Can we say that Anthroposophic Medicine is Anti Aging Medicine too?

Anthroposophic medicine was born in the beginning of the last century by Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, medicine doctor. It is a medicine that has been infused with the teachings of alchemy and philosophy. Chief among these teachings is that the body is not an independent material organism and that good health depends on a harmonious relationship between the physical body, the etheric or vital force, the soul, and the ego.It builds on the well-established facts and methods of diagnosis and treatment of conventional medicine, which it extends with a holistic approach based on the principle of  ‘salutogenesis’, a term which describes an approach focusing on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease.

The general known concept of pathogenesis -the origin of disease – which still is the base of medicine and its research nowadays, opposites the newer concept of salutogenesis – the origin of health. The concept of salutogenesis aims on finding and examining factors which are responsible for the formation and the maintaining of health. In this context the concepts of Pathogenesis and Salutogenesis are not opposed to each other, they are meant to supplement each other.

“Salutogenesis makes a fundamentally different philosophical assertion about the world than does Pathogenesis. It directs us to study the mystery of health in the face of a microbiological and psychosocial entropic reality, a world in which risk factors, stressors, or ‘bugs’ are endemic and highly sophisticated [….] that open systems, no less than closed systems, were characterized by immanent forces of entropy”

 

Antonovsky, 1996, among the main speakers of the concept of salutogenesis worldwide.

Anthroposophic Medicine operates through the salutogenic model, which focuses on maintaining and stimulating the forces that generate health and it is based on the holistic concept of health; this leads to effective strategies for disease prevention through education and lifestyle programs and the development of self- management in the prevention of and coping with disease.

We are used to consider every condition of the human being as a pathology, instead we have to consider it over all as an opportunity for human development; the ‘salutogenic model’ is concerned with the relationship between health, stress and coping. An other goal of “salutogenesis” is the so called research of resilience’s forces. The research on resilience’s forces showed that heredity and environment are not fundamental for the human being development , instead is fundamental a third factor: the human relationship factor.
That is very important because in the salutogenic cause is fundamental the man’s faculty to deal with what is foreign, to support the conflicts, and in this comparison to strengthen yourself.

We haven’t only to prevent the stress, but also to support it and to know the limits of unbearable physical and mental side, to be able to then widen.
In a medicine that aims to support years spent fundamentally in rich wisdom and serenity, we can safely say that the Anthroposophical Medicine is also a medicine Anti Aging.