#6 What is a Naturopathic Medicine? FAQ

Oahu Holistic Medicine

Okay, so let's talk about naturopathic medicine and what's included in it. So here in Hawaii and some other states that can be primary care, I don't remember off the top of my head what they are. But, you know, just like you'd go to your regular general practitioner, your regular doctor, you can go to see a naturopath. Instead, assuming that your annual wellness exams, done routine bloodwork, we can also go deeper and do some specialty testing and look at stuff that aren't necessarily commonly looked at blood markers, but can tell us about some of the next deeper layers of the onion, some, you know, other things that are happening that maybe aren't as apparent to other practitioners or things that don't show up in the regular routine bloodwork, fertility support and pregnancy preparation, if I was, you know, spending a lot of money and time and I really, really wanted that kind of thing to happen. I think I would be, you know, looking at natural ways to support that. And my partner, Dr. gaudir, she's very, very skilled at going into that, and helping people get set up for that. So anyway, nutrigenomics analysis, which is how your genes affect your nutrition, your ability to process nutrients as they come into processed food it comes in, and what your genes are saying about your proclivities to be able to do that well, or not being able to do that. So well. What are you absorbing? Well, what are you not absorbing them? And what can we do to offset the kind of hand that your adult How can we fix not really fix is a funny word, but how can we supplement where things maybe aren't necessarily working as well? Or, you know, downregulate, things that are, you know, happening? Too much. nutritional counseling was always great to have somebody help you figure out what to eat. naturopaths are actually trained that most general practitioners actually are not trained in nutrition at all. So that I think we're seeing the problems associated with that supplement and nutraceutical counseling. So it's very easy to see all kinds of stuff that you should take like the world is full of health foods and supplements, it's kind of hard to know what to do. So it's really helpful to have somebody talk you through it. I, for example, until I started working with her, I had no idea that there were so many different kinds of zinc, or so many different kinds of magnesium, they all do different things. So if somebody says you should take magnesium for our sleep, like there's a bunch of different kinds, and there's time where you should use some over the other. So having somebody walk you through that is really important. Same thing with botanicals in herbal medicine, if you don't have a background of like having grown up in a tradition where your grandmother always used this plant and this thing for that and you have some kind of background knowledge about it. It's very again, easy to be told you should be on this herb, you should take Asha Kondos, you take Rishi ginseng, all of these things, and not necessarily have a grasp of when you shouldn't use those things. And it's very possible, like any medicine, if it's strong enough to help you is strong enough to hurt you. And we see that a lot in the clinic where people don't know what they're taking, and they wind up taking the wrong things, or take them for too long. And it causes damage that we have to look at and figure out how to undo or, you know, mitigate drug review for nutrient depletion. So a lot of times being on on a medication for, you know, weeks, months, years, or even decades, or multiple decades without looking at the damage done the nutrients that are depleted that the body relies on to either process that or that the nutrient pulls out on or sorry that the medication pulls out on its way out whatever nutrient grabs on his way out the door. With prolonged use, and not necessarily addressing the depletion is that depletions will become more and more and more severe and can manifest in a very variety of different ways. So we want to look at that and make sure that we're supplementing where your medications are potentially draining. So we're talking about Specialty Tests. Some of the specialty tests include, you know, nutritional status, are you deplete or excess in certain micronutrients or even macronutrients and, you know, not necessarily seeing how much protein or sugar that you have, but also what are the related markers, what's happening all surrounding that autoimmune conditions, how is your immune immune system attacking itself or not? And what are the markers that can look at that? adrenal function, you know, endocrine, health, anything with hormones, male and female hormone testing as it relates to reproductive health and you know, as that relates to aging or coming of age, that kind of thing, microbiome imbalances, irritable bowel disease, your bowel syndrome and small intestine bacterial overgrowth. microbiome, like the bacteria that lives in Your digestive tract, getting that sorted out can really help to change those conditions IBD IBS, SIBO. I've seen it in my patients, I've seen it in myself. And there's a lot of I think microbiome is going to become huge, hugely important in the next, I don't know, 20 3050 years, maybe in health and getting that sorted out will save you a lot of embarrassment, a lot of frustration, a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort. So we can also test for those things or, you know, naturopaths have the ability, many of them have the ability to do that. heavy metal toxicities can cause like, like mercury is the classic one we know about that. There's other heavy metals in our environment toxicity that can you know, toxic heavy metals that can cause problems in our body. And I'm sure if you Googled heavy metal toxicity, you'd see lots and lots of symptoms that I think you probably recognize that a lot of you may have those. So food sensitivities what foods are working for you what aren't working for you. Advanced cardiovascular panels, even beyond what's tested in regular basic testing. inflammatory markers, environment, mold, algae is a big one. Mold causes a lot of problems for people. neurotransmitters, do you have the right amount of neurotransmitters? Are they working? Well, organic acids nutrigenomics we talked about and chronic viral infections. Definitely a lot of people have lingering low grade chronic viral infections, like mononucleosis, or Epstein Barr limes disease. Now we're seeing we'll probably see that with chronic COVID, too. You know, as we go further and further down the line, I don't know of any ways to test for low grade lingering COVID. Yeah, I don't know if the tests like that exists. But point being chronic viral infections cause problems that are a little bit trickier to trace unless you know, to look for chronic viral infections. So I think everybody should get tested for that at some point, it's pretty low. It's, you know, it's low risk, high reward for sure. nutrigenomic analysis. So again, we talked about using your so we use a software called Opus 23, which will look at your genetics and tell you what's going on with your genes and how that relates to what issues may be predisposed to have developed based on the way that the genes work. That's not my area of expertise, I don't know, but I know is very interesting. And I've learned a lot from it. And I use that in my day to day life. microbiome analysis we talked about right? Can microbiome if it's if the balance of the gut flora is off, you want to have a diverse healthy balance of different kinds of bacteria. But if you have an overgrowth of one or you're you've been on chronic, even antibiotics a lot, you can run into issues like like gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, SIBO, IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, Ra psoriasis, lupus, and some other complications that are outside of kind of the digestive tract, or the immune system would be anxiety with weight issues. Yeah, could be part of digestive tract could also be hormone related, could be a number of things, insomnia, and kind of overall health, like the the digestive tract is tied to every other organ system. They're all connected, but specifically, when the digestive tract goes haywire, everything else is going to slip when the digestive tract is fixed, everything else benefits fixed again, being a funny word, but optimized or, you know, change for more beneficial balance. And yeah, and that can lead to you know, having correct balance of that can can prevent and preemptively treat, again, some of the aforementioned diseases. So, yeah, we like to analyze how the food metabolizes what nutrients are coming in, when nutrients are deficient. Calories, how are you absorbing all of that and how does that all relate to weight loss or weight gain which is a big question for people that want to know how to lose weight they want to keep it off and or why they're gaining weight. So that's a little bit of a window into naturopathic medicine. I hope it was helpful. I've been in Dr. Santander. Thank you for listening