Rachel's Blogs
My Big Fat Greek (month-long) Feast!
Somehow it didn’t dawn on me immediately, that I was in fact living this nutrition nerd’s dream…I WAS ACTUALLY EATING THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET! 🤯 😍 Like, the real-deal, legit, bona fide, honest-to-goodness, original, dinkum 1960s Greek diet. That...
Suboptimal Thyroid Function? Could It Be Their Psych Meds?
Gone are the days, thankfully, when we could all easily identify any individual taking an antipsychotic 1) because they were the marginalised 'mad' and 2) stigma and shame were rife. With the seismic shift that has occurred both in psychiatry & society we now know...
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There’s Nothing Alive in this Kitchen!
From the giddy holiday highs to the lows! As you know we kicked off these school holidays with a birthday celebration at Stradbroke Island...time travel forward just a short distance to the end of school holidays and you'll find us we've now taken up residence in the...
Microbial Madness
The understanding that certain infections produce mental health presentations is not a new one. However, based in part on observations of some of the features of tick borne diseases (TBD) such as Lyme like illness, a reawakening of the role for infection in psychiatry...
Just Do It! (Motto for Successful Teen Feeding)
Question: What has 22 legs, 11 mouths, sounds like your tv, radio and CD player are all playing at their loudest deafening volume together and an appetite like a small army? Answer: the 11 teens I took to Stradbroke Island to celebrate my twins 16th birthday! Yes,...
Closing the Gap on Coeliac – Why a GF Diet Shouldn’t Come First
A patient walks into your client and reports that they think they might be reacting to gluten. Happens every week, if not every day, right? Awareness about potential negative health effects from gluten is exploding and often patients present self-diagnosing and self...
A Disclosure
Robert Bransfield MD DLFAPA likes to start off his presentations with a full and frank disclosure about potential conflicts of interest. After all, he is a well known psychiatrist and Associate Clinical Professor at Rutgers-RWJ Medical School, who is...
Sorry if I've been quiet for while but I promise have been very very busy! The Australian Naturopathic Summit is getting tantalisingly (& frighteningly!!) close, and I'm just back from a great Aus/NZ tour with Professor Vormann talking my heart out about Acid...
10 Top Tips to Improve the Accuracy of your Patients’ Blood Test Results
If you’re reading this you already know how much I love a good set of blood test results, right? It’s always (tragically!) a bit of a high point of my day when they spit out of the fax machine or become available through some other more modern little IT...
A New Mental Health Education Initiative in July!
“Access the Experts with Rachel Arthur” is a month long intensive webinar series focusing on the best of Mental Health Education. Every Thursday night for the month of July, Rachel will be interviewing a hand-picked guest speaker about a particular area of expertise...
Drop in for a Chat Tomorrow?
The New Practitioner Drop In Class is a monthly drop in class that focuses on providing an easy to access drop in opportunity for integrative health practitioners to participate in some of the most accelerated form of post-graduate education and clinically relevant...
Emotional Pain…Pop a Paracetamol?
During a mentoring session this week a practitioner asked me, 'How could paracetamol relieve anger?'. After the initial, 'What the..??.' reflex, I thought well the placebo response is really a wonderful thing, the potency of which should never be under-estimated. I...
Finding YOUR point of difference
I really enjoy mentoring practitioners in business - it's a real privilege to be able to hear about each practitioners' aspirations and challenges. A few weeks back I had the good fortune to speak with a fresh one! A practitioner who has only been in business for a...
Bone Broth Warning
Perhaps you've been keeping abreast of the bone broth debate? The practice of preparing broths made from slow boiled animal bones and made popular by the GAPS diet as well as many Paleo advocates, has come under scrutiny thanks to a small pilot study that evaluated...
Announcing the second intake for the Rachel Arthur Mentorship Program 2016
Due to popular demand and increasing interest, I am so pleased to announce that I will be starting a second Rachel Arthur Mentorship Program (RAMP) from May until November 2016! RAMP is a program that focuses on providing practitioners with the most accelerated form...
What’s the COCP really doing? An update on its physiological impact
How many of your clients are on a combination OCP? Do you know the full extent of the physiological impact in each? Are you able to identify to key pathology indicators regarding the magnitude of that impact? Like you I see a lot of clients who are on the COCP -...
Nothing like a big reminder of the power of ‘sickness related behaviour’
I've been sick - real sick just for a couple of days...an acute exotic respiratory thing that the northern Rivers and specifically the period around Bluesfest (!) seems to specialise in. Anyway, apart from it being terrible timing (I ask my patients 'when is it EVER...
Chronic Threadworm Infestation – Diagnosis & Effective Treatment: An Update
I was recently asked to speak at an ACNEM conference on 'Clinical Pearls in Paediatric Practice' and I talked about 3 key things that have proved to be absolute game-changers in my understanding and better management of children...and guess what one of my...
Anti-Epileptic Medications & Nutrient Interactions 101
Ok here's a gripe I'm having currently. I have a number of patients who are taking anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) and most of these are children who require them for seizure control. Naturally, working alongside such serious pathology and these critical medications...
What Does the new RACGP Guideline re Naturopathic Requests Mean?
It's taken a little while for me to collect my thoughts on this one. Initially there was a little flash of anger, frustration and a good deal of huffing and puffing when I heard about the RACGP guidelines recommending GPs say no to any requests from naturopaths for...
Ten Quick Tips for Identifying High Oestrogen & its Causes
During mentoring sessions over the last week I've been prompted to ask a few practitioners if their patient had any signs, either clinically or in their pathology results, of high oestrogen. Each time it kind of caught the practitioner off guard because their...
The Beauty of the Basics
Howdy practitioners - I've had an inspiring month of clients. Not because I cured anyone, answered some major riddle previously unsolved by modern medicine or any of these enormous tasks we or our patients often set ourselves but rather because I got back to basics....
I need a (Local) Hero!
Well here's a thought...the 'Superfood' nutrition movement has just about eaten the South Americans out of quinoa and the Pacific Islanders out of coconuts..isn't it time for a local hero? I get a bit despondent when any new food is touted as a 'Superfood' anyway for...