How To Healthy

Hello and thank you for your interest in How To Healthy. This site was created for people trying to improve their health. It's pretty new but I am adding new content as quickly as I can. Being as healthy as you can be takes time and effort. This site is here to support your efforts by...

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• Providing tools to make your goals more achievable

• Providing information about various health topics

• Providing solutions to various health related problems

• Providing inspiration and encouragement to keep you on track

• To connect you to in-person care if you should desire it. 

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I just finished my Internship in Naturopathic Medicine at the Robert Schad Naturopathic Clinic at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. Before beginning my degree in Naturopathic Medicine I completed an Honours Bachelor of Science at the University of Guelph. Between those degrees I worked, took other courses, and did normal life things like get married and have a kid. 

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I am a research junkie. I spend too much of my free time reading and summarizing articles from medical journals, both Naturopathic and Conventional. In my non-research free time I love to grow vegetables, develop recipes, forage for wild foods and make medicines from scratch.

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So why did I choose Naturopathic Medicine? When I was a kid I was frequently sick, sometimes with serious ailments that put me in the hospital. My most memorable serious illness was a respiratory disease where I would have coughing attacks that would leave me unable to breathe and gasping for air. My parents would take me to the ER frequently. The doctors did not believe my parents when they described what was going on. They prematurely decided what I had was just asthma and threw medication after medication at me, none of which did any good. One nurse thought I might have whooping cough but the doctors continued to treat asthma. The attacks got worse and worse until they were causing my skin to turn blue from lack of oxygen. Finally I was admitted to the hospital. It was determined that I did have whooping cough, but it was not suspected because I was vaccinated. 

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The system broke down for me because I was not one of the 80-85% of people who got protection from this specific vaccine. I was an outlier and outliers often get missed. I have seen the system break down for others for similar reasons but different conditions. They don't have one of the most likely conditions so they fail to receive the appropriate care.

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In school we learned algorithms, clinical decision rules and how to calculate disease probabilities using likelihood ratios. These are all tools to help us determine the most likely conditions a patient has. This is the same system of reasoning that skipped right over me. While I still use these tools, I do so with a grain of salt. I feel it is important to catch the outliers so that they don't slip through the cracks like I did. I strive to consider the more rare conditions when the more common ones just don't seem to fit. 

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There is a drive in mainstream medicine to make everything as efficient as possible, ask the fewest questions, do the fewest physicals, run only a few labs and make a decision fast. The system puts more and more pressure on MD's to reduce visit times. It's not fair to doctors who are now trying to make very complicated decisions very quickly. It's not fair to patients who are receiving care from over worked doctors. 

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I feel so fortunate to have an hour with my patients each appointment. I love learning about the details of their health, how their health affects their lives and what their lives are like. I love finding solutions that will work best for their unique situation. But most of all, I love when they come in and tell me that they feel better. It is what drives me to work hard for my patients every day. It makes every boring class, terrifying exam and dollar of tuition worth it. It has been the struggle of a lifetime working through this insanely difficult program while raising a child but every time I see a patient, I know I decided on the right career.  

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