Boulder Naturopath: Use Pandemic to Evaluate Your Health

Around the world tens of thousands of people have come forward who want to help others survive the coronavirus pandemic. That includes Boulder’s Charley Cropley, a naturopathic physician, and teacher who has been helping people improve their health in Boulder since 1979.  KGNU’s Roz Brown says Cropley is passionate about encouraging people to use the current health crisis as an opportunity to make changes.

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Charley Cropley has been a Front Range practicing naturopath for more than four decades. Naturopathic medicine is a system that uses natural remedies to help the body heal itself. Cropley says the novel coronavirus called Covid-19, is no exception. He says the coronavirus pandemic is now being called a war, but that implies we don’t have control over how we’re impacted.

“Our cultural, conventional relationship with illness is that it’s an enemy, something to be feared, something to be fought against and destroyed and focuses on something outside ourselves, the enemy,” said Cropley.

Cropley notes there are four pillars of naturopathic medicine, the first being what we eat.

“We transform our health by transforming the way we eat,” said Cropley. “And how do we eat in this country? Horribly! Our food has been stolen from us and processed and sold back to us in ways that do nothing but make us sick and then when we become sick we’re given pharmaceuticals because we’re poisoning ourselves by the food we eat.”

Cropley says movement or exercise is also inherent wisdom that allows the body to heal itself.

“The second is movement,” said Cropley. “We are taught about a virus that attacks our lungs and creates an interstitial pneumonia. The lungs are healed by and can be strengthened through breathing exercises and the power of fresh air.”

“The third area is the use of our minds, teaching people the power that we have to heal ourselves and using on minds to care for the suffering in our minds -– the anxiety, the depression, the grief, the negative emotions we feel – people can learn how to change their relationship to those.”

Social distancing has proven extremely effect in our current health crisis – but people across the globe have found ways to connect with loved ones on Skype, Zoom, email or the old-fashioned telephone. He prefers to call the current situation, distant socializing, which he says is more critical than most of us realize.

“The fourth area is community and relationship and coming together to talk and be in communication about making these changes – what changes we’re making in our own personal lives,” said Cropley. “The work of healing ourselves is learning the ways we’re harming ourselves in these areas.”

He says it’s important to learn about the new virus, but it’s equally important to turn our attention to ourselves.

“That’s where the power is,” he said. “We are making ourselves susceptible to things we never would have been susceptible to before.”

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