Why Can't the Body Always Heal? Understanding Regulatory Medicine
When something hurts, we take a painkiller. When our stomach burns, we reach for stomach medication, and when we cannot sleep, for a sleeping pill. When blood pressure rises, we lower it; when there is a muscle spasm, we try to relax it. None of this is wrong.
Modern medicine, especially in emergencies, infections, surgery, intensive care and the diagnosis and treatment of many serious diseases, is one of humanity's greatest achievements. It is unnecessary even to question this.
But for years, while working with chronic patients, I have kept asking myself another question: We have seen the symptom, but have we truly understood the pattern that produces it and keeps it going?
You can reduce a pain. You can suppress stomach acid. You can release a muscle spasm. But if after a while the patient comes back to you with the same complaint, it is not enough to ask only, “What is broken?” We also have to ask, “Why can't this organism return to its own balance?”
For me, regulatory medicine begins right here.
The Human Body Is Not a Machine
It is easy to think of the human organism as the sum of organs that are independent of one another. In medical education, too, we divide the body into systems in order to learn. We leave the heart to cardiology, the intestines to gastroenterology, the brain to neurology, and the muscles and joints to yet another field. This division is necessary for diagnosis and specialization. But the human body does not recognize these boundaries in daily life.
The gut is in constant relationship with the brain, the brain with the heart, the heart with breathing, breathing with the diaphragm, and the diaphragm with the spine and posture. Hormones, the immune system, metabolism and the nervous system do not work unaware of one another.
One of the important regulators of this great communication network is the autonomic nervous system. It plays a role in many of the functions that life carries out without our awareness, from heart rate to vascular tone, from intestinal movement to sweating, from digestion to the stress response. Even while we sleep, the organism senses changes in its surroundings, responds and tries to adapt.
For this reason, health for me is not merely the absence of a disease diagnosis. Health is the ability to re-establish balance in the face of changing conditions. For years I have called this “regulation capacity.”
The Last Drop That Makes the Cup Overflow
I very often hear this sentence from my patients: “Doctor, it started all of a sudden.”
Did it really start all of a sudden?
Sometimes yes. But in chronic diseases, the story has most often begun much earlier.
Long-term stress, past surgeries, old injuries, problems in the teeth and jaw area, deterioration in gut function, physical inactivity, irregular sleep, nutritional problems, chronic inflammatory burdens or functional disorders in the spine can strain the organism's capacity to adapt over the years.
The body compensates silently. It balances one burden with another system, adapts to the new condition and keeps life going. This is an extraordinary ability, but it is not unlimited.
Think of a cup. It fills drop by drop. At last a tiny drop arrives and the cup overflows. An outside observer sees only the last drop. Yet the real story lies in why and how the cup came to be so full until that day.
For me, regulatory medicine does not mean belittling the last drop; it means trying to see the whole cup.
Pain Does Not Always Begin Where It Hurts
If your lower back hurts, you naturally think the problem is in your lower back. Often there really is a cause in the lumbar region that needs to be evaluated. But the whole story is not always there.
Sometimes a functional disorder in the sacroiliac region, sometimes a restriction in diaphragm movement, sometimes a segmental dysfunction in the thoracic spine, and sometimes an old surgical scar can increase the burden on the organism. We may encounter a similar situation in headaches. Treating only the head may not be enough if the other functional relationships that sustain the pain are overlooked.
Because the human organism does not live in separate pages like an anatomy atlas. The body is a whole. A change in one region can produce a response in another.
That is why I do not ask a patient with chronic pain only, “Where does it hurt?” For me, the second question is at least as important as the first: “What cycle is sustaining this pain?”
What Does Neural Therapy Do Here?
Neural therapy has a history of about a hundred years. In Turkey it is at times perceived merely as an “injection treatment” or a local anesthetic injection. My view of neural therapy has never been limited to that.
In neural therapy, local anesthetics are applied to specific anatomical and functional regions. But the aim is not merely to numb that region. In a suitable patient, the goal is to influence pain, segmental responses and the regulatory loops related to the autonomic nervous system, so as to help the organism respond in a more coordinated way again.
For this reason, I see neural therapy as one of the tools of regulatory medicine.
The boundary has to be drawn correctly here. Neural therapy is not a miraculous method that cures every disease. It cannot replace the treatment of cancer, infection, a fracture, advanced organ failure or a condition that requires surgery. Such a claim is neither scientific nor compatible with a physician's responsibility.
But in chronic pain and in some functional disorders, once serious diseases have been excluded and a proper diagnostic evaluation has been made, assessing the patient's regulation capacity and the functional loops that sustain the complaint can open a different window for us.
Sometimes the Problem Is Not the Instrument but the Orchestra
Think of an orchestra. The violin is sound. The piano is sound. The cello is sound. Yet the music that emerges is not good.
Where is the problem?
Sometimes it is in none of the instruments. The problem is in the harmony.
We see similar pictures in the human body. No serious pathology is found on the MRI. Blood tests show no significant disease. The heart has been examined, the stomach has been examined, the spine has been imaged. Even so, the person does not feel well. They are tired. They have pain. Their sleep is disturbed. Their bowels do not work regularly. From time to time they feel palpitations. They are no longer as resilient to stress as before.
It is easy to tell such a person, “Your tests are normal, there is nothing wrong with you.” But that is not understanding the patient.
A normal test result does not always mean optimal function. Just as important as how the organs look structurally healthy one by one is how the organism establishes harmony among these systems.
This is exactly one of the areas that regulatory medicine tries to look at: listening to the orchestra as well as the instruments.
Not an Alternative to Modern Medicine
I would like to emphasize this point in particular: Regulatory medicine is not opposed to modern medicine. Neural therapy is not an alternative to modern medicine.
I am a physician. I know the value of a correct diagnosis, the laboratory, imaging, pharmacology, surgery and evidence-based medicine. But long years of clinical experience have also taught me something else: Explaining a human being only through laboratory values, MRI images or disease codes is not always enough.
The issue is not “either modern medicine or regulatory medicine.” I do not find such an opposition correct.
First you will exclude serious disease. You will make the diagnosis correctly. If necessary, you will prescribe medication, refer to surgery and work together with the relevant specialty. Then, especially if the complaints have become chronic and persist despite treatment, you will not hesitate to ask another question: Why is this person still not recovering? Which burdens continue to make it difficult for the organism to re-establish balance?
Thinking in a complementary way is not giving up on science. Sometimes the requirement of science is to keep asking the right question rather than ignoring what we cannot yet explain.
Seeing the Person, Not the Disease
There is a very old truth that I believe medicine must remember again in the coming years: Disease occurs in a person; a person is not just a disease.
Of two people with the same MRI finding, one may experience severe pain while the other carries on with daily life. The same stress, the same surgery, the same infection does not produce the same result in everyone. Because people differ from one another not only genetically but also in their life stories, movement, sleep, nutrition, gut function, past illnesses, traumas and capacity to adapt.
Good medicine of course requires naming the disease correctly. But there is sometimes a second kind of medicine that begins after that: being able to see the person within the disease.
This is one of the things I have learned from my patients over the years. The body has a memory. The traces of the illnesses, surgeries and injuries we have gone through, and of the burdens we have carried for a long time, do not always remain in the same form; but they can contribute to the organism's behavior today. The physician's task is not to give a disease name to all of these traces; it is to be able to distinguish which of them is truly meaningful.
That is why, for me, regulatory medicine begins with this question: “Why can't this person's organism re-establish its own balance?”
Neural therapy is also one of the tools we use in this search when needed. The aim is not to give injections. The aim is, as far as possible, to understand the cycle that sustains the pain and the disease.
Making Room for the Healing Power of the Body
The human body has a far greater capacity for adaptation and healing than we assume. A wound closes, a bone knits, the system recovers after an infection; the heart speeds up, then calms down. The body continuously adapts to heat and cold, hunger and fullness, movement and rest. Life itself is already a state of uninterrupted regulation.
But sometimes obstacles accumulate in front of this capacity. Then the task of medicine is not to dictate to the body what to do, but to identify as accurately as possible the factors that make it difficult for it to re-establish its own order.
Over the years I have come to believe this more and more: A physician is not merely someone who intervenes in a disease. A physician is also someone who listens to what the patient's body is trying to say. Sometimes the most valuable information is hidden in a laboratory result, sometimes in the examination, and sometimes in the detail of an event the patient experienced years ago. These need to be evaluated without confusing them, preserving scientific limits but without fragmenting the person.
Because we have to study the human being by dividing them into parts; that is how science has advanced. But when we treat, we must not forget that those parts belong to the same person once again.
Perhaps the medicine of the future will remember this simple truth that we have known since the past:
We can study the human being by dividing them into parts; but healing only gains meaning when we see the whole again.
You can find neural therapy and Hüseyin Nazlıkul's other treatment methods here.