Healthcare and Women's Health: How Dr. Doni's H.E.A.L. Approach Is Different

Hi, I'm Dr. Donny and welcome to How Humans Heal. In this episode and video, I'm going to be talking about my approach to healthcare in general and specifically women's health and abnormal pap smear specifically. And how what I do and the way I approach healthcare is different than what you may have experienced in other practitioners offices or medical offices. So that you can really understand that this is a different way of looking at things. Things different way of looking at the human body and the different way of looking at how healing can happen and what to expect. If you choose to then become a patient of mine or work in one of my programs, you'll know. Oh, this is. This is what the way Dr. Donnie guides me to heal. So I'm a naturopathic doctor. I have a doctorate degree in naturopathic medicine from Bastier University. It's called V A S T Y R. I graduated from the Seattle Camp campus and I graduated in the year 2000. Now, a doctorate in naturopathic medicine requires an in residence. I'm in person. It's not an online program. It's an in person program over four or five years. For me, it was five years because I also trained and I'm certified as a professional midwife, which is a separate degree program at the same time. So in over five years, I completed the doctorate degree in naturopathic medicine and the certificate in midwifery, and then I went on to complete a residency, a residency in family medicine in a naturopathic clinic. So I completed the doctorate degree and then a residency and then went into internships and into private practice. This is all after completing two bachelor's degrees. I have a bachelor's degree in science, general science, and in nutrition. I'm also a clinical nutritionist. That just gives you a little bit of my professional training and education background. As a naturopathic doctor in the United States. I'm required to pass board exams as well as to complete continuing education credits in order to be licensed in. Naturopathic doctors are licensed state by state. So I am currently licensed in four states. I maintain all of that because I want to be able to offer my patients as much of my scope of practice as I can and to be able to help as many people as I can at the same time.

As a naturopathic doctor. Part of the difference between naturopathic medicine and what we think of as standard conventional allopathic medicine is a difference in philosophy, really. Naturopathic medicine comes from a place of, first of all, believing that the body can heal itself and that we as practitioners and patients, as humans, we're here to support the body in its innate healing process. And we look at the body as an integrated whole. So instead of just looking at a single system or part of the body, we're looking at the whole body and how your different parts are working together, how your nervous systems working with your gut and how your gut is working with your hormones and your immune system, and how all of that is then influencing different physical areas of your body, including the vaginal area for women. And also how that's all influenced not just on a physical level, but on how the mind and body are connected and how we are.

We need to address the mind, body and spirit. We also have a spiritual aspect to our being and we need to address that as part of our healing. So it's really looking at us as a whole person and looking at how the different systems interact. Now, when I was in Nature pathic medical school in the 90s, something was developed called functional medicine. So maybe you've heard the term alternative medicine or functional medicine. Functional medicine was developed by Jeffrey rebland in the 90s as a way to help train practitioners who were not becoming naturopathic doctors, who were, let's say, medical doctors or nurses or other types of practitioners. Even nutritionists and even sometimes naturopathic doctors will then get additional training in this same way of thinking of how can we support our bodies to heal, how can we prevent illness using the least invasive therapies possible? So we're. I'm always going to be thinking of dietary changes first, lifestyle changes like how can we be getting better sleep and movement, or exercise and stress recovery activities. Those are the beginning steps of healing is how do we take care of our body better? So it's going to always start with diet.

Lifestyle and then nutrients, herbal approaches, sometimes homeopathy and other natural approaches, even natural hormones. So we talk about natural hormone approaches to thyroid, to hormone replacement during menopause, to even natural ways to support fertility. So it's all a matter of thinking of how do we support the body to do what it needs to do that it already knows how to do. We just want to support it or we want to correct imbalances. And in doing so, the body, body can come back to more optimal functioning. And then how do we maintain that into the future so we can decrease the likelihood of chronic illness and increase our longevity. So these are approaches that you're going to hear about. And that's what my training is. Starting from way back in the 90s and I've been in practice since 2001, when I finished my residency and I specialize in women's health. But I really also helped everything from infants, children, teenagers, men, and even I have patients into their hundreds, I'm happy to say. So to me, it's not about really limiting based on age. It's about let's take these concepts and help you heal. And so any health condition, I'm going to look at it as what's really going on here. We're going to. I'm going to look at what is the underlying cause, or you might hear the term root cause. So I'm always thinking about what caused this in the first place, because if we address the cause, we can solve for an issue. Right? Just like if you have something going on in your house that's not working, you're going to call someone to help you figure out what's the cause, and then they're going to fix the, the problem. And then now that is going to work again. So it's similar with the human body. Whereas in the allopathic standard, conventional medical practice, which is often what's at least partially covered by your medical insurance, where they're going, you're going to get access to which we need screening exams as well as if there's an issue, they can give you access to a procedure or surgery if needed. That's helpful. It's just that it may not be addressing the root cause and it might not be looking at you as a whole person. Same with medications. Many medications and prescriptions are there to affect a receptor or to suppress some functioning of your body. If you think about antacids right there, or a blocker, H2 blocker, it's going to turn off the production of stomach acid. Now, that can be very helpful temporarily while your stomach heals. However, it's not asking or looking at why was there an issue with the stomach acid to begin with and how do we actually help prevent the need for a medication that just turns off your stomach acid? Right. So it's a different way of thinking about how we approach what's happening in the human body. When I look at something like HPV, which is a virus, and there's 13 types of HPV that are considered high risk, meaning they're associated with cancer risk. We go, I think, okay, this is a virus that our human body can protect us from. Our human body and human immune system has the ability to protect us from infections, bacterial infections can, you know, fungal infections as well as viral infections. We need to look at how is our body's natural ability to protect us from hpv? Where is that not coming through for you? How is that not being optimized? And when we can look at those causes for the inability to protect it from HPV and we address them one by one, there may be more than one. As we address those causes for your immune system not to not be protecting you, we then build your immune system back up and it's now able to protect you from HPV now and into the future. Because many people ask me, well, what about the next time I'm exposed to hpv? Or why does it come back? For some people, I would say it's because.

If your system has a breakdown, right? If there's a, if your immune system is depleted because of stress, and it's well established that the stress that we're exposed to as humans depletes our immune system. Not only that, but the stress we're exposed to as humans also causes nutrient deficiencies, causes negative effects to our digestive tract. We're not absorbing nutrients as well. We're, we end up react causing inflammatory responses to our foods. We end up with disrupted bacteria or microbiome in our gut, and that translates to disrupted microbiome in the vagina as well. So it can't just be about avoiding all the stress, right? That when we think through, okay, the stresses we're exposed to as humans cause these things to go out of balance and become less effective. It's not like we can just say, okay, well then I'm going to turn off the stress, because that's impossible. As humans, we're going to have stress. You know, we can reduce the stresses we're exposed to, but it's, we're going to have still some stresses come up as humans, no matter what. So we need to figure out how to help our bodies maintain optimal functioning. Even though we're going to be exposed to some stress, how can we still maintain optimal digestion, immune function, hormone levels and nervous nervous system responses so that we can then be most optimal even in our stressful day, even in our stressful life. And so what I find is by thinking about it that way, which is from there is where I developed my stress recovery protocol and the books that I've written. You can find my books here on my website. I'll put a link down below. My most recent book is called Master your Stress, Reset your Health. And in that book I describe this in detail to help you understand not just this part that I've already been explaining, but specifically how stress affects us and how stress affects each of us as an individual. It's not one size at all. It's not the same for everyone. Some of us the cortisol goes too high. Some of us cortisol goes too low. Some of us adrenaline goes too high. Some of us adrenaline goes too low. So we need to understand how stress is affecting your system, your hormones, your nutrients, your nervous system, your gut, your microbiome. And once we understand what's been thrown out of balance, then we can do something about it and not usually doesn't require a medication. We can correct these imbalances oftentimes with diet changes, lifestyle changes, nutrients, herbs and other natural approaches. If we can use substances that don't have negative side effects or dependency, addiction or withdrawal associated with that, that's even better, right? Because now you're choosing things that you can use on a daily basis that help you to don't work against you. I know how scary it is to test positive for HPV virus. And I know it's even more concerning when your gynecologist tells you that all you can do is wait and see if it continues and if it causes abnormal cells. That's exactly why as a naturopathic doctor and midwife that I feel so passionate about helping women to be proactive about protecting themselves from HPV virus. I've been helping thousands of women for the past 23 years to do exactly that and to get HPV to negative and stay negative. And that's why I develop the say Goodbye to HPV online program where you can get access to my proven protocol from wherever you are in the world. So I hope you will come check out the say Goodbye to HPV program, review the success cases and see if this is going to be a good fit to help you get your life back from hpv. And so this is the way I think about health issues in general. I help patients with everything from autoimmune conditions like colitis and rheumatoid arthritis to infertility. Because I same way of thinking about it can help to help your ovaries work better so that you can.

Conceive of pregnancy and prevent a miscarriage is also how I help women with perimenopause irregular cycles in general as well as with abnormal Pap smears. So we, we go through this same thought process and the way I have consolidated it down is to four main steps. One is to gather the information. We need to gather information about your health history, your body. We need to know what you've been through what you've tried. And we also need to look at any testing, lab testing that's available that can give us more information. And it's important to know that the standard labs, like, yes, we use the standard blood work for what information it can provide. But we can't get everything from blood work. It's not all reflected in the blood that's floating to your body. So we can get some information from that. But sometimes we need to get information from urine or saliva or stool testing and the testing that you're used to getting at the, let's say Standard Lab, LabCorp or Quest is only the labs that those particular companies offer. There are hundreds of specialty labs around the country and around the world for that matter, that offer labs that are specific to certain areas of the body or information. So I can go to a lab that specializes in food sensitivities and choose the lab that gives the best results for clinical cases and best outcomes. We can go to a specific lab that measures cortisol and adrenaline and neurotransmitters that I was just talking about. We can go to a specific lab that measures the gut microbiome or the vaginal microbiome. And these are not labs that are in the standard lab that you go to for your standard blood work. Okay? So just to know that that's how it works. But you don't have to be limited by what's covered by your insurance, and you don't have to be limited by what's offered in a standard lab down the street. You can actually be getting information from labs and shipping samples to these labs and getting information. So we gather all this information.

About all these different systems in your body. So we don't have to guess anymore. We don't have to guess which foods are a problem. We don't have to guess whether your cortisol is too high or too low. We don't. Because guessing might help. You know, it might help, but it's less likely, right? If you, if you guess what's wrong with your. Your sink. But it may or may not be the problem. And so you might be guessing for a long time. To me, instead of guessing, I'd much rather do a specific test that's going to give us exactly what's going on so then we can address it in a very targeted way. So we, I guide you to know which tents provide the best information, because this is something I've been learning about and researching about since the 90s. So I know what's available and I'm constantly learning what's the latest, greatest offering. And so I can guide you. You don't have to do all this figuring out on your own. I guide you which tests are the right ones for you to understand what's going on for your body and your system. So we gather that, then we review it all, we look at it and we say, what do we find here? What did we find here? What did we find here? And this is what I find is missing in a lot of even functional and naturopathic clinics is they, did they miss the part of reviewing it and integrating it into a single plan. And so for me, the way my mind works is I always want to look at all the options, all the information, and then put it into an integrated plan. So you're not just left with results that you don't know what to do with. We actually take that information and we put it into a plan step by step. Now the question becomes, what do I do first, right? I have all this information, what do I do first? And a lot of practitioners don't know what to do first. It's just that I've spent now 25 years understanding what makes sense to do first. And then second, what can you do in a certain order that produces, produces the greatest, the best outcome? And this is what I refer to as this three phase process, which is the first of all the where we address what's, what's depleted, we address the that. And we have to get you out of stress mode first. Because when we're in a state of stress, our body's not going to get the healing messages, it's going to be in a state of stress. It's like, feels like a tiger is chasing you constantly. And the body's never in a state where it can actually relax and heal. So we need to, in this first phase, help you get out of stress mode, get the cortisol adrenaline reset so you can actually get into healing mode. And so in phase two, we can be in healing mode where we're rebalancing. So where this is all where the balancing happens. And we can, whatever it needs to be for you. If we need to rebalance your microbiome, rebalance your thyroid, rebalance your estrogen, progesterone, rebalance your nutrients, we rebalance. Everything that we found was out of balance. So now you're starting to feel better. But this is not something that happens overnight. Some people are like, why is, why can't I feel a difference tomorrow? Well, it's not going to happen overnight, right? If you're, if you have a system that has multiple areas that are out of balance, it's going to take some time, add some consistency on your side of implementing these changes consistently so that your system has a new experience. Your body can go, oh, no longer are we constantly in a state of stress. We actually have times where we're in an anti stress state and we can heal and we can sleep and we can eat and we can enjoy and we start to actually support the healing process that your body already has innately in it. It's just a matter of helping you to access it and support it. So then once everything's back into balance, because a lot of people say, am I going to have to keep on this forever? Well, first of all, you're, you have a human body, it's going to require some care for as long as you have a human body. So that's just a simple truth. It's not like we just one day don't have to pay attention to feeding our body or sleeping or, or you know, making sure we have nutrients and those kinds of things. That's part of having a human ex existence of human body. And so yes, you're going to need to continue to take care of your body, but at least now you know how and you learned along the way what is it your body needs from you in order to feel good and to order to work optimally. And at the same time the, this fourth, this last phase is called maintain. It's about me. How do we maintain your now new balance state? And so we've learned what your body needs and so now what you, what you continue to do in the main maintenance phase, it doesn't require as much as it required in the recovery phases. Right. Because we had a lot of balancing to do and getting your immune system to get HPV out of there to negative, get your Pap smear to negative, for example, or in, in the case of maybe you're dealing with autoimmunity, we get the auto antibodies down, right? So we get correct those imbalances and then we get to maintenance where we get to say, hey, what do we need to do in order to maintain this new optimal state? And how do we help you do that? How do we, how often do we need to retest? Right, we can retest and make sure that everything that was out of balance is now back in balance and we can figure out what is the minimal amount of, let's say nutrients and lifestyle and additional dietary changes that you need to maintain in order to maintain that benefit, that optimal health benefits going forward. Because it's really what we do and how we relate to our bodies regularly over time, consistently over time, that's going to make the biggest difference in our life and our future. Right. It's not just what we do for a couple weeks. It's not just what we're going to do for the next couple months. Yes. That's going to help reset and help you recover. But then we need to figure out what's going to help you maintain for years and decades into the future so that you can continue to prevent health issues going forward. And that's how I look at things. That's how I help my patients. I have patients who've been my patients for over 22 years, some of them even 25 years. So because they, I continue to help them maintain their health over time. So I hope that helps you to understand my approach as Dr. Donnie, as well as naturopathic medicine, functional medicine, and specifically how my protocols work. Because some of what I just described you're not even going to find with other practitioners because it's what I developed as a researcher, scientist myself and what I see works clinically for my health and for my patient health to help you resolve health issues that were considered to be impossible to heal and help you maintain that going forward. So thanks again so much for joining me here. I inhale humans heal. I love to bring guests in who have also their own perspective and what they've discovered in their clinical work. So that you're learning from me and you're also learning from all of them and their specialties in specific areas. So I'm so glad you're here with me. I encourage you, if you're new, to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where I might be sharing more specifics about how I help with health issues. And I also will be sharing guest interviews over specific health conditions, conditions and, and ways of approaching it so that you really get a sense of what's possible, that healing specific possible for you and that if we can think about it in this approach, not that we're not going to access a conventional approach. Yes, if we need surgery, we're going to choose surgery. If you need a medication, we're going to choose that medication. However, we can look at it in this bigger picture view where it's all about supporting your body to heal itself and to believe. To believe that your body can heal and that these are different ways of thinking about it than maybe you've heard before. So I'm glad you're here and thank you for joining me and I look forward to connecting with you again soon. I'll put links down below. If you'd like to learn more about working with me as a one on one patient, you can. You can do that. I can put that information down below and or working with me in one of my group online programs where I can guide you from wherever you are in the world to implement this strategy and approach for your health. So I look forward to talking to you more soon.

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