Naturopathic Doctors?

Maybe you just haven’t sniffed enough herbs today, Thomas.

Brilliant, TS!

Short version: I recently had experience with a naturopath, who was smart and helpful, but unfortunately a little too wrapped up in the current anti-grain/clean eating way of thinking. Helped me stay away from prescription meds — that alone is HUGE and I’m really grateful. Despite the blind spots, still better care than your standard 7-minute visits with a “regular” doc. Eventually, though, I plateaued eating with restrictions … thus, 180-eating.

Long version: I went to a naturopath because I had very suddenly developed every-freaking-meal heartburn for the first time in my life last year. In retrospect, I believe it was a metabolism slowdown due to overtraining/undereating in exhausting summer heat, with major life stresses as a backdrop … but I didn’t know that then, I was just freaked out! The “regular” doctor gave me free samples of Nexium that made the symptoms twice as bad. So, I gave the naturopath a try. First experience in the alterna realm! To me, it at first felt equivalent to going to a fortune teller, but I had a deep intuition that taking the meds was the exact wrong thing to do.

Dr Nature is pretty well respected in the small city where I was living at the time, and had originally trained as a chiropractor before doing the ND thing. His office worked hard to get as much covered by insurance as possible. I will also say that he was a relative minimalist and didn’t push excessive supplements or an expensive appointment schedule. And he is a very bright, interesting person to talk to, in general, which is saying something because I’m picky.

He set me up with enzymes, HCl, multivitamin, plus lots of lab work, including a poop test. I got pretty good test results, only showed a Vitamin D deficiency (even by conventional standards, not just alterna-standards) as well as slightly elevated Reverse-T3, as opposed to parasites and sibo and so forth, thank goodness. He also told me to drop grains, sugar and dairy. (This was probably good thing to *try* because these are common sensitivies … but when it made no difference to me, I think I should’ve been encouraged to re-introduce those foods. And I should’ve had the courage to do it myself, without seeking approval.) Also to his credit, he encouraged me to take my temperature a lot … but certainly wouldn’t have suggested sugar to raise it! lol.

Eating super-“clean” plus the digestive sups helped at first. At least they got me *eating* again, my symptoms had been so bad I was down to maybe 800 calories! I got up to maybe 1800 cals and, eating quasi-paleo, didn’t have time/energy/money to cook or chew any more. Eating so “healthy,” I eventually plateaued with the symptoms this crowd knows like the rosary — fatigue, hair loss, dried up sex parts, trouble sleeping, unintentional weight loss (which, because it moved me from the “overweight” to “normal” bmi category, was quite triggering to body neurosis I’d thought I’d left behind years ago), yada yada yada. And my low body temperature never went up eating clean. Thanks to 180, slowly going back to no-restrictions eating allowed me to completely forego the enzymes and HCl. Still working on getting to 100% energy-wise, and getting over anxiety from gaining back weight I hadn’t really set out to lose in the first place.

And that’s the long version! Probably boring, but maybe it’s relevant to someone out there.

My mom sees a naturopath. She developed a type of autoimmune colitis in 2011 and her gastroenterologist put her on steroids. They worked, but she didn’t want to live on them. I was really into paleo at that time and encouraged her to see the naturopath. He started her on some sort of amino acid injections. Each injection is $300, and insurance doesn’t cover the cost. At first she needed the injections every week, but now its been 8 weeks since her last one. Her doctor is trying to wean her off of them, which I think is good. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if she is experiencing a placebo effect, but autoimmune diseases are poorly understood so I’m not sure. I don’t think her doctor is as much of a money-sucker as other naturopaths since he is trying to wean her off of the expensive injection.

The problem I do have is that she now trusts his opinion over an MD. I’m probably much less into the “natural” approach and woo like others on this forum, because I work in the medical field and I see what works. Modern medicine definitely has its drawbacks, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals and the eat less, move more belief, but it saves a lot of lives as well. Of course this is partly my fault because I really believed the naturopathic stuff for awhile and encouraged it. My mom calls him when something is wrong, so I’ve been telling her to call her MD as well so she can have two opinions (I don’t have much faith in natural remedies after trying to “naturally” cure a UTI and a yeast infection). Basically, this naturopath seems to have helped her, but I think placebo effect played into this. I also know people that his treatments didn’t work for. I wouldn’t see one unless I was very desperate and nothing else had worked for me. And I had a ton of money to spare.

I went to a naturopath here in Australia. At the time I was eating extremely low carb paleo. My complaints were dizziness, low body temp, fatigue, poor digestion, low libido, all the usual low carb stuff.

From memory she put me on high dose omega3 supplementation, Q10, gave me some kind of tonic she made up. I payed a shite load for it all, I took them for about 3 weeks before I decided it was making me worse and threw them all away.

I think there could be some great naturopaths out there, its just a matter of finding the right one. Just like anything I guess