Host: What's interesting about natural medicine is you can approach each person the same as far as just getting them healthier making sure they're exercising, making sure they're eating regular meals. And you always have a funny little thing you say: eat the salad at the end of the meal. You always want to make sure there's a vegetable in that meal, and it's very helpful for patients to remember.Dr. Stengler: In naturopathic medicine, there's always a big emphasis on a few things. Number one, the diet it's hard to be healthy if your diet isn't healthy, which for a lot of Americans it isn't, so we work with patients over time to improve their diet and get good nutritional status. Number two, improving digestion due to stress and medications, a lot of people have poor digestion and detoxification. Just by improving diet, digestion, detoxification, and helping people with stress and quite often hormone balance, that helps the majority of people significantly.Host: Speaking of hormone balance women's issues, menopause, infertility, PMS, osteoporosis I believe all of those can be helped by naturopathic medicine.Dr. Stengler: Very well. Women's health conditions in regular medicine, in my opinion, are not helped very effectively for symptom relief, and not in a safe manner. In naturopathic medicine, we have things like herbs which help balance the body's hormones naturally they don't give you hormones, they balance your own hormones. Studies show that by improving the diet, you can help a lot of hormone-related conditions; improving detoxification helps too, because your liver processes all the hormones in your body, so better liver function means better hormone balance. For patients with severe symptoms, we're trained in using natural or bioidentical hormones. We have a lot of tools, which differentiates us from many other types of doctors more flexibility to help the patient, because patients require different treatments. If you have a hundred patients with menopause or arthritis, you have to use different treatments depending on their unique situation and symptoms, and naturopathic medicine has the tools to do that very adaptable, very flexible, very effective.Host: That kind of comes full circle with something like skin problems.Dr. Stengler: Certain conditions are a great example of how naturopathic medicine treats the root of the problem. In conventional medicine, skin rashes and things like eczema and psoriasis are treated with topical treatments, often topical steroids, which can help for a period of time by suppressing the symptoms, but the condition is always there and often comes back stronger, needing stronger medication. With the naturopathic philosophy, we go internally into the body and look at why the skin is flaring up in the first place things like food sensitivities, poor digestion and detoxification, where toxins come out through the largest organ of elimination, the skin. You improve digestion and detoxification, and lo and behold, the skin clears up. Poor skin health can also be representative of nutritional deficiencies like essential fatty acids or B12. So for long-term skin conditions, we often see them disappear because we're treating the deeper problem, which is often internal, though we may still use some natural topical applications for symptom relief.Host: Now, something that can be life-changing diabetes. That can start in young children.Dr. Stengler: Diabetes is skyrocketing among children and adults in the United States and around the world it's pandemic. In the United States, anywhere between 30 percent and 50 percent of American adults either have pre-diabetes or diabetes, their blood sugar going too high, and we know most of these cases are related to diet and lifestyle: too many refined carbohydrates, not enough fiber, not enough nutrients for your insulin to work properly to get that glucose into your cells. With naturopathic medicine, using exercise, proper diet, and supplements shown in studies to lower blood sugar and even more indirect ways, like balancing your adrenal glands, because when your stress hormones are out of balance, your blood sugar will rise we address all these parameters, help patients with weight loss effectively, and a lot of these patients with type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes can eliminate that problem if our protocols are followed. And what I love is that as a doctor, you're really teaching them why it's important through education you're not just telling them to take a pill, you're teaching them an effective lifestyle change so they don't have problems later on.
