Health Detective

If there were such a thing as a "medical gumshoe" I'd be it. I love a good mystery.  

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I am a deep believer that "the answers are out there", and we just have to ask the right questions to find them.  And, like Sherlock Holmes, we have to actually look at all the data.

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What I offer is different

There are three things that distinguish me from other health care professionals.

1) My commitment to keep asking questions until we find the answers.

2) My willingness to devote the time that it takes to get there.  

3) The wide variety of paradigms I have trained in give me a lot of different lenses to look through.  

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Most health care practitioners, especially in the conventional system, specialize in a particular part of the body or a particular technique of healing. Because of this they tend to assess and treat only the parts they know and ignore the rest (or at best send you to a different specialist who will assess and treat only the parts they focus on). They tend to limit themselves to diagnostic tools and testing that are common to their healthcare "micro-culture".  This is not necessarily a bad thing; we need specialists who devote their whole focus to deep understanding of one thing.  The problem is the loss of the art of the generalist. 

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Multiple Perspectives

Naturopathic doctors are trained to look at the body and all of its systems as a whole, to see how systems interact with each other, and how single, common threads can weave through and affect many things at once.  NDs are also trained to look at health from a whole life perspective. Looking for the cascade of life events that correlate to changes in your health patterns. We are also trained to look a little deeper than just screening tests, and to favor critical thinking over algorithms. One of the principles of our core philosophy is to "find and treat the cause".

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Acupuncturists are also trained to look at the whole body, but Chinese medicine divides the body systems and functions completely differently.  Ayurveda (the traditional healing system of India) has yet another map of the body and its system.  There are many maps of the human ecosystem.  While they do not exactly overlap, they are all true within their own paradigm. I think of it as a many faceted jewel, that fractures light differently depending on which direction you shine the light beam through.  Or perhaps the 5 blind men with their hands on different parts of an elephant.  The fundamental truth is there, but depending on your point of view the map can look different.  

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With training in many different healing systems, as well as research, I look at each person's health story as a whole, from many different perspectives.  I consider:

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• Inborn Genomics

  • What raw material do you have to work with?

  • Are there genomics that match the symptom picture that could be better supported?

• Biochemistry

  • What nutrients do you need more or less of due to your unique combination of genomics, diet, environment, habits, illnesses, medications, etc?

  • What labs have and have not been looked at?  If there are obvious symptoms, has that system been thoroughly checked?

• Physical structure

  • How the musculo-skeletal system interfaces with the nervous system and through that the endocrine and immune systems.

  • What imaging has or has not been done?  Is gaining a picture possible?

  • How thoroughly has the body been examined?

• Energetics

  • excess or deficient? 

  • hot or cold? 

  • damp or dry?

  • flowing or stuck?

  • what level of the energetic body is affected?

• Exposures

  • to pathogens, biotoxins, toxic chemicals, sick buildings, pollution, etc

• Results of past "therapeutic trials"

  • What successes and failures have happened with various treatment strategies?

• Psychological and Spiritual health​

  • Stability, fear, loss, love, joy, grief - all impact our physiology​.

  • Change and stressful life events affect our physiology.

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I put all those pieces on the table (ok, sometimes spreading it out all over my living room floor). 

Your whole life health history, all of your labs, all imaging, all symptoms, physical exams, major life events, everything.  

I map it all out, find the holes (missing data), and look at where the patterns are pointing. 

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Happily, there is often an "ah ha!" at the end of that process. 

For most of my clients, working with me is the first time anyone has ever pulled all the pieces of their story together into a comprehensive whole and looked for the common threads.