotes healing in case of lesion.

It is still a complementary therapy, knowing that a sanitation of the diet is compatible with most medical treatments. Medicines are generally found to be better tolerated (eg chemotherapy). Treatments can be optimized by reducing side effects and inflammatory complications, and by providing nutritional and phytotherapeutic substances that facilitate the work of the body.

Another therapeutic virtue can still be seen in learning to listen to the body. Learning to recognize the signals of the dietary instinct raises awareness of all the signals, sometimes very tenuous, that the body sends to protect itself from most nuisances. The tendency to privilege the mind disappears thanks to the daily exercise which represents the respect of the pleasure and the displeasure during the meals. We thus learn to be more in our own body than in our intellect and to better avoid all the harmful factors inherent in the environment or in the behaviors which civilized life imposes on us.

For the list of beneficial effects observed under instinctotherapy, see last page of the Theory in Brief.

However, it is up to the attending physician to judge a possible incompatibility or to adjust the treatments in the presence of the improvements obtained.