Whole Medicine Blog
Explore the Five Pillars of Wellness
At Plum Spring Clinic, our holistic approach to healing chronic illness is grounded in the conviction that our well-being arises from our self-care in five major domains: happiness and resilience to stress; nutrition; exercise and movement; rest and sleep; and toxin...
Moving Through
What seems like a long time ago, I was teaching in a medical school course that introduced medical students to different philosophies of healing. A person I later got to know and become friends with, a medicine man in the Cherokee tradition named Hawk Littlejohn, gave...
Fluoride May Be Good For Our Teeth But Is It Bad For Our Babies’ Brains?
A research study conducted by the Canadian research program Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals (MIREC) and recently published in the Journal of the American Medical society has raised concerns about fluoride treatment as well as the effect of fluoride...
Is Your Sunscreen Doing More Harm Than Good?
Did you know that skin cancer is the most common cancer in the US? In fact, the number of Americans diagnosed with skin cancer is higher than the number diagnosed with all other cancers combined and the rates continue to rise. Research has shown that sun exposure is...
It’s my fault
As I work with adults who experienced childhood trauma, I’ve increasingly become aware of a child’s belief, deep down inside many of these folks, that they are the cause of their own unhappiness. The chronic symptoms that have brought them to see me reflect how this...
The Gym
I can save you money!! And no, it is not snake oil. I’m old and pretty active. I play racquetball several times a week, I garden and haul big, 50 pound bags of “stuff" around and dig and bend over and weed and Kathleen makes sure my vegetable intake is pretty good. I...
First Year Medical Student
I was a first-year medical student and like my classmates, vulnerable to developing whatever disease we were studying. Or at least compulsively worrying that I was in the early stages of its development. This week we had learned about anterior compartment syndrome....
The Factory
Functional Medicine: thinking of your body as a factory In our holistic medical practice we are increasingly looking into metabolic disturbances that often have far reaching and unpredictable consequences on health and wellbeing. Given increasingly sophisticated...
Nate’s Supplement Notes
It’s spring cleaning time. While you’re at it don’t forget to take a look at your dietary supplements! It may be time to upgrade your supplement regimen to include more advanced and absorbable formulations of your old favorites, or find more convenient, trustworthy,...
A note from your inner Customer Service Department
That notorious Inner Critic — in health coaching partnerships with people carving a path to their healing, I observe this voice to be a shared entity. Like a weird uncle, we all seem to have one and it is important to be self-aware of such. This ‘internal cattle prod’...
The Hole
Those of us who are in the recovery community often hear about “the hole”. It is the term used to describe a feeling associated with an unfulfilled need, or an uncomfortable emptiness that some people experience that they are driven to try and fill. The discomfort...
Intention
Albert Einstein, that master of the underpinnings of physical life, observed that the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Along that line, all of us who have been through the School of Sesame...