We are in a time where the internet and social media are constantly blowing up with information. There are many coaches and influencers speaking on natural and “holistic” medicine, not having the appropriate education and training; and oftentimes health coaches are overstepping the boundaries of their scope of practice. Learn who to hire to appropriately help with your medical needs, and when to hire a health coach. Join the conversation with Dr. Iasha White and Dr. Ana Lara.
Dr. Iasha White’s Bio: Dr. Iasha White is an Arizona Native, she holds a Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Sonoran University. Dr. White received extensive education and training in the areas of nutrition, botanical medicine, IV therapy and acupuncture.
She enjoys helping people who have autoimmune conditions, like rheumatoid arthritis, hormone imbalances, gastrointestinal issues, high blood pressure, diabetes and much more.
Dr. White’s goal is to empower her patients while guiding them to the highest quality of health; where the mind and body are harmonized allowing her patients to realize their highest potential.
If you like to reach out to Dr. White email her at Dr.iashawhite@outlook.com
Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Myself, the podcast. I’m Dr. Alara, and this is episode 14. Today we’re going to talk about, don’t be fooled, get the right medical help. And joining me is Dr. White. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So we were sitting down thinking about what did we really want to discuss on this episode, right? So many different things we can really discuss. And one of the things that we see that’s really trending is there’s a big move and shift into the natural medicine realm. There’s a lot of interest there. So we see this increase in holistic practitioners, quotes, whether they’re health coaches or nurse practitioners are going more holistic, natural, functional doctors. So a functional doctor. There are a couple of different ways that they become, it’s either medical doctor who decides to be more natural, so they call themselves functional and they get the training for it. They’ll get training for it. And then there are some functional medical schools.
I know there’s one here in Arizona that will train people, but there’s a difference in nature. Pathic medical doctors versus functional doctors versus a health coach or even a nurse practitioner that is working holistically. So we wanted to talk about this because it’s kind of a pet peeve of ours, right? Yes, it is. Naturopathic doctors are not new. No, they’ve been around for a long time. They were not called naturopathic doctors.
They were called the eclectics, which means they practice many different modalities. They were called homeopathy, and nature curious, and they were using exactly what it sounds like, just diet, nutrition part, getting sun exposure, exercise, and other water therapies that they were using to bring healing. What else did I miss out here, Dr. White?
These were the natural doctors. I mean, acupuncture kind of fits into that. It’s more Eastern, but chiropractor, chiropractors are part of all of the natural doctors. There were massage. They didn’t call themselves massage therapists, but they massage as medicine as a way of healing, whether it was physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritual, healing. So there were all these natural practitioners many, many years ago, but there were two groups of people that came together to form what is known as the naturopathic physician or doctor now. And that was the nature, curious and homeopathic doctors, those two married, and that’s where we get the name pathic from Nature Cure to Homeopathic. So we are trained in a very holistic way In a previous episode, and we’ll link it to this video, there’s another episode where Dr. Mylene Simone we talk about what is the naturopathic doctor. But today we’re not going to so much talk about that. But how do you distinguish if you’re working with the right professional? There’s a huge difference in a health coach, and I want to hear your take, and then I’ll share my perspective on the whole health coach industry, the health coach industry go in. We have to speak the truth.
So like Dr. Lau has said, this is a pet peeve of both of us. And it’s funny too, I was at a networking event recently, and one of the ladies there asked me, who do I follow? Who do I watch? And I had to be honest, I don’t follow anyone on social media. I don’t follow any outlets when it comes to health at all. We’re medically trained. We go to naturopathic medical school. And so I will listen to other naturopathic doctors. We do our continuing education courses. We read, we study, we read books, but we’re not online following other doctors. We do have doctors who are our teachers as well, but they are naturopathic doctors. There are some medical doctors as well who teach and who we learn from as well. But we’re not online seeking out information, especially when it comes to our health or our patient’s health. That’s not what we do. And so for me, when it comes to, I’m probably skipping over your question, but when it comes to seeking out care for me, you just don’t do that online. I agree with becoming super educated about yourself. You want to become educated on where you are.
You do want to get your blood work. You do want to get any imaging that’s necessary. You do want to sit down with a healthcare provider who knows how, take your case, and who knows about disease and dysfunction or disharmony in the body. And so for me, I think the pet peeve is I see a lot of patients who come in and they’re taking a lot of supplements. And that’s the thing too. Patients realize that you’re being sold naturopathic medicine right now, it’s trendy, right? Healthcare is trendy. I’ve been seeing a lot of people posting fruit online. It’s trendy to eat fruit. And like, no, these things aren’t trends. It’s a lifestyle. But the thing about the world that we live in, when there is a trend, there are individuals who know that they can capitalize on that. They can capitalize on the fact that you might believe that they’re a doctor that they’re educated or that they truly know what they’re doing. But if you’re not sitting down with patients, if you’re not taking their case, if you’re not examining their blood work, you don’t know anything about that person.
And here’s a very dangerous thing that I see when it comes to all the different health coaches, and it’s not an attack against them. You need to know your place because in medicine, you need a license. You need to have the proper medical training. You need to have a license and a licensing board that oversees you because there are certain things that you need to be able to do under that license.
A health coach is not able to diagnose you, assess and diagnose you with a condition, and therefore they’re not able to treat you. So if you’re working with a health coach and they’re telling you, take these supplements and take that much, they already crossed their scope of practice and it is illegal, it is illegal for them to do that.
Do you know that someone who does not have the proper training cannot tell you, to take this much vitamin D or take methylene blue or do that therapy or you, if they are not properly trained, they are treating you and that is against the law. And if there’s a formal complaint put against him, they would be accused of practicing without a medical license. Now, as naturopathic doctors, we are trained in that. Even a medical doctor cannot cross the boundaries and say, you should take ashwagandha, you should take this herb. You should take that for this because they’re not medically trained for it.
Now, if they’ve gone through botanical training and so forth, then they’re able to.
Even botanicals, they’re not doctors but botanists, they study this, and they have a degree for that. I’m not sure if there are any examinations that they do to prove that they’re well versed and they understand the complications of verbs because the number one, oh my Lord, the number one thing that people do not understand is that even if you take something that’s natural, it can still harm you. If you take too much of something or you take it for too long, let me tell you, you will end up giving yourself a medical issue. Just because it’s natural does not mean it’s safe for everyone and anyone to do so. I see a lot, lot of people going online following these. These could be influencers, coaches, they call themselves health coaches, or they have areas that they work specifically like their thyroid coach. Guess what? You can’t do that because you cannot properly test a person’s thyroid, and you’re not medically trained to understand the complexity of not just the thyroid, but as it relates to the whole body. And so now you’re giving, you’re assuming things and giving treatment for something. Everyone wants to throw iodine for thyroid issues. And it’s like, really?
That could go either way, for sure. It could be good or it could be bad. And so then people end up giving themselves a bigger headache. This is where I think it crosses the line. So I did look up the purpose of working with a health coach. Because there is a time and place to work with a coach. The coach is there to inspire you, to motivate you, to help you with the lifestyle. Stuff like the implementation. They should not be doing what we are doing. They should not. They’re really crossing the boundaries of their scope of practice. So they should not be making recommendations on supplements either. That is against their scope of practice. What they’re able to do is coordinate and work with a naturopathic doctor, a functional doctor to say, because I have patients that I can assess, diagnose and all that, but they do need a little bit more hand-on-hand motivation. And that’s where a coach can come in and be more strategic with helping them implement the plan, but not giving them the plan of this is what we’re assessing and diagnosing. And unfortunately, I have seen coaches cross that line, but no one’s complaining.
Right? And see, for me, it’s interesting because we’re doctors and it’s a practice we’re practicing. We both graduated at the same time. So we’ve been practicing for seven years. And I think the biggest thing for us is, or for me, when I’m hearing, oh, take Ashwagandha, take magnesium, take this, take that. And it’s like, please don’t do that because we’re all individuals. And I think that’s one of the things that we learn. It’s a yes. You go to school and you read in a book like, okay, there’s this triad and these are the things that you look at. But everything is different because everyone’s body is different. Everyone’s body is going to respond differently to treatment. And so what one person needs the other one may not need. And so that’s why even when you look at, okay, so I might have a patient who by medical standards is overweight and they’re doing all the things to lose weight, all the things to lose weight, but something is just missing.
And so that is because of their makeup, their genetics, there’s something there that’s different that we have to dive into and do detective work to figure out you going online and trying to figure this out. It’s not enough. It’s not sufficient. It’s not thorough. And that’s what I really love about naturopathic medicine is that we’re incredibly thorough and we do detective work and we’re going to figure it out. It might take time, but that’s what we do. But we’ve had the training. And so I think for us, we know that every person, everybody is not the same.
They’re individuals.
How you treat is individual, and they have individual experiences and they react to situations. Very individual too. There’s no two people that are like, I always say, two people can come in with diabetes and I might treat them differently. I will treat them differently. They might get some of the same things that crossover, but they’re going to be treated a little bit differently because they have different things going on. So yeah, I would say that’s one of the things that is, it’s not linear. No, helping people heal is not a linear process. So health coaches might say, well, I focus on hormones. How can you do that? Do you know how many hormones are in the body? It’s not just the sex hormones. It’s beyond estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and DHEA and prolactin and all of that. Insulin is a hormone. There are so many different hormones that you cannot test.
So you cannot speak to that in your assessment and questionnaire of signs and symptoms.
You’re not properly trained to assess. So when we are trained, we’re trained, oh my God, in so many, all the systems, we’re trained to look at the whole body and get a full assessment asking all these questions. And like you said, I love always referring to, we’re medical detectives, we are doing detective work, we’re gathering all these pieces of information that the patient is giving us. That’s one, that’s what they’re giving us. But it’s also our observation of physical presentation. What does their skin look like? What does their nails look like? Their eyes, their gait, their gait, how they sit.
All of these different things let us know their signs that let us know what the body is doing. Even times there’s someone sitting across from me and I see their thyroid like a little lump. So guess what I’m going to do? I mean, I check everyone’s thyroid, but I’m going to go in there and check it out. Now we can say, Hey, I want to send you in. We’re going to do a full thyroid panel.
We’re just going to look for antibody tests and all of these different markers, and then I want you to go do an ultrasound of the thyroid. Let’s make sure there’s nothing concerning there. We can do that. A health coach cannot do that. So usually whatever their area of focus is, they see everyone through that lens. They, it’s assumed that everyone has a hormone issue. You may not know that until you confirm it with tests. Now, what’s interesting here in Arizona is that not that people can order their own tests. They don’t need a doctor to give them a lab order.
Insurance won’t cover it. So then you’re paying out of pocket for that. And some people are okay with that, but you still don’t know what are the right tests to do. You are not aware of how to interpret those tests appropriately in looking at it from the big picture too, because if hormones are off, there could be other things that are off too. So we do the full assessment and based on that information, I tell my clients, we will address which labs I want you to do, and then we’ll go from there and we’ll treat the things that are out of balance. And that’s an art. It is, it’s a skill. It’s training, it’s education, it’s an art because people can learn all that stuff. But the practice part of it is where you need the time to sit down with this person’s information and say, what is this patient experiencing? Does this align with that?
Yeah, truly. And then also along with that, I think a lot of times I’ll have patients come in and it’s like, okay, well, all this looks great, but you feel terrible. Everything looks amazing, but you feel terrible. But we don’t give up. We don’t give up. We don’t give up. We keep looking. And I think for me, with me being in practice for seven years now, it is just like, okay, sometimes there’s nothing that’s showing right now, but I know in a few months, once your body is able to show me, it’s going to show me. So it’s not like there’s nothing going on. There’s definitely something going on. So either we need to dive deeper or the body is just not ready. And so it’s like you have to know how to, when to fold ’em and when to hold them.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great segue that you made is a doctor, and I’m not even going to say all doctors because I can’t speak to conventional doctors. They’re just trained differently.
The way we are trained, we are trained to look at all the full person. So when we get those labs that look normal, but they are still present, we don’t dismiss the patient and say, well, everything looks fine. It’s all in your head. Maybe go see a therapist. We don’t do that. We say, okay, we just peeled back a layer. That’s not the problem, which is good. I always tell patients, if nothing shows up in labs and imaging, that’s not a bad thing. It’s good. We don’t want you to have a medical condition, but it’s not showing up in the blood work yet. We don’t want it to. We want to prevent it from showing up.
So then there’s a next step of maybe doing specialty tests, which a lot of coaches, some functional doctors may know of it or not, but there’s a lot of specialty tests that we have access to.
Insurance is not going to cover it. However, when someone is in such need, they want to just get the help. So they’ll do the test, but even if it’s not showing up in a test or an image, then we look at trauma. We say, Hey, Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about your life. What was going on in your life before this happened?
So now, because we are trained in mental health, we have to learn all the DSM five conditions, guys. So what the psychologist and the, we learn that and we learn different mind body techniques and therapies, how to do an interview, how to interview people, how to listen, how to be self-aware and listen and guide them through that process. And then what to do, whether it’s giving them herbs, whether it’s doing other therapies to help release that or maybe referring them to a specialist and say, Hey, you know what? You need to go see a therapist to help you with this, which is something that does a coach do is a coach able to know when it’s time to hand it to someone else?
I think too, along with that, do they know when they’re able, but also I think what we need to realize is a lot of people who have these, what are they call platforms on social media, they’re presenting themselves in a certain way. And we were just talking about this before we started the show, as doctors, as educated people who are supposed to be masters in these areas. Even for myself, I have trouble with coming on and talking about medicine, talking about healthcare, and talking about my knowledge of these things because I’m at a place where I don’t believe I know everything. And that comes along with education. The more you know, you know, don’t know. And so for me, a lot of the people who are online and they’re giving you this information, they don’t have that. They don’t know that they don’t know. Which is interesting because you have to know when you don’t know.
So for us in practice, we can refer out. And so if I have a patient who needs to see a neurologist, you’re going to a neurologist, they can do diagnostics that I cannot do. Absolutely. And so if you need to see a cardiologist, you’re going to a cardiologist. And so you have to know the next steps. You have to know when to have someone move on and see someone who not move on. Totally. We’re still going to have you in our care, but this person is going to be able to give us the information. And a lot of patients will avoid going to other doctors because they don’t want to do the treatment. And I’m like, no, that’s fine. Let’s just go get the information that we need. Let’s get the information that we need and then come back.
So good. So good. There are several points you said one of them being that when a patient comes to see us, they don’t expect that we’re going to refer them to the specialist and we do some education and prepping them up and say, the only reason I’m sending you to them is because they have other diagnostic tests. This is their specialty.
We want to make sure we rule out these things. And it’s not a problem.
It’s clear, great. If something comes up, just remember you don’t have to initiate whatever treatment they have right away. Bring it forth to me. I will communicate with that doctor since I’m referring, and then we will work together. What are the natural alternatives to that, if there are any? The bottom line is if it’s a lifesaving therapy or suggestion that the specialist is making, the best thing to do is help the patient say, Hey, guess what? That surgery is going to be important. There may be that time to do that, to preserve your life, to extend your life. We know where that fine line is. I think you touched on this as well of the dangerous part. I think it’s dangerous for someone to not know when it’s time to refer to them. Like this is beyond my scope. I cannot work with them. But if that’s your livelihood, you’re a coach, you’re charging for that, it makes sense that you want to keep this person coming. And that’s the fine line. You got to put the finances out to a side. It’s not about that. It’s about the person’s health. And see, we have a medical license that we have to uphold. So to me, that’s my thing is I’m not trying to kill anyone. I’m not trying to have anyone die on me or create an issue. My job as our six principles of naturopathic medicine, one of them being is first do no harm intentionally or not, and we need to ensure that we’re doing the best thing for them.
I always like to see my patients. If this was my daughter, if this was me, if this was my mom, how would I want that person to be treated? If we can change, and this is true for any business industry, if you treat your patients, your clients, your customers, with that mindset, you’ll never make a wrong mistake. Nobody intentionally wants to hurt someone that they love.
I think we’re good at that in general as naturopathic doctors. I think we’re really good at referring out. And I think maybe it’s the scrutiny that our medicine receives that we are very much okay with saying, okay, I want you to see this other person. Of course, come back to me, but we need to figure out what’s going on. I think that we excel at that.
We really do.
We are not interested in excluding our other professionals. We want to bring them in. And I think that’s very important for our field for people to do that because when we do that, these doctors get exposure to working with a naturopath, and they are blown away. I’ve had conversations with emergency room doctors. When a patient of mine, I might go to the emergency room, you need to be checked for this right away, make sure it’s not these things.
They’ll go in and they’ll tell my doctor said to screen for this to do this. And then I’ve had people, like, the doctor wants to talk to you. So they’ll put ’em on the phone and I’m talking to them and I can see, I can hear in their voice that they’re impressed because they think, oh, this person’s, what do they know? But we have a full medical training, which is why I would like to include a medical doctor in my name as a naturopathic medical doctor because we do practice the natural and the medical part as well. And so like I said, we’re trained to look at all of these systems. And you’re absolutely right. The more you learn, the more you realize. I don’t know enough. And it’s a humbling act to say, obviously, we know a lot. We can talk hours and hours about different systems and therapies and so forth, and physiology, we can do that for hours, but we don’t go around throwing our titles out to people. But I’ll tell you that there are a lot of influencers that need to shut up is what they need to do.
It’s true.
They need to just shut up. They need to stop putting information out there that they have no real education on, they have no training on. And it’s dangerous that you’re giving little segments, little pieces of information that someone can just run off with and they get themselves into trouble. So I don’t know if you remember, there was a time a couple years ago, maybe 20 18, 20 19, I remember seeing this trend of apple cider vinegar is good for everything and it’s good, but you need to know how much, how long, who can and who can’t.
I was giving a talk, a presentation to a group of people, and after the presentation, a woman came up to me, I said something to the effect of, just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. And she came up to me and said, you know, are so right about that. She says, I went on this whole apple cider vinegar trend thing that was going around, and I ended up giving myself a heck of a lot of issues. I had all this indigestion and my stomach was hurting and all these digestive issues. So she goes to her medical doctor and says, oh, just throw a probiotic at it. It made it worse. So I asked her, how much am cider were you taking? She says, A cup. Oh my lord Jesus, a whole cup, a fire. And I’m like, no, you’re supposed to one or two tablespoons. I’m not telling you guys to do this, but it’s usually one or two tablespoons in water, maybe with a little lemon in the morning when you’re fasting. That’s for some people. Not everyone can do that. If you have other issues, you might not want to do that. So I’m not telling you to do that. So these things are for educational purposes, but people are running with it, doing it, and then hurting themselves. And I was like, oh my God. I said, yeah, that was way too much of what you were doing.
But that’s the mistake that people make is they hear someone that maybe they’re just charming in front of a camera. They sound good, they sound confident of what they’re talking about.
But the information is not grounded on sound, credible and safe and effective medicine. It’s just not, the experience is not there. Yeah. Experience is not there. A part of physician heal thyself, the reason I named, it’s because what we tell our patients to do,
We’re doing it ourselves. We’re walking that walk. We’re not perfect, which is why we stay humble.
Right? Totally.
We stay humble.
You’ll fall off, but get back up.
You fall off and get back up. Part of the journey for anyone, which is why when we work with people, we say, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t beat yourself up because you failed at the diet. Just get back up. We’re going to do it again. No judgment. We’re coaches too. That’s right. We need coaches. We have people that speak life into us. If it’s not amongst colleagues, we have other people that we’re wise enough to know we can’t do this on our own. It takes community, it takes support. It takes someone else’s perspective. It is like trying to treat yourself as a doctor can be dangerous. Sometimes I’m the best patient. They say doctors are the worst patients. Sometimes they are. But once you learn, you realize it’s good to have neutral eyes on me. So some things that we wanted to talk to our audience about is if you’re looking to work with someone who practices more natural and holistic, start asking the right questions. You should interview people. We interview our patients and they’re interviewing us too.
I always tell my potential clients, this is an interview. I’m going to ask you questions to identify. Are you a good fit for me? And you get to ask me questions to identify, am I a good fit for you? Because the last thing that we should have is a working professional relationship that’s not harmonious that you might get on my nerves and my nervous system is going off all the time. I see your name because you’re not doing what you need to do. Because the reality is we get people who are like, they think they want to do a natural.
Until they’re walking that journey, they’re fighting every way. Like, wait, wait, you may not got to stop drinking coffee. I got to stop drinking soda. I got to eat vegetables. Eat a green. What do you eat? Broccoli. Just one. I only eat once a day. Why do I have three times a day? And then they want to go back and talk about the caveman days. They only eat one time or whenever they came across food, they didn’t live in cities with traffic where our nervous system, our bodies are constantly fighting flight burning through all those vitamins and nutrients. We’re living in different times. Our body needs the fuel.
I mean, also our food has no nutrients in it for the most part, right? That’s right. Their food.
They ate the whole cow. Whole cow. They ate all the organs too. And so yeah, food is different. Toxic burden is different. Yeah, there’s so many reasons you need to eat.
There are so many different, eat your food guys. Eat the food. Just eat the food. Yeah. So the ways of, as I said, ask whoever you want to work with, whether it’s be clear about what kind of help do you need. Because if you’re going to need someone who does blood work and prescribes treats you effectively, you’re going to want to ask where did they get their education. What kind of licensure do they have? What’s their scope of practice? How do they go about helping people? There’s nothing wrong. I don’t get offended if someone asks me where I got my training from, I let them know. And if they ask me, how are you trained? We’ll go into it. And most of the time they’re like, wow, that’s a lot. Yeah, it is a lot. You want to ask, like I said, where did they get their training in their individual profession? There could be a nurse practitioner. There are some really good nurse practitioners that I’ve met that who have done this. They’ve invested time and money to get the training to learn all of the natural modalities. And it’s through the experience of implementing what they’ve learned and training under other doctors that have been doing that work to apply these things. And I don’t mind.
I mentor a couple of people that are not naturopaths, and I’ve told them it’s going to be a lot of work because what we’ve learned condensed in four years, you’re going to have to learn in pieces. But you can do it if it’s a nurse practitioner, ask, what is their background in history? What have they learned and trained in? And what is their areas of focus? Does it align with you?
You really want to work with someone who is licensed. Ideally, like I said, health coaches, they have their place. They need to know what legally they can and cannot do. If they’re there to help motivate you, inspire you, and create a meal plan for you, that’s great. They can do those recommendations. They can do recommendations. They just cannot treat conditions. What other things would you say that would be good for someone to discern? Should they work with a doctor, a naturopathic doctor or a coach or a nurse practitioner or any other specialist in this holistic industry?
So I think it depends on where you are. It depends on where you are in your journey, how serious you are about your health and that journey. Are you ready to see a naturopathic doctor? I find a lot of people who are online and they’re shopping around or looking for information, they might just be at the beginning of this journey of natural healing or natural health. And so a lot of those people, I end up seeing them in office and they come in with their bag of supplements, and I’ll go through all those supplements and it’s like, okay, let’s do some blood work and let’s see if you really need this. And for the most part, a lot of those supplements we’re in a consumer world. And so you’re constantly being sold. So I think that’s the one thing to keep in mind. They’re going to tell you that you need these things. You don’t need them. You need blood work. That’s first and foremost, get your blood work.
I kind of distinguish between working with a health coach versus a doctor. So if you’re sick, if you’re fatigued, if you’re not sleeping well, if you’re not having a bowel movement every day, see a naturopath if you know have a chronic illness, if you’re severely ill, if you’re acutely, ill see a naturopathic doctor. I don’t think that, I personally don’t think that someone who is not an optimal health should see a health coach. I think that even with myself, I’m a mom. I have two children. I went through medical school. That’s a lot of stress. And so even for me, I’m not going to see a health coach. I’m going to see a naturopath. I know that although I take care of myself really well, I work out. I eat healthy. I take supplements. I know that there’s other things that I need and I know who I want to see. And so if you are not just like this extreme warrior and your body is just optimal and you’re living somewhere that doesn’t exist, you have no toxins. You’re just healthy picture, perfect picture, perfect health, then okay, go see a health coach. Yeah. If you live in this world with these toxins in this water, you need to see someone. Yeah.
I think if there’s serious chronic conditions, autoimmune conditions, cancers really chronic symptoms, neurological, just serious things going on, you need to see a licensed professional who’s properly trained in addressing those things because you will end up in a situation where you’re wasting your time and money. They can’t really help you. That’s really the truth. They can’t help you. They don’t have the proper training. And by law, a health coach is, I looked at the scope of practice and the legal considerations of health coaches. Health coaches cannot diagnose medical conditions, prescribe treatments or prescribe supplements or medications because these actions require a medical license. So if you’re working with a coach and they’re doing that, they’re beyond their scope of practice. Or if you’re a health coach and you’re doing that, you stepped outside of your scope of practice and understand that that’s a human life that’s going to be impacted by the lack of understanding how serious these conditions are. While everyone is on the natural health thing right now, which is great, we want that. But you need to know what specifically do you need?
What are your needs? And the only way to address that is someone who’s going to do a full assessment and then do blood work and then still do more assessments and then start treating you from there. Because that individual needs to understand the quality of herbs and supplements. First of all, the therapeutic dosing of supplements, that’s very important. There’s a therapeutic amount that’s safe and effective for certain conditions, and everyone’s individual age, gender, weight, all of these different things they play in hand. And lab work obviously has an effect on this. So this conversation is not to bash people who are interested, who love the natural industry, right of healthcare, but it is to warn anyone who is a health coach, to know what your role as a coach is and maybe how you can work alongside with the professionals to help these clients of yours to do the things that they need to do.
Really, it comes down to the lifestyle, the dietary stuff. That’s the big area that coaches can be very helpful, getting them to exercise. But everything else leave it to the people who are properly trained and educated, and they’re informed on how to do these things safe and effectively for people out there. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. If you have any comments on this, I love to hear it. Like I said, it’s not to bash anyone, but I do think that as nature paths, we need to take a stance and be clear on what’s safe, what’s effective, because we’ve seen all these IV clinics pop around and now they’re selling. That’s what they’re doing. They’re selling an iv. We do IVs, but we are assessing our patients and creating these IV bags according to the specific needs of that individual. So there’s a huge difference of diagnosing and treating people. So any remarks before we wrap up here? Dr. White?
No.
I think if I say more, we’ll, it’ll too much. That conversation. I would just say, just be safe. Truly be safe. Be smart. Ask questions before you hire someone and make sure that you feel confident that they’re able to help you. If you don’t feel confident that this person’s properly able to guide you in your health journey, then you’re not going to heal because your nervous system needs to be in a parasympathetic state and needs to feel safe in order for you to heal. And if you don’t have full confidence in that individual that’s going to help you in this process, then you just need to keep interviewing people until you find the right person.
I think that’s a good point though too, because I feel like a lot of people are going online or they’re going online out of desperation.
So they’re going to put their trust in these people online.
It sounds good.
It does sound good to show something here because when you’re chronically ill, you don’t think straight. You can’t. You got that brain fog going on and whatever seems enticing, you want to jump on that opportunity. Discernment, I would say discern, slow down, ask the questions. Don’t jump at that opportunity right away.
And also, what do you get out of seeing me? What does this health coach get out of seeing you? Or what does this person get from you buying the supplement? Are they making money off of it because yes, they are.
Yeah, supplements. That’s a whole other conversation, a whole other conversation. Well, thank you guys for so much for joining us on this episode. I hope you’ve took a lot of value to keeping you safe. We’re going to go into the good, the bad, and the ugly in our current sick care medical system. Jay, I want to talk about the importance of physical exams. After Covid, a lot of doctors stopped doing physical exams in their office, and I have to say that’s a big disservice to their patients because this is a very important part of our assessment, is that we examine neurological symptoms assessments on them, and just putting our hands on patients in a therapeutic way of assessing different things that we’re trained to do. It can really give us information on what are the things to evaluate, to do blood work or do imaging, or to refer to someone.
If we see there’s a neurological deficit, we can refer to that. So if your doctor is not doing a physical exam on you, or if you bring up a condition that’s a physical condition and they’re not doing an assessment on you or even referring you to someone, you might want to ask why or find yourself a new doctor. Hey, until next time, I hope you all stay blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.