Hi , who are you ? Thank you for joining in on the Mindfully Integrative Show , and this is Dr Damaris Maria Grossman , and we have an amazing mindful chat with Vanessa Nixon . She's a traditional naturopathic doctor and she has a wealth of knowledge and many things to kind of share with you and I'm so glad that you've made it on the show .
Thanks so much for your time .
Thank you for having me . I'm delighted to be here .
I think it'll be awesome and I can't wait for those that can see your beautiful tapestry . In the back , I see the little elephant and a beautiful animal . I love it , love it . So thanks for being on the show and taking your time to teach others and to guide them in your knowledge , and so , what's a little fun fact , people don't know about you .
Well , actually the elephant is a great segue into that . A lot of people don't know that I've lived in a couple of different countries overseas . I've lived in Japan and India and Germany , and this is a tapestry that I got when I was living in India .
I was going to say that looks like an Indian one .
Yeah , elephants are definitely one of my favorite spirit animals Love it .
That's beautiful , oh , I was going to say there , or maybe Thailand .
Right , right . Yeah , I still want to make it to Thailand . I haven't been there yet .
No , I haven't either , but that'll be . That's a definitely a worthwhile trip soon . So talk to me about your journey to be a traditional naturopath and how that was and what . What got you there . Cause that isn't you know , that's not like a normal path in health , you know Right .
Right .
You know what I mean . It doesn't that people don't go . Oh , I'm this . You know what got you there ? What ?
It was definitely a journey and , uh , it really began , um , when I was probably a teenager , because I , um , I was one of those kids who grew up eating a lot of processed foods , a lot of junk foods , what I call , you know , packaged processed non-food substances , and by the time I was about 14 , I was catching every cold , and every time I caught a cold
it started to turn into bronchitis , and so this became a downward spiral for me in my health , and my mother was a nurse , and so she was pretty deeply entrenched in just the conventional medical model , and at the time , that was antibiotics .
That's all we know . That's all we know . Knew Coming from conventional to now integrate . That's all you know . That's all you're taught .
Right , right . And so I was put on antibiotics every time I got sick . And as this continued , I was getting sick , you know , six , eight times a year . And so after a couple of years , I was prescribed daily antibiotics , just continuous , oh , my goodness , daily .
Daily . Oh my God . What that did to your microbiome , oh my God .
Exactly , you know , by the time I was , you know , this went on for years . So by the time I was in my early 20s , I was just sick . All the time . It was affecting my quality of life . It was affecting , you know , my ability to , um , focus in school .
It was affecting my work life , my , you know , relationships , um , and when it changed was probably I was 22 or 23 . And a friend of mine was noticing that I was taking antibiotics every day and he asked why . So I told him the story and he asked me a question that nobody had ever asked me before .
Throughout this whole journey , and I had never asked myself this question . He asked is it helping ? Just that one simple question made me stop and it just it flipped something in my in my brain , it flipped the switch . That was like you know what it's not helping , you know what it's not helping .
And that question , just me stopping and thinking about that question , actually opened my mind to other questions Like okay .