“Above all else guard your heart, for it determines the course of your life.”  –Proverbs 4:23

In the ND curriculum, we are taught to prioritize treatment according to a person’s center of gravity, meaning the most pressing threat to their health at that time.

In cases of emergency, stabilization is logically the center of gravity. If someone is bleeding out, stopping the bleeding is the first course of action. However, people don’t become naturopathic doctors to work in emergency settings, therefore determining the center of gravity warrants delicate discernment.

In class, we are taught that infection, diabetes or back pain are the centers of gravity in our patient cases. As a participating member of our culture, I am inclined to disagree.

If you are in a room with a sleeping lion, would you turn your attention to folding laundry or sweeping the floor? By all means, no. You would deal with the lion.

We live in a culture with a crisis of spiritual mediocrity. One that prowls after our very hearts. Yet as doctors, we carry on attending to mundane chores be it back pain, HbA1c scores, total cholesterol levels or numbers on a scale. We mask the real center of gravity – a lack of purpose, meaning and joy outside of ourselves – with symptomatic distractors.

Instead of crying out that there is a lion in the room, we fumble about trying to sweep the floor.

I am certainly not immune. In fact, I am the worst offender I know. It’s an easy algorithm: collect an intake or palpate the spine, and then discuss the best supplement to take, brand of water filter to buy, or lab to run. And obtain an arbitrary number to represent pain in order to prove our own efficacy, despite the fact that if a patient gets better, that will be an end unto itself.

What if we changed the algorithm. What if instead of focusing on the best brands to buy, supplements to take, or adjustments to perform, we focused on the real center of gravity as the book of Proverbs defines it, our hearts?

Would our heads emerge from our computer screens? Would our dinner tables become fuller, our prayer lives deeper, our communities stronger? I personally have never felt better from an adjustment or liver support supplement than I have from listening to a great sermon or sharing an evening around a table with friends. Yet we recommend the former and not the latter.

Dear friends take heed, there is a jewel that exceeds all price. If everything we do indeed flows from the heart, then protecting it, even at the steepest of costs, is well worth the fight.

Learn more about NUHS’ Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine program here.