The Basics of Nature Cure on Dr Birch’s new YouTube Channel
Below is the transcript for Dr Birch’s new YouTube channel. Please follow the channel and join the conversation as they will be posting different enjoyable content. Thank you and enjoy!
Hello there this is Dr Jonathan Birch here in Santa Barbara California I'm a naturopathic medical doctor and welcome to my new channel. I've been encouraged by my patients for this past decade in practice to begin making content and videos to share with the world. We love our practice with our patients but this is exciting for me to be able to share content with you and offer tips, medical information and new things that we're learning so you can benefit and watch at your convenience. So follow this channel and keep an eye out on new content coming out. Today I'm discussing the basics of our practice as naturopathic doctors.
When patients come to us we're pleased to get to know them as human beings, as well as to get to know their medical history, do proper physical exam, and really try to figure out the root cause of their concern and their condition, and also to educate about how best to take care of themselves for longevity. All of our patients are unique and wonderful and depending on their issues we need to think about what to do to figure out how to get them feeling better.
At the root of our philosophy of naturopathic doctors we do have to think about Nature Cure.
Living within the laws of nature cure is going to put our bodies in the best environment to heal and to feel good for as long a period of time as possible and so these are the main things we always first make sure our patients are doing their best with:
Number One: Diet
It is so important how our body is feeling and doing with the nutrition we put into it. Our biggest connection with the world around us is our food. Our food gives us our nutrients, and the health giving properties of our diet is so important for our longevity. If we're not giving ourselves the right food it could burden our bodies with a huge amount of toxicants and aggravates that can perpetuate inflammation, what we know as a big contributor to lots of different conditions which we'll talk about in future videos.
Number Two: Exercise. Of course you always think about exercise as a I'm doing right now with my dog Matisse, she's with us at the office every day and she is a gift to all of us. But exercise lubricates our joints, moves our blood, and moves our lymphatic system. Without exercise you will create a lot of stagnation, weakness, and we want to stay strong for health, longevity and good energy.
Number Three: Hydration. We always think about how our patients are hydrating and lubricating through fluid intake. As I mentioned lubrication is so important with exercise, but also lubricating our blood with the proper amount of hydration is so important for healthy blood pressure, energy creation, for taking care of our tissues and as we know our cells are mostly water so we need to maintain water intake for proper functioning of our system.
Number Four: Environment. Sunlight, fresh air, and the environment as a whole around us on a daily basis is very important for our proper function. As humans we are all creatures of nature and come from this beautiful nature around us, and so we always like to think about with our patients how are we interacting with our environments, how is our environment affecting us and especially we are concerned with our daily indoor environments. A lot of our patients are damaged by indoor mold and usually initially not even knowing it. Also other indoor pollutants, EMFs, electrosmog and also outdoor pollutants can drag down out health.
Number Five: Sleep. Optimizing our sleep rejuvenates our bodies, allows us to make our hormones at night, regenerate and rejuvenate for the next day. Lack of sleep affects our stress levels, contributes to inflammation and can be super detrimental.
Number Six: Love. Loving ourselves allows us to motivate ourselves, achieve self-care, reduce stress, and reach our goals. Whether it be friends, family, or even pets we can share experiences, have more passion and maintain that passion so we can have a wonderful lovely life that we feel good about and we're excited about. This is so important for health.
Too much bad stress without balance falls under this category and it is of utmost importance as it can affect our heart, nervous system, and organ systems if not taken care of. Stress can become good stress which is called a eustress and this is ideal to motivate ourselves and be regenerative versus degenerative.
If we have too much bad stress this is going to very much affect our sympathetic nervous system which is our fight or flight, and balance of sympathetic with parasympathetic which is the rest and digest relaxation is so important.
So these are some basics we think about which are simply the basics of a healthy lifestyle, natural medicine, and Naturopathic Medicine. When any of these go wrong there are different conditions that we think about testing, monitoring and fixing and very frequently our patients get better.
In future videos I'm going to keep going over these topics in detail with things to think about and I'm excited to share that with you.
This again is my first video on this channel and I'm excited to keep it going, and I'm going to commit to doing as many videos as I can to bring you interesting information. So please follow me here, and I wish you all the best have and have a wonderful day.