My story…

I think I need to write a little bit about myself and to let you in on my journey of how I found my true calling in holistic and naturopathic health and how this helped me to develop my approach of digging deep for my clients making me a better clinical practitioner along the way.

I have always been interested as a young woman in holistic health and started out as an aromatherapist. This was fantastic at the time and although I was working full time as an estate agent little did I know that this would be the beginning of what was to come.

As fate would have it I was often confronted with the need to help sick people in an emergency. As estate agents we are quite open to the public if people felt unwell and they would often gravitate to where I was, and again and again I was faced with having to look after them until the ambulance arrived. Strangely, this happened so often that I decided to enter into the nursing profession!

I studied nursing for three years and encountered many up and downs of the profession and when I qualified as a staff nurse I decided to work in a cardiothoracic hospital that specialised in heart and lung surgery and treatments. Having studied cardiothoracic nursing I found I realised that I had a massive passion for this area and this has followed me through to herbal medicine and naturopathy nutrition. I am fascinated by this area and what we now know is that in the many cases of various diseases and ailments it can be boiled down to bad lifestyle habits and nutritional deficiency and, more importantly, can therefore more often that not be reversed or at least improved.

I enjoyed many days on hospital wards looking after patients who were sick or poorly due to various heart conditions. Sadly, however, I knew that I was struggling with the paperwork for nursing handovers and it became so overwhelming that I decided to leave and go on to work in an a fast paced front-line NHS accident and emergency department (I later found out I had dyslexia.)

Here, in A & E, I blossomed. I loved every minute of my 15 years there but I did sadly encounter much loss and heartache with, for example, families that had lost someone in road traffic accidents I cannot explain the grief I felt for them! But it wasn't always doom and gloom as I also had the opportunity to meet with some of the most wonderful people I have ever known. And yes, in A & E it was easy for me because I did not have time to write everything down, we had to think on the spot and act quickly. As time passed not only did I thoroughly enjoy this way of working but I began to realise that this was one of my strengths and allowed me to thrive where others failed.

After spending years seeing patients come and go I begun to feel that I could do more. Working sometimes 80 hours a week most months whilst on a night shift one day one of the other nurses said to me ``Why don’t you study something holistic?`` and so after I took a quick look online, herbal medicine popped up and I thought to myself 'This is my kind of thing!'.

I applied and went onto to study for a degree in herbal medicine and understood full well that we need to look at the patient as a whole and in a holistic manner taking into many factors more than just their symptoms. It was great! Of course, my clinical knowledge and practice helped me enormously.

Unfortunately, due to the faced high stress environment such as A & E and studying a degree full-time I eventually crashed and burnt out quite severely! Working a full shift then sleeping in my car for a couple of hours then rushing off to university, looking back I really must have been crazy! But my passion got the better of me. Cutting a long story short, I ended up a patient in my own A & E with AFIB, a resting heart rate of 180 beats per minute and a blood pressure of 180 over 100. You can check out my story of how I managed to cure myself over a 2 year period by reducing inflammation, shedding the pounds going from a size 16 down to a 12 and all of which without exercising!

Suffice to say I had to retreat from my beloved NHS and take much needed time to convalesce and reflect on what I should do next. This was a major turning point for me in health care and changed forever how I would look after my patients and clients in future.

Inspired by my personal experiences founded my new knowledge and passion of digging deep. It meant going back to basics and looking at the cells themselves. I see this like building works or construction, for example if you have a crack in the wall it’s not advisable to ignore it or just paste over it; we have to look at what has caused the problem by digging deep and really understand on a cellular level how we can treat it.

Assessing clients in this 'dig deep' fashion to find out what really is going on and taking the time to do full medical history on an mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual level is the only way truly treat. Treating the whole person and not just the ailment.

This journey has given me the tools to investigate in such detail and on a cellular level; it’s just unbelievable! Understanding the very essence of food science and knowing what pathways on a chemical level is not working - this is my passion. As Hippocrates says 'Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.' This is my journey and it is one that does not end here. I will continue to grow and learn more and more everyday increasing my knowledge and practice of naturopthic therapy health and nutrition to best serve my clients.

From A&E Nurse, to Medical Herbalist and now a practicing Nutritional Therapist of some years I can honestly say I have found my calling! I love speaking to clients and learning with them about their own unique physiology to better support their pursuit of optimized health or the management or removal of ailments and their pains. Join me!