THE CURIOUS MINDS CLUB 
While we're on the topic of perimenopause -and will we ever get off it btw because quite frankly there's so much that needs to be said?!- I need to bang the drum some more about bone health & our role in that. During our recent all-things-peri-education-event I...
It's 2022 and I am celebrating my 50th with friends. Within just a few months of this I have left a 14 year long relationship & relocated to a new town where I know no one. Next up, I'm undertaking an 11 day solo hike across the island of Kythira in Greece and at...
Are we doing ourselves out of a job? I've been talking treatment plans with my New Grads recently. Given, only recently these were major assessment items in their clinic units, they have been trained to create ALL-ENCOMPASSING (biopsychosocial) prescriptions and...
And all 35K results have been collated, analysed & made available so we can be better informed regarding expected Cortisol values based on sex (spoiler alert: women win & when I say win I mean track higher generally🤷♀️), age &...
Have you ever noticed that our products don't work if our patients don't take them?!🙄 The reasons for non-compliance, dis- or non-engagement, poor patient buy-in & follow through are many: *My dog ate the instructions * My inbox swallowed the instructions *As...
How much has THE world🌏 changed in the last 2 years?! Have the changes within the field of Integrative Health been equally seismic? I'm sure there are many different aspects to speak to & we all have our own thoughts to share on this. I shared my thoughts on this...
Last week, yet another patient with refractory diarrhoea, up to 10 stools a day, Bristol type 5-7, for 3 decades following a diagnosis of Crohn's at 16 years old. A range of specialists have thrown everything at 'it' - single & combination immunosuppressants, TNF...
Did I say, ‘Our Brain’? 🙄 Maybe it really should be, ‘Their Brain...on Drugs: what recreational substances reveal'. While infinite self-analysis is an occupational hazard for health professionals, when we use our detective powers for good not evil, our patient work-up...
And health, no matter which side you sit on, seems to be particularly plagued by them. I (incorrectly) recall my 4 year degree as being a series of deep personal losses, some favourite food, then caffeine, then alcohol etc etc.😂 Likewise, I'm aware that naturopathy...
"My 7yo daughter was frequently distressed, telling me she had that 'throat feeling'." As you can imagine, mum offered up a smorgasbord of suggestions to help her try and describe it: Can you swallow ok? Does it burn or taste funny? Where is it? Is it hard, soft,...
When was the last time you 'got on the gear?'. Wait, am I showing my age?🙄 The afore mentioned 'gear' could be beers or GnTs, weed or hooch, eccies or pingers, 'nose candy' or blow. I could keep going! While, anything beyond alcohol, might be purely a historical tale...
There's probably some poignant lines from a rap song everyone knows that I could insert here but, alas, Gold FM doesn't play anything produced after 1999, so I'm none the wiser. What I'm trying to bring to mind, is the potential clash between our reality & our...
I've been hatching this passion project for quite some time. In truth, I can probably trace its beginning back 2 decades, when I returned to practice, after working in psych meds for big pharma. I knew then I had something to say. Because even then I knew that we, as...
Burning, tingling, crawling, buzzing, humming, zapping, pins & needles, numbness: our patients often tell us about strange sensations they have in various parts of their body. It's typically not their major concern, but they mention it as an aside, a curiosity,...
There are some things we say so often to patients we could record them and just press <PLAY> Like this daily dogma: 'When you're under stress, your demand for Magnesium rises and then in turn that can make you more susceptible to further stress, so we're going...
And it will. It knocked again on a practitioner's door last week. She in turn knocked on mine. It turned out to be a very familiar story: Firstly: Patient presents distressed - recently a nurse applied the term 'Chronic Kidney Disease' to HER (note no one has ever...
And not in a good way, right. While we've known about the potential for peripheral neuropathy with excess B6 supplementation since the 1980s, currently there's a seismic shift in our sense of safety even with previously regarded 'safe' levels. You may have heard...
I'm intrigued by the silence. Hair loss in women is frighteningly common, following pregnancy, menopause & with extreme stress (wait is that a tautology? 🙄) In fact it can strike at any age and for a multitude of reasons. When it happened to me a few years back...
You may have noticed I don't often have recipe raves, swap serving suggestions or generally dialogue about diet. That's because about a decade into my career as a naturopath I hit food fatigue - my enthusiasm for explaining basic food swaps and increasing kitchen...
You know when you learn about a 'new' dis-ease driver and then you actually have to stop yourself from diagnosing every patient with it? I've done this dance with Gilbert's Syndrome for over a decade, so too maybe have some of you? And while there have been many,...
"After our group session I suggested the low fat trial but she was 'no, no, no....I can't take anything more out of my diet'. It was at the beginning of lockdown & she had other stressors as well. So I asked her to be mindful of her fat intake & if one meal...
No, this is not a trick question & it's certainly not a silly one. IBS, as many of us know, has a very loose diagnostic criteria: visceral hypersensitivity coupled with altered motility in the absence of organic disease. Hence it tends to 'loosely' fit a vast...
I'm 100% confident that, as a professional group, among our highest values about healthy, preferable, food choices, would be characteristics like: 'as close to nature as possible', 'unrefined', 'unprocessed', 'unadulterated'. Tell me I'm wrong. So, when I keep...