THE CURIOUS MINDS CLUB 
There was indeed food & drink & merriment galore but a good holiday season for me is about having the conversations. With family, friends, my professional peers. This is the real feast. In this strange period between one year and the next, portals appear to...
As part of our current audio series on the pros & cons of non-enteral administration of our medicines, we're finally up to the foof. The vajayjay. The bajingo. The coochie. I mean what exactly does happen when we start delivering nutrients direct to this target...
ACNEM’s annual conference is almost upon us and this will be a jammed packed weekend of fascinating talks and lots of great networking. Evolving Landscapes of Nutrition in Medicine – ACNEM Conference 2019 in Melbourne 24-26 May This year there is a range of...
As health professionals who take the time & have the incredible attention to detail to capture the 'whole health story' of each patient, we can end up with vast amounts of information for every client: detailed medical histories, broad systems-reviews, condition...
Ok I need to straight up apologise for the 80s pop culture (and I use that last term loosely) reference. That was uncalled for...especially because this message might need to be heard most by those next gen naturopaths who weren't even born when mullets had...
When I was studying my under-graduate I imagined my clinic was going to be full of them: well patients wanting to maintain or even improve upon their wellness. Turns out...not so much...all the really really sick people have taken their spots and the former has been...
How often were we told this in our training? And how often have we found this to be true in practice? And now suddenly, it seems, the medical researchers (at last!) are rapidly coming around to this core concept?? Our microbiome is suddenly the hottest property on...
a. Some hip new (truly undanceable) track b. Every herbalist's jaw at my table at the NHAA conference gala dinner, when I got almost all my Latin binomials right during the trivia quiz?...and after some champagne, that's a particular achievement c. My jaw, when I saw...
I arrived home from the Farmer's Market this week ready to cook a little number I like to call 'egg dinner' (fancy I know 😉 ) and found my organic bunch of kale, covered in dirt. Ok, admittedly, there was a small reflexive, barely-audible-beyond-immediate-neighbours,...
Q: If a patient says they can only tolerate 7 foods...how many did they start with? A: Typically about 20 No, this answer doesn't come from some complex mathematical formula...it comes from appreciating the low dietary diversity of those eating a Western diet. When...
We're not deaf...we heard that stampede of Iron-Inundated Practitioners! Our recordings and clinical resources for improving your skill-set in all things iron including, your accuracy of diagnosing deficiencies, pseudo-deficiencies & excesses, plus...
My career path has taken me a long way and in a very different direction from the one I started on. During my uni days I wildcrafted herbs, enthusiastically made potions and, yes as the semi-famous story goes, even misidentified one wild-crafted species and...
So this is not news to most people who know me but I don't like taking things out of people's diet. As a result, in a room full of naturopaths & integrative medicos, I might be voted the least likely to use the phrase, "No Gluten or Dairy for you!" [said with the...
Let's talk turkey about our pharmaceutical Pet Hates, mine are Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPIs). They irk me more than any other drug class. It's not entirely rational. Let's face it, they have some stiff competition but for some reason, in my mind, they almost always...
Hear Hear...on all levels, right. But this is actually the first recommendation of an easy to read patient resource for families dealing with adolescent depression, that you and your patients can access here. As lovely as the picture above makes parenting look, the...
My second speaking gig for 2019 is approaching at a vertigo-inducing speed (hey...wait..someone stole January??), heading to Hobart as part of the NEW primary training course that ACNEM have created and will be rolling out this year around the country. I am really...
So you've gone to all the effort. Be that writing referral letters suggesting some pathology investigations might be warranted or you've coached your patients endlessly to get copies of ones done elsewhere so that you may be privy to their findings. Worse still,...
While we're on the topic...I tend to think, that as good as we are at asking a lot about a patient's health, we can always do better. One of the classic pitfalls for practitioners is having to rely so much on patient self-reporting: Is your period heavy,moderate or...
How long? How long must we sing this song? I'm feeling a bit 80s anthemic and righteous. It turns out that patients' bowel movements could be improved by using a foot stool?!! Who said that?? Only every naturopath, ever. Right? But now medical researchers are...
Remember the good old days when we understood everything about food allergies and life was simple? IgE was the culprit - short and sweet - which made patient assessment (SPT) & management (never eat this again, never feed it to your infants if you don't...
Virginal skin, as my sister calls it, is on the endangered list. She also predicts that as a result, it will be a highly sort after commodity in the future and I agree but our reasons are a little different. Hers are aesthetic and mine are well, health-based. I...
Did you read something fabulously non-work related over the break? I did. Basically opening any book by Isabelle Allende evokes a Pavlovian relaxation reflex in me - ok admittedly some salivation as well! Then I decided to seamlessly segue into some work-related...
Relax, no one is leaving RAN central - they've deadlocked all the doors (!) but I’ve left another online abode I built and time-shared in last year….The Worm Whisperer…which is exclusively focused on educating the public about worms. Not the compost ones, but...