Improve your health through natural medicine
75% of American adults take supplements to help with overall wellness or to address specific symptoms. Often these are symptoms that their doctors say they have to just live with, or that are a normal part of aging. Things like brain fog, poor sleep, fatigue, and gastrointestinal issues are all common but are by no means normal or healthy. Fortunately, they are also symptoms that you don’t have to live with.
Naturopathic medicine treats these symptoms as signals from the body. By combining these signs from the body with specialty labs, a naturopathic doctor can determine exactly what will help your body heal. Normally this involves a blend of herbal and nutritional supplements to support the organs in the body that aren’t functioning properly, all the way from liver detox to neurotransmitters in the brain.
But naturopathic medicine is so much more than just supplements. What if you could find out what your perfect diet was by identifying the foods you are sensitive to? What if your joint pain was caused by the food you were eating and not just arthritis that you are doomed to live with the rest of your life? What if your brain could work better and your energy level could be higher?
Because naturopathic medicine uses diet, minerals, herbs, and lifestyle to improve health (instead of drugs), it is uniquely suited to address these sorts of concerns, so you can be the best version of yourself.
At Ideal Human, we combine this rich tradition of medicine with the latest in research and lab testing to investigate every factor that is playing into your health. We use this data to stratify your plan and determine exactly where to intervene and which symptoms will self resolve once you remove those things that are hindering your body. Our end goal is always to have you feeling amazing without being dependent on drugs, supplements, or strict dietary restrictions.
How we do It
Botanical medicine:
Plants have been used as medicine since antiquity. Botanical medicine combines this rich tradition with modern research to help restore the body to proper function and support tissue health
Nutritional medicine:
Our body uses enzymes to speed up cellular processes, and all of these enzymes require minerals to work. Unfortunately, many of us are deficient in one or more minerals due to conventional farming practices, poor diet, and gastrointestinal issues making it difficult to absorb nutrients. Nutritional medicine analyzes labwork and symptoms to determine which nutrients are lacking and seeks to replete these stores
Diet:
We eat three times per day, and so food can be either our most powerful medicine or our worst poison. We use advanced food sensitivity testing along with individualized dietary assessment to make practical recommendations for a healthy diet.
Lifestyle Coaching:
Taking pills is easy, but true healing takes time and commitment. We are surrounded by poor food options, we are encouraged to work too hard and rest too little, and we are bombarded by constant noise. Lifestyle medicine examines your day-to-day life to help find sources of imbalance and design a plan to address these sources of stress on the body. The end goal is to create a lifestyle that leaves you recharged and vitalized, rather than drained.
Detoxification:
Clinical detoxification aims to support the body’s pathways for toxin removal. Often this includes supporting biochemical pathways in the liver to support the body to clear hormones, chemicals, and other toxins, and opening the routes of elimination. By lowering the body’s toxic burden, we enable all other systems to work more efficiently and decrease inflammation.
Lab testing:
While all doctors run lab tests, our tests are different. We aren’t trying to diagnose a disease, instead we are trying to understand the body. So while some of the tests may be familiar to you, a lot of them are unique to natural medicine practitioners. Additionally, we often have a much smaller range of acceptable values on the conventional tests we run, because we don’t just want you to be in range, we want you to be optimal.
Principles of Naturopathic Medicine
1- First, Do No Harm (Primum non nocere) Naturopathic doctors use safe, drug-free therapies to help the body heal. Too often, prescription drugs come with unacceptable side-effects, and ultimately do more harm than good, and doctors are all too eager to cut out organs, fuse the spine, and cut open joints. These therapies are highly invasive and should be reserved for a last option.
2- The Healing Power of Nature (Vis medicatrix naturae) The body can heal itself, if we let it. Normally symptoms are seen as something that needs to be suppressed, but really they are the body’s way of trying to find its balance, or homeostasis. Remove these obstacles and give the body proper nutrition, and it will return to normal, healthy functioning.
3- Identify and Treat the Causes (Tolle causam) We put your symptoms together to understand the underlying process in these symptoms. This is what makes naturopathic medicine so elegant. Instead of chasing symptoms, we go to the root cause, and thereby many symptoms resolve with just one intervention.
4- Doctor as Teacher (Docere) We educate the patient about what they are experiencing, why they are experiencing it, and what may help change this. Because we do so much more than prescribe pills, we need you, the patient, to understand why you are asked to do certain things and how it will impact your health.
5- Treat the Whole Person (Tolle totum) No system in the body works in isolation, and so we must look at all the systems to heal the body. This includes the many organ systems, but also the mental and emotional aspects as well
6- Prevention (Praeventare) Prevention is far less costly than cure. Prevention for conventional doctors means regular screening and hoping to catch a disease early in the process. Prevention for naturopathic medicine means you identify the factors that lead to disease and address those before disease ever happens.