Natural Health Help

I have an empty half hour on a gorgeous Fall-like day. I have a to-do list a mile long. I want to go outside and play. Ignoring leaf piles begging to be kicked up, I call out to my office manager. “Hey, come have some fun with me. What should I talk about for this next blog entry- Weight loss? Sports injury? Truth and Beauty?” She comes through the door and drops into the chair next to me. “How about erectile dysfunction?” She’s scowling. She seems to be losing her sense of humor about her email spam deluge. “Well, we could do that” I tell her, “but it misses too much of our demographic. What’s the bigger issue?” She rolls her eyes at that and gets up to do something more like work. Tosses over her shoulder, “What does everyone come to see you for? They want to feel good.”

That’s about right. Natural medicine does seem to promise ‘feel good’. It also inspires a lot of mythology. Things like, you’ll have to be a vegetarian. Or, give up coffee. Or, that there’s a vitamin you can take to replace the prescription you’re taking and it’ll work the same only better, and be cheaper, with no side effects. And, you can’t hurt yourself with herbs, right? Plus, it’s easy to figure out which ones to take, just the clerk stocking the shelves what would work for what you’ve got, or your neighbor can hook you up to his down-line, and you can get the stuff that’s good for everything…

After nearly 30 years as an other-than-conventional health care provider, I can tell you, natural medicine is a lot like oh, say, skiing. It is easy, cheap, safe and effective after you have invested lots of time and intense attention to acquiring the necessary tools and mastering the essential skills. Gaining feel good on the terrain of Life means commitment to a dynamic learning process, to maintaining your equipment, choosing your trip according to the conditions in the moment and being able to continuously adjust your course.

Feel good means different things to each of us, and it’ll change all the time. I‘m most interested in the roots of things. What is most fundamental to feel good in general? I think choice is basic. And, to have choice, you have to have information, and you have to know how to use it.

Feeling bad is information. Symptoms are us telling ourselves that something we are doing isn’t working. The main difference between what I do with folks who work with me, and what a conventional practitioner usually does, is to spend the necessary time to search out what you are doing that isn’t working, and figure out how to do something different. The conventional medical model can be (over)simplified as something being done to you- an expertly administered drug, or just the right surgical excision. These solutions are excellent, irreplaceable tools for our well-being. They don’t however, as everyone pretty much understands at this time, adequately address all the ways we feel bad. Some things can’t be cut out by someone else- but, you could cut it out yourself, that is, stop doing that, and do something different and you’d get a different result.

My job, the thing I love to do, is lend you the value of my experience, having witnessed thousands of human self-experiments, listened to uncountable hours of story. Combining clinical experience with constantly refreshed technical education, I use this collective of information to help you hone in on the most likely choices for the feel better outcome. Sifting your expertise on your self in with my long practice at using thee tools, means I can support you to arrive where you want to be, health-wise, sooner rather than later.

If you are local, think about making an appointment. If you live too far to drive to Missoula MT, check out www.naturopathic.org, website for the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians. There’s a Find a ND feature on there that will help you locate the licensable naturopathic physician closest to you.

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