Many may be aware that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) features a pattern of unwanted thoughts and fears, even obsessions, that lead you to do repetitive and rigid behaviors. It's a compulsive behavior that interferes with daily activities, causing significant distress. Despite efforts to ignore or get rid of bothersome thoughts or urges, they remain, so these behaviors then become like rituals. Many people with OCD know or suspect their obsessional thoughts are not reali

My entire life my hemoglobin has been high and I always joked that clearly I was meant to be a mountain girl, because high hemoglobin generally means I can carry oxygen well. This also meant I could handle a postpartum hemorrhage better than most, although this was the one complication I never suffered. It wasn't until just last year that I cared for my first client with hemochromatosis and since that time, I've had five more and have found the genetic predisposition in my ow

Functional medicine practitioners see a wide-variety of clients and because we are the system-focused clinicians, where so much of conventional medicine is composed of our specialists who have somewhat of a tunnel visit in their consultations, functional medicine clinicians often see those clients who have a plethora of issues, throughout the entire body, which have largely gone unresolved with previous clinicians. When ominous cause can't be found for symptoms or treatments

It's no secret that my weight has fluctuated through the years - primarily the years I was previously in clinical practice. As the mother of six, it wasn't my pregnancies and breastfeeding experiences that seemed to challenge my waistline the most, but more the stress and sacrifice of being a midwife, taking 24/7 call, and managing everyone else's needs while ignoring my own. I've lost 60 pounds in the last three years, and while my #diet has changed very little, my movement

This has been on my mind a few years, as I feel there is an underlying cause we have failed to fully realize. Why would someone intentionally starve themselves, right? It goes against all our survival instincts. More recently I heard it explained that because there is no cure, nor even really any treatment, no pharmaceuticals for anorexia, that anorexia is the one condition in which someone can "choose" to kill themselves and a judge will permit it (euthanasia). Is this just

Did you even know that was a possibility? Admittedly, neither did I, until I suffered from zoster sine herpete (ZSH) just two weeks ago - and thought I was dying. The first few days, I felt sore whether I was moving or resting. My body just ached. I can remember the very first sensation honestly, down the right side of my neck and right shoulder just moments after I resigned from a fairly toxic position. I hadn't made the connection though. I wondered if I had slept wrong, if

Everyone has their favorite diet. Experts argue which is more effective. The meat group has a fan-base and certainly so does the vegan life-style. What really doesn't receive any argument is the value in eating fruits and vegetables. The very well-studied Mediterranean diet is a huge proponent of eating plant-based foods, as is the #vegan and vegetarian approaches, the hunter-gatherer diet or Paleolitic, and even the ketogenic diet. Plant-based diets reduce a plethora of chro

My son joined the #football team this year. As a #homeschooler, this has never been an option before, for any of my kids, but Samuel is especially athletic, so I made the decision to transfer him to the local government school so he could participate. The second week into playing, I picked him up from practice and his face was significantly swollen and pink. He shared they had to do a lot of up/downs because another kid on the team had demonstrated some poor behavior during a

Nearly twenty percent of our national expenditure is for healthcare expenses. Ten percent of that expense is for prescription medicine. This implies our country is suffering significant illness and we have an inability to prevent disease in the first place. In fact, we haven't healthcare at all; we have a failing #sickcare system. Many experts have suggested we are paying a steep price in terms of degeneration and illness as the result of our separation from Mother Nature. Tr