Speaker 1: Welcome back. These days more people are turning to holistic medicine. It’s a practice that considers the whole person, body, mind, spirit, and emotions. Here to tell us more is Dr. Erica Steele from Holistic Family Practice in Virginia Beach. Welcome to Coast Live.
Speaker 2: Hi. Thank you for having.
Speaker 1: So I’m really interested in this. I love the whole person, the whole body approach to everything. . And so how do you do this? First of all, what is a naturopathic doctor? Explain how you study and how you help people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we go through similar, undergrad training, doctoral training. So it’s a lot of education, but we’re not just trained on identifying and diagnosing and managing diseases.
That’s what an allopathic doctor does. What we do is we look for all of the imbalance. In the health of the person. And we’re also treating the person, not just their disease process or their nutrition or nutrient deficiencies or their food or whatnot. I That’s all included, but we’re really working with the individual and what the individual needs.
Speaker 1: Interesting. So when you say balance, how do you figure out how to get somebody in balance? Because I know you said you treat the mind as well as the body. So does all of this kind of go together?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So let’s shift some of the conversation. Yeah. So I’m not treating. Okay. I’m supporting you and holding that space for you to heal yourself.
Okay? So meaning that I’m, you’re not gonna come in and then I say, you say, Oh, okay. I have this problem here. Here’s how to fix it, right? , that’s not what we’re doing. What we’re doing is I’m listening to and identifying. What really matters to you and helping guide you through step by step, a process of healing.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah. So how is the gut connected to the brain?
Speaker 2: So the gut is like everything, right? Okay. Yes. Like its connected to the whole world. I believe it’s because when we’re, little embryo in the womb, we’re just this little collection of cells and. Splits off, you have your gut in your brain, and so it just continues to evolve from there.
Our GI system, it houses majority of the immune system, hormonal system and neurological system, so it’s very important in terms of helping assist all of the other systems. I call ’em reflexive systems. To our bodies.
Speaker 1: So how would I help myself, for example, cuz we were just talking off camera Yeah. About some issues I had going on with my sinuses. Yeah. But how do I even help myself?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So as we talked about with the drainages, right? And going on, so that’s an immunological response. So we look at the GI system and we know that we wanna help heal the GI system. So we look at where the imbalances are, whether that’s in stress, whether that’s immunological, whether there’s like heavy metals or chemicals in the system.
We wanna pretty much take the things out of the system that are not supposed to be in there. And we wanna continue to add the things like healthy nutrition and food, but also how you digest and assimilate your food. Cuz it’s not just what you eat, it’s how you break the food down.
Speaker 1: Okay. So do you do a lot of different testing then to find out what’s going?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we do the baseline testing that you’d have done at a physical, but then we all do the full range functional testing, so blood stool, serum, plasma, urine, hair,
Speaker 1: so things that maybe not all doctors would do. You go above and beyond.
Speaker 2: Yes. We’re trained more in clinical biochemistry and laboratory diagnostic. So we know which labs to run, how to read ’em, and how to evaluate and how to treat based off of them.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. And we have some information on the screen there about your holistic family practice classes. Explain those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that’s all self-empowerment to really help people to understand how to heal themselves.
It’s not a mystery, right? We all know eating fruits and vegetables are the key to good health, but it’s why those habits and those behaviors are not there. So it’s helping to distinguish that for people and then leave them empowered so that they’re able to, go out and do better for themselves.
Speaker 1: If somebody’s watching this and they’re interested and they wanna come see you, who should come see you? And how can they get in touch with?
Speaker 2: Yeah I treat families, so little kids all the way up to elderly and then people with ear infections all the way up to stage four cancer. So they would just call our office and schedule a first visit.
Speaker 1: Oh, that’s so interesting. Thank you so much for all that information. We really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 2: Wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Sure. All right.
What do you think?