Healing Has an Order: A Conversation with Dr. Lauren Deville on the Body's Design
By Dr. Cynthia Libert, Functional Medicine Physician | Caring for the Body, Center for Functional Medicine
This post is adapted from the Re-Think Aging podcast. You can listen to the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcQaBn-Bk_0
One of the themes I come back to again and again with every patient in my practice is this idea that healing has an order to it. If we address things in the wrong sequence, even with the best therapies, it can actually backfire. You can overwhelm the system when aggressive detoxification starts too early.
I couldn't think of a better guest to explore this with than Dr. Lauren Deville. She is a naturopathic physician, owner of Nature Cure Family Health in Tucson, Arizona, and the author of The Holistic Gut Prescription and How to Be Healthy: Body, Mind, and Spirit. She also hosts the podcast Christian Natural Health.
What Is the Therapeutic Order?
Dr. Lauren explained that when she started naturopathic school, she thought it was essentially "green allopathy," giving an herb instead of a pharmaceutical for the same symptom. But early in her training, a mentor changed her thinking entirely. As she put it, the body is designed to heal itself. God made it that way.
This is the vitalistic principle: living systems operate through intricate feedback mechanisms. Tinker with one part, and the body adjusts elsewhere to find a new balance. Every symptom is the body's intelligent attempt to do the best it can under the circumstances it's facing.
Dr. Lauren walked through the therapeutic order step by step:
- Remove obstacles to cure
- Give the body the building blocks it needs
- Boost the vital force
- Support damaged tissue
- Treat pathology with nutraceuticals, working with the body rather than suppressing it
- Use pharmaceuticals when necessary
- Palliate when healing is no longer possible
As she said, "if you give the body the building blocks that it needs to heal itself and then you get rid of any obstacles to cure, then within reason, healing should follow."
I see the same pattern in my own work helping people prevent and treat cognitive decline, including Alzheimer's disease. Conventional medicine often goes straight after the amyloid plaque, when that plaque may actually be the brain's protective response to a microbe, toxin, or imbalance. There is a place for pharmaceuticals, but we need to start at the foundation.
The "Canaries in the Coal Mine"
Some patients are highly sensitive, often locked in a sympathetic freeze state where the nervous system is constantly signaling danger. For these patients, Dr. Lauren said the priority is sending the body a signal of safety. That starts with removing the external trigger, whether it's contaminated water, mold, EMF exposure, or a toxic environment, before anything else.
Once the environment is addressed, she works to calm the nervous system: sunlight, grounding, vagus nerve stimulation, deep breathing, and gentle energetic approaches like red light therapy or homeopathy, used carefully since highly sensitive patients can react even to these.
Only after that groundwork is laid does detoxification begin, and even then, it has to happen in sequence. As Dr. Lauren described it, you start with elimination, because that is the route everything exits through. Then you move to circulation and lymph drainage before anything deeper.
I loved her point that we have to "tend to the soil" of the body before moving into more advanced therapies.
Mitochondria and the Cell Danger Response
We talked about mitochondrial support, which is often the first step recommended for cognitive decline. Dr. Lauren noted that mitochondria frequently go offline for a protective reason, referencing research on the cell danger response. If the body still perceives a toxic environment, giving mitochondrial supports like NADH or CoQ10 may do little, because the body isn't ready to receive that signal yet.
Her point stayed with me: everything the body does is intelligent relative to what is happening in its environment. If a therapy isn't working, the question becomes what we might be missing in that environment, not whether the therapy itself is wrong.
Listening to the Story
I asked Dr. Lauren how she evaluates a patient's environment. Her answer was simple. It isn't a checklist, it's a story. She starts every new patient by asking them to go back to when they were completely healthy, then build a timeline of what happened and when. Overlaying that health timeline with a trauma timeline, physical or emotional, often reveals the turning point.
This kind of listening is something I deeply value in my own practice. As Dr. Lauren put it, reflecting on the limits of conventional medicine's short visit times, "there is no way you can do good medicine in five to ten minutes."
Faith at the Center
We closed our conversation talking about how our shared Christian faith shapes the way we practice. Dr. Lauren shared that she prays for wisdom before every patient, and that she keeps a "trusting in God" journaling practice for herself, reviewing times when a situation looked impossible and God came through.
Her closing words summed up the heart of this entire conversation:
"The power is working with the body the way that God made it. And that's what I think needs to come back, not just to naturopathic medicine, but to all medical training, all medicine."
If you are dealing with a complex chronic illness, cognitive decline, or unresolved fatigue, Dr. Lauren's advice is a good place to start. Build your health timeline. Look for the overlaps with major life stressors or environmental changes. And find someone trained in functional or naturopathic medicine who can help you interpret what you find.
Ready to take a root-cause approach to your health? Start with a free strategy session with the Caring for the Body team.
Whole-person care. Science-backed. Faith-informed.