History of JFNT
Jacka Foundation for Natural Therapies (JFNT) is a not-for-profit charitable fund that supports research in naturopathy and its related modalities, and the development of a community of researchers, scholars and leaders in the naturopathic profession.
The lineage of natural therapies
All Indigenous cultures around the world continue natural healing traditions that they have practiced for millennia. Major natural healing systems such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine have been practiced for 5,000 years.
Ancient Egypt
In Western society the lineage of natural therapies can be traced back to the early written records of Ancient Egypt. In healing temples priests carried out surgery, herbal medicine, dietetics, and religious healing rituals.
Ancient Greece
Much of this was adopted by Ancient Greece where the Hippocratic writings demonstrate a cultural paradigm shift towards an understanding of health as the balance of energies or essences within a person. There were four such essences that collectively were called humors. Each of the four humors were reflected in nature as four elements (fire, air, water, and earth), four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter), four stages of life (childhood, youth, middle age, and seniority), and more.
Ancient Greece
Much of this was adopted by Ancient Greece where the Hippocratic writings demonstrate a cultural paradigm shift towards an understanding of health as the balance of energies or essences within a person. There were four such essences that collectively were called humors. Each of the four humors were reflected in nature as four elements (fire, air, water, and earth), four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter), four stages of life (childhood, youth, middle age, and seniority), and more.
In this approach, diseases, emotional states, foods and medicines were all designated to belong to a category of one of the four humors. The role of the physician was to identify what the imbalance of humors was for each person and to restore that balance with holistic treatments. Each person had their own unique mix of these humors and their health depended on keeping this in harmony.
Within the Hippocratic writings we also see the development of a rational approach to illness where, rather than seeing the gods as the source of health and illness, human health was strongly influenced by where you lived, how you lived, how you ate, your ethics, and emphasised your responsibility in looking after your own health. Concepts of diagnosis, prognosis, clinical reasoning, careful written records of patients’ illness, categories of disease, clinical observation and many other concepts have been passed down from this time to the modern era of health care.
Ancient Rome
The Romans followed this tradition and added many other concepts of hygiene, classification of diseases, herbal medicines according to humoral theory, and advances in anatomy and physiology.
Ancient Persia
After the fall of the Roman Empire the Islamic physicians of Ancient Persia continued these traditions further by introducing the pharmacy of herbal medicines, expanding upon dietary treatments for disease, building specialised hospitals for the sick, and developing a structured, scientific approach to understanding illness.
European herbal medicine
These ancient ideas all flowed back into Europe in the 11th century. Herbal medicine thrived during this time and over the ensuing centuries notable healers such as Hildegard von Bingen, Gerard, Culpeper, and others developed the medicinal herbal knowledge of Europe. This was based on the Ancient Greek principles of the balancing the vital energies of the person and using diet, herbs, and lifestyle advice to restore their health.
Developments in North America
During the 19th century, conventional medicine was not yet fully regulated and natural therapies were very popular, particularly in North America. Herbalists including Samuel Thomson (1769-1843) utilised Native American and European herbal medicines to restore health. Thomson’s approach emphasised domestic medicine, which was widely accepted in a settler society where self-sufficiency was valued.
After his death, a group known as the Physiomedicalists developed his ideas about botanic medicine, alongside another group of practitioners, the Eclectics, who combined homeopathy, nature cure and herbalism with surgery and early pharmaceutical products. The focus of the Eclectics was on including a scientific perspective into practice. Underlying all these developments were the concepts that there is a vital force that sustains all living things, and that the practitioner must take a holistic approach to address the individual situation of each patient.
Other developments in the USA also included the establishment of osteopathy and chiropractic, both based on the idea of restoring vitality by returning the physical body and the nervous system into balance.
Water cures
In Europe there were other developments of natural therapies. Homeopathy, based on the work of Samuel Hahnemann (1775-1843) and the concept of engaging the vital force of a person, gained popular attention with remarkable success with infectious diseases (Negro & Marino 2021). In other parts of Europe, the nature cure movement which utilised of water cure, hydrotherapy, saunas, and spa culture further developed the concepts of cleansing, detoxification, massage, fresh air, pure water, sunshine, a vegetarian diet, exercise, and emotional and spiritual balance as essential to restoring health.
Naturopathy
At the beginning of the 20th century the concept of naturopathy developed by utilising an eclectic approach that encompassed natural therapies based on the principles of holism and vitalism. At this time modern medicine became more dominant and during the middle years of the 20th century naturopathy receded.
The modern era
In the 1960s, a merging of unique social and cultural forces reconfigured natural therapies and challenged the dominance of biomedicine in the healthcare sector. During this time of rapid social change, the more traditional 19th century natural health practices began to be absorbed by counter-culture movements that resisted the orthodoxy of conventional capitalist society, which also included a rejection of the paternalism of biomedicine and its association with the pharmaceutical drug industry. Natural therapies healthcare emerged as a symbol of the cultural changes that Western society was undergoing in the 1960s. This included holistic health and New Age themes derived from human potential movements, psychotherapy, feminism, environmentalism, Eastern and Western metaphysics, new science paradigms, neo-shamanism and a whole range of alternative health modalities such as naturopathy and Chinese medicine. These holistic, New Age influences were further amplified by the high visibility of chronic lifestyle diseases such as heart disease and cancer, where biomedicine was struggling to provide satisfactory solutions.
Into the 21st century
Since the 1980s there has been a growing development of an integrated approach to health care where natural therapies are now using the best of ancient healing traditions supported by scientific research and understanding.
Natural therapy can now be seen as ‘conservative medicine’. Employing the principle of ‘First do no Harm’, there is now sufficient evidence to support the use of many natural medicines and lifestyle interventions as first-line treatments, particularly in addressing the chronic lifestyle diseases which are now so prevalent and so costly to society.
The Jacka Foundation of Natural Therapies (JFNT) is a not-for-profit charitable fund that supports research in naturopathy and its related modalities, and the development of a community of researchers, scholars and leaders in the naturopathic profession.