Before medicine had metrics, it had stories built on observation that carried clinical truths in plain words.
One of them still teaches a rule of clinical success.
Build foundations, then treat.
The Three Little Pigs understood the Therapeutic Order.
The tale of the three little pigs, carried through oral tradition since the 18th century, is a cautionary tale about indolence versus preparation, taking shortcuts versus building a foundation. We read it to children as entertainment, yet it compresses a medical education into three minutes.
Three pigs, three materials, one inevitable threat. The first pig chooses straw because it is fast. The second pig chooses sticks because they are stronger than straw and still go up quickly. Only the third pig chooses bricks, understanding the power of a real foundation.
This children’s tale predicts treatment success better than many diagnostic algorithms. Two decades of clinical cases in our journal support the pattern.
Walk into any practitioner’s office and you will see all three houses under construction. The straw house is the two thousand dollar protocol that addresses everything except the actual foundations. Sleep remains disrupted. Stress remains unmanaged. Movement remains absent. Relationships remain toxic. Sunlight remains inadequate. The patient receives comprehensive supplementation for a body that lacks the basic requirements to use any of it. It looks like medicine. It collapses like straw.
The stick house is better. The practitioner addresses sleep hygiene and prescribes magnesium. They recommend probiotics and talk about stress management. The foundation gets mentioned and even prioritized, yet the execution lacks commitment. Half measures on foundational issues produce half results. The structure holds longer than straw, yet it still collapses when real pathology tests it.
The brick house takes longer to build and requires uncomfortable conversations. The practitioner addresses the job that is destroying the patient’s sleep. They talk about the relationship that keeps the nervous system in a constant threat response. They deal with the trauma that makes the body feel fundamentally unsafe. Only after establishing these foundations do they introduce supportive interventions. It is the structure that holds when the wolf arrives.
Drugs and surgery are also part of the Therapeutic Order, but after the foundations of health are built.
That’s why our 20-year archive and fruiting of cases utilizing the Naturopathic Therapeutic Order is such a powerful tool for a spectrum of practitioners involved in patient care.
The wolf is disease, and he is patient, stealthy, and resolved. He will wait for shortcuts. The question is not whether he is coming. The question is whether we are building with straw, sticks or bricks.