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Recently, I posted about my very positive experience of the AIMA NZ conference, prior to that I was gabbing on about the upcoming ACNEM Brain Health conference in Melbourne in May and now I am going for the conference hat trick!  I want to revisit a really impacting lecture for me at last year’s Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine (ASLM) conference, delivered by the Emeritus Professor Mark L. Wahlqvist AO, BMedSc, MBBS, MD (Adelaide), MD (Uppsala), on the relationship between ecology and human health.

Why did I find his talk so impacting?  Why should every integrative practitioner take the time to watch this?

I grew up with Mark Wahlqvist.  Not literally no, but he was the author of several key mainstream Australian nutrition texts that we used during my undergraduate.  They were very conservative, conventional even…ahem…dull books. My critique of his books however, doesn’t appear to have negatively affected his career! (lol) Mark Wahlqvist went on to become Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Monash University and the president, chairperson, head honcho & kingpin of more nutrition boards, panels and advisory committees than you can poke a stick at – highly regarded internationally for his nutritional knowledge and insights particularly in the context of public health.

Now regarded as an elder in the field, he speaks with reflection, wisdom & incredible insight about the challenge of human nutrition in our current ecology & the solutions we desperately need. And as an Emeritus Professor of Medicine, he speaks the language of naturopathy eloquently to an audience that needed perhaps to hear it from one of their own.

“We are intimately connected to our locality through genomic convergence and cooperativity, biorhythms, energy throughput and regulation, locomotion, sensory inputs, hormonal and other homeostatic mechanisms, microbiomic pathways, other immune processes, our food systems and various inanimate factors which contribute to our environment and interaction with it. When these are perturbed, so are we; being synchronous with nature is a marker of our health.”

There are so many conferences and education opportunities being offered to us and not all of them are of equal value.  It’s noteworthy when we get to hear or witness something as important as this.   I feel so lucky to attend the good ones and I am really pleased when I can pass on the best of the bunch.  Been hassling Stephen at ASLM for a while to enable everyone access to Mark’s talk...so here it is.  Thanks Stephen 😉

Rachel’s Update in Under 30 Subscriptions are a great way to stay up to date in under 30 minutes every month on a key clinical topic.  These mp3 recordings, delivered fresh to your inbox every month represent independent unbiased education on topics that will change the way you practice – from diagnostics to treatment, quick case studies to supplement sleuthing!  Check out some of the previous topics here.