Health isn’t black and white because YOU are an individual.
Spinach can be a great source of bone-building calcium and minerals for one person, and the culprit of oxalate-induced joint pain and kidney stones for another person!
Intermitting fasting can work great to balance blood sugar for one person, and cause adrenal stress and further hormone imbalance in another.
St. John’s Wort is an amazing mood-boosting herb that reduces nerve pain, but it’s not safe for everyone depending on what medications you’re taking.
It’s important to work with a trained professional who understands the intricacies of how the body works as well as drug-herb interactions, rather than recommending their personal favorite approaches to everyone!
I am so grateful for both conventional medicine and alternative medicine.
I believe all types of medicine have a time and place for each individual. When possible, I personally start with the lower-force, gentle methods such as plant medicine, nutrition, hydrotherapy, lifestyle modification, habit/routine adjustment, nutrition, supplements, etc.
But for emergencies, surgeries, acute cases such as sepsis, and severe autoimmunity that requires biologics/steroids, conventional Western medicine excels and I am so grateful these options exist.
I understand that everyone has their own personal preference when it comes to preferred modalities, and I respect your preferences and will tailor our work together accordingly.
I believe in a prevention & wellness model instead of a sick-care response system.
There are many wellness tools beyond the most conventionally prescribed pharmaceuticals. There are also just as many preventative tools as there are illness-treatment tools.
In the U.S., we live in a sick care system where imbalances aren’t treated until they have developed into full-blown detectable diseases with oftentimes permanent repercussions on our wellbeing.
I believe in your intelligent body’s ability to heal when barriers are removed and proper support and nourishment are added.
Just as birds know to fly south, and turtle hatchlings head toward the sea, your cells know how to heal. Your body is programmed for balance and health, but sometimes things get in the way of it running its various functions or “programs.” Toxins, lack of nutrients, stress, poor sleep, etc. can all interfere with our body’s ability to run its programs.
For example, if we are exhausted because our body’s energy-production pathway can’t run due to lack of sleep, and we use caffeine and stimulants to force the energy production into overdrive, our body has to pull those resources from somewhere else. Eventually, we will deplete our body’s other functions such as our cortisol production program that allows us to handle stress, and our digestive program that assimilates our nutrients so we can have strong bones and tissues.
Instead of forcing your body to do something, we want to look at why it’s not doing something in the first place (identify the root cause) and address that. Then your body can rebalance itself. We want to solve the root issue and move the needle toward health instead of just suppressing symptoms and driving the problem deeper.
There are so many parts of you that factor into your wellness.
You are the sum of your physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing. Your mindset, your emotions, and your connection to others or something larger than yourself is just as important as whether you are exercising or eating well. When you tap into your health intuition and develop a healthy relationship with your body, you are freely able to navigate your health with confidence—and that is the goal!
Research guides, but does not determine.
SIBO (intestinal bacterial overgrowth) existed before there were research studies documenting it. Naturopathic doctors understood functional physiology and knew that probiotics were helpful back when probiotics weren’t researched yet and were therefore considered a hoax by the Western medical community.
Healers around the world have used White Willow Bark as an anti-inflammatory and pain reducer long before the plant’s extracts were isolated and made into aspirin, and aspirin was then researched for years and then shown to be anti-inflammatory and a pain reducer.
Research does not breathe things into existence, but it does help establish safety and can help guide us toward the outcomes we want when used as part of the picture.
Most research (even what is considered to be “unbiased” research) is conducted by pharmaceutical companies. Natural health research studies are limited and are conducted mostly by universities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), because there is a lack of financial incentive to study herbs and natural approaches that cannot be patented and sold for significant profit.
So I let research guide me, but I do not limit my approach to only the financially supported treatments that have made it into PubMed.