The history of medicine traces a significant evolution. The medical understanding that fundamental human needs—such as nutrition, sleep, physical activity, and social connection—are essential to health traces back to the teachings of Hippocrates of Kos. He emphasized the importance of living in harmony with nature. On this basis, two and a half thousand years ago, he developed a primarily preventive, systemic and deeply natural approach to medicine. Together with his students, he laid the foundations for nature-oriented medicine as an empirical science: health or illness were not random or fated developments, but had natural causes that – once understood – could also be influenced in natural ways. Man was thus not the plaything of divine whim but, like all life, part of nature and subject to its laws. With this revolutionary view, he undermined the almost absolute power of the priestly word in matters of illness and freed medicine from faith: it is not gods on Mount Olympus or elsewhere that cause illness and suffering, but a way of life that is not in harmony with natural needs.

But the early 20th century saw the influence of Rockefeller medicine, which promoted exclusively a pharmaceutical-oriented approach. This led to the gradual exclusion and prohibition of natural medical practices such as osteopathy or herbal medicine, presenting them as less credible “alternative” medicine, as if the laws of nature did not apply to humans (see below, the Law of Minimum and Maximum required for healthy homeostasis). But there is no humane alternative to medical practice that respects natural human needs. As medicine has become increasingly institutionalized, its focus has shifted toward symptom-oriented approaches—often at the expense of holistic care and an understanding of patients within the broader context of their life stories. Modern medicine largely emphasizes biomedical models that prioritize isolated physical symptoms.

Preventing and treating multicausal diseases requires a systems-based approach that gives equal weight to environmental factors (such as toxins), deficiencies in essential nutrients, and lifestyle choices. Today’s “normal” is often mistaken for “natural,” and mere correlations are frequently misinterpreted as causation—often with devastating consequences for public health. For example, age is commonly cited as the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, even though this correlation merely reflects the time it takes for the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle to manifest clinically. There are many ways to destroy mental health, so there is no single drug that will ever change the course of the disease. Prevention requires that these pathways be recognized, understood, and offered to the public (e.g., NehlsM: Unified theory of Alzheimer’s disease (UTAD): implications for prevention and curative therapy).