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modern naturopathic model

The Modern Naturopathic Model

Today we are chatting with Naturopath Brett O’Brien from Core Naturopathics, who, together with his business partner Darren Sassall, has created a groundbreaking naturopathic clinic allowing patients to experience a new and modern naturopathic model to healing.

The Core Naturopathic team has blended traditional naturopathic philosophy with modern tools including pulse electromagnetic field therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, infrared sauna, hyperthermia, and IV nutrition to offer a unique and contemporary naturopathic clinical model.

 

About Brett O’Brien:

I have practised as a qualified naturopath for almost twenty years, and I am still excited by the
possibilities this career can offer. The constant that I am always most fascinated by is the people. I have always embraced a desire to engage with others. It can be as superficial as my time in sales or as deep as supporting someone at the end of life. The human capacity to communicate, connect and support each other can be extremely fulfilling.

As a Naturopath, trying to understand the human experience is so very complex. Still, I believe I am closer to understanding it through the philosophy of Naturopathy than any other health profession. I love that the body intrinsically understands what it feels like to be perfect, and its aim to return is based on hope, confidence, possibility and self-sustainability. I believe the role of the naturopath is then to provide a managed reconnection with this innate capacity. Our role is to identify and remove the roadblocks that inhibit the body from what it already knows. Our tools of the trade then provide a means of traction and momentum and a road map. It has taken nearly twenty years to know this.

As a Naturopath, you are constantly scrutinised about your effectiveness in a medicalised system. To rediscover a philosophy and confidently embrace a paradigm that has almost disappeared and build a business model around it has been a massive risk. But the amazing thing is, is that most people intrinsically know this paradigm and just need a road map to navigate by. Core Naturopathics returns to the ideals of the past but represents a very modern application. I believe naturopathy can be a modern, scientific and results-based wellness paradigm that supports people’s capacity to heal and thrive. It also represents my vision to engage with others, experience the human condition and trail blaze through this new age of wellness.

Connect with Brett:

 

Transcript

Introduction

Andrew: Welcome to “Wellness by Designs.” I’m your host, Andrew Whitfield-Cook. Brett O’Brien and Darren Sassall have set up a groundbreaking clinic, which looks more like a private hospital than a naturopath clinic. Today, we’re talking with Brett about their new clinical model and how they’re hoping to recapture the philosophy of natural medicine. Welcome to “Wellness by Designs,” Brett. How are you going?

Brett: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Andrew: Absolute pleasure. Now, I’ve gotta say in our chat the other day, just about doing a podcast, you took me through a walkthrough of your clinic. Oh my God, that’s impressive.

Brett: Oh, really? Oh, thank you.

Andrew: Yeah. How long did it actually take to come to fruition? Like just the setup, that’s quite amazing.

Brett: Yeah, we put it together over the years. You know, it’s when you don’t have money and, you know, every naturopath’s gonna understand that you don’t have a lot of money, you have an idea, how do you build on the idea? You just get into a situation, you just keep building with a concept in mind and you just keep adding to it over time. And then you’ve gotta go through, does it all work? So then there’s a process of seeing if it all works and it all comes together and it has, and we’re pretty confident with what we’re doing right now as a really good naturopathic clinical model. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. So let’s go back a little bit. How long have you guys been at that premises?

Brett: Well, this is a new clinic, so there are different stages of the clinic. So we’ve been in this one for three and a half years. This is, I guess, the big clinic model. This is the goal clinic. Before that, we were seven years in another clinic, before that we were two years in development, before that we were, you know, doing what every other naturopath does. And, you know, a room in another clinic somewhere. Yeah, all the basic stuff. I’ve done the rounds and prepping and working in health food stores and, you know, what every naturopath does. Yeah, cut my teeth on everything.

Andrew: Tell us about that vision then. How did the idea of this end goal first spark? And how did you gel with Darren about it? I mean, that’s quite an amazing meeting of the minds.

Brett: Yeah. So I had this idea for quite some time. I just wanted to build a clinic that was more modern. I read a book by an economist that said the wellness industry was gonna be the next trillion-dollar industry. And he wrote this in the ’90s. And so I read it and I went, “Right, naturopaths are gonna have to fit in there somewhere. What kind of clinical model could I have?” And then reading about it, I went, “Well, naturopaths really got that spa background.” And then I said, “Well, how could you bring that spa idea where you go out of the country, you know, you’re in an environment that’s conducive to healing, how could you bring that into an urban environment, and how could you modernize it?”

Andrew: Okay. But this is quite dramatic. Like, when I did that walk-around with you, like, it’s serious, it’s flabbergasting, just the best equipment, the most modern appliances. It’s almost like a brand new hotel. Like, it’s spectacular, nothing shorter. But you come from country beginnings. How did you think about this from an economic point of view?

Brett: Well, you develop a model over time, so I guess your dream. And everywhere every naturopath starts with a dream of what they wanna do and I just did that. And, you know, I did repping, I saw other practitioners, I saw what they were doing. You know, I tried a menopause clinic in the early 2000s. You know, so I was always looking for something to sort of get my teeth into. And then I had an idea about we need more application to really have the impact as naturopaths that we need to have in a modern context. So really the clinics about how we actually get results as effectively and efficiently as possible. I didn’t think that nutraceuticals and herbals were good enough, so I started looking at what else is around the world, what else is being used, and how can we be more effective in a clinical model that was naturopathic. So not pseudo-medical.

Andrew: No, that’s right. So let’s delve a little bit further into this clinical model because it requires some explanation about the equipment that you have, why you are using that equipment. We’ll talk about some of the results later, but can we delve into that clinic focus and how you chose each piece of equipment to fit in as a piece of a jigsaw?

Brett: Yeah, sure. Well, I guess when you look at chronic disease, there are two main factors, that’s metabolic and immune. So that’s always a good place to start for naturopaths. If you look at cancer, autoimmune diseases, they generally have two parts, generally, a few more parts in that we all know but… So what I did was I started looking for pieces that would fill the requirements. How can we get detoxification happening more effectively? How can we get the immune system working more effectively? How can we get lymphatic fluids moving? How can we heat the body up? How can we get the immune system activated? How can we get the recovery? How can we get neurology in a better position? And then what I did overtime is I could see that one piece of the puzzle then enhanced the next part. And I guess that’s what I call this telescopic response is that it’s not each piece of equipment by itself that has the benefit, it’s when you bring ’em all together and you add them on top of each other and then they give this springboard effect.

But to do that, you really need to have an individual really well-resourced. We all know that people can go overseas, they can use whatever equipment they want, but what we were seeing, people are coming back with mixed results. And our interest was, “Well, what’s the mixed results. Why are some people coming back from doing hypothermia in Germany and going, ‘I’m cured,’ to other people coming back and not surviving?” And so our interest was, “Well, what’s the variant?” And the variant is how well that person’s resourced rather than the equipment itself. The body can only respond to the therapies if it’s well-resourced and has the capacity then to take advantage of the other therapies. So we really start off by getting the body well-resourced. And then when we launch it, it has a far better effect as far as what the equipment can then do for that individual. So it’s really important to get those baselines right first. It’s really important to get digestion, nutrition, all the basics right.

Andrew: So these are the resources that you’re talking about, resourced. Let’s delve into this. Do you have a program that you adhere to with each patient? Like, for instance, you mentioned digestion, it’s like a number one. Let’s go through those first because I have a second question after that.

Brett: Yeah. So I guess what we do is we’ve got testing equipment that we use inside the clinic. So we use different capacities to measure and then really we…if you look at naturopathic philosophy, the equipment’s not about diagnosis, it’s seeing how far away the person is from ideal. It’s the true nature of homeostasis is how can you measure what the roadblocks are to homeostasis. Once you recognize the roadblocks, how can you remove the roadblocks? So it could be, you know, inflammatory bowel. Okay, then work on the gut. It could be neurology, it could be depression, anxiety, panic attacks, remove the roadblock. It could be a nutrient deficiency, remove the roadblock.

So we’re looking for roadblocks that we can just remove and the body will then be able to self-regulate by itself. We just support that process. So really the testing equipment is to find out how well-resourced someone is and then what kind of resources they need then to optimize their health. And then that’s how we use the equipment. That gets away from this pseudo diagnosis or this pseudo-medical model that, you know, we are not allowed to diagnose, but we do. We don’t need to. All we need to do is recognize roadblocks and remove them, and then the body takes care of itself. And that’s what we’ve proven again and again in the clinic.

Andrew: And that is indeed naturopathic philosophy, something that we really need to re-grasp, or else, as you say, we become little diagnosis and little leaf-waving doctors.

Brett: And we don’t need to. There’s a massive capacity for us to work in a completely new field where we are just removing roadblocks, and we are just enhancing the capacity of the human body to do what it wants to do. That’s all we’re doing.

Andrew: Take us through, though, this patient dialogue because sometimes that can get extremely messy. People don’t come in with a diagnosis like a textbook. They come in with this, with a little bit of that, and by the way, you know, beforehand, there was that and the other. So there’s usually not just one thing going on, there’s usually a network, or actually more like a tangle of things going on. How do you unravel that tangle?

Brett: Yeah, I guess it’s the change of the role of the naturopath really. Once upon a time, we held all the information. Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to know about, you know, the gut, they had to come and see me for the information, where now everyone’s got the information, what they don’t have is the capacity to manage it well. So all of a sudden, we are in a position where we can help people manage their health better by working out strategies. And so everyone with a chronic disease comes in with a tangle of a web that they have no idea what’s working or what’s not. Really what our job is, is instead of…most clients come in with a symptomatic picture. So they’ve got 10 symptoms, they’ve got 40 different ways of how to manage that.

What we do is go, “Okay, then you’ve got all these symptoms, but really what we wanna do through this testing is work out where the drivers are. Let’s go for the top rather than these bottom symptoms, work out where this driver might be and see if we can treat and support that person in one area as the highest…I guess, the highest impact as possible.” So all of a sudden, what you’re bringing together is like a jigsaw puzzle, and you’re saying, “Well, what you’ve got here is a whole tangle, but you know what? If we just do this one part to it, then it should have this, you know, feeding down effect to all these other symptoms should have an impact if we can treat as high up as possible.” Again, that’s naturopathic. But that’s the way we untangle the web, it’s educating people around that.

Andrew: Yeah. But I would imagine that there would be a significant amount of work that you’d have to do on your intake to be able to get people to answer interview. How do you handle that effectively?

Brett: Yeah, a questionnaire, a really comprehensive questionnaire. And the questionnaire really gets people to sit down for three hours, which they’ve probably never done in their life and really have a look at their health and answer a really complex questionnaire that has an interrelationship to it. So all of a sudden, they’re kind of going, “Well, why are they asking me the same question again and again?” What it’s really doing is starting to get people to look at health holistically. And the questionnaire can be a really great learning technique or teaching aid to get people to start to look at their health and look at it holistically. So that’s, I guess, the first step. Really, then the next step, once they come in, is really connecting with the person, regardless of needing to take a case. Often as you start doing the testing, the case will develop itself over time.

So it’s about education. Once you start to simplify it, and once you can make it to a point where someone can understand the complexity very simply…and we’ve developed a complex language for that. So that was one of the things that we did is I developed a language that every practitioner in here speaks similarly. So we don’t practice the same. I don’t have any expectation that other naturopaths in here practice exactly the way I do. But what we do do is have a consistent language so no matter who they’re talking to in the clinic, it’s consistent for the client. And I guess that language then is really simple. We make it simple. We don’t make it complex. It is complex, make it simple, and then people can digest it and then gain confidence in the process.

Andrew: Take us through a little bit of what this dialogue might mean or might sound like with your patients.

Brett: Yeah, okay. So it’s describing, I guess, what chronic disease is. And it can be as sometimes…like, a lot of what I’m interested in at the moment is neurology. So what I see with most chronic clients is there tends to be a fight and flight response. There tends to be this neurology that dominates. Personally, I think that chronic disease is probably dominated by neurology, and that’s why it’s different between chronic and acute. So if we start to educate people about why they got into the position that they got into, first of all, particularly around chronic disease, and so once they start to understand and they can relate to it and they relate their story, so really what I’m doing with the testing is I’m relating their story to a biochemical fingerprint, and I’m telling their story through what I can see in the biochemistry.

Then once they can see that and they can match it up, then they can start to understand the process, then they can start to understand how to unravel it, how to create change, how to look at 1 thing rather than 12 different things, how they can work out strategies, how they get diet, lifestyle environment right as the basics of this foundation. Then once they get that, then we can start to launch ’em, and it’s about confidence then, it’s a new system. It’s a very new system. So it’s difficult for people to walk in here and understand it. The majority of people have already done the research, they know a lot about our clinic, and they step in with a greater understanding of how it works. But it’s educating people gradually.

Andrew: Yeah. So I could imagine there would be quite a lot of time needed to educate people because a lot of people have this predetermined. I go in, I see the naturopath, I go out, whereas you take a hell of a lot more care, and your programs are a hell of a lot more involved because they’re not just looking at, as you said at the beginning, one facet, a bunch of herbs, or a bunch of supplements. You look at this truly holistic approach, it’s quite magnificent. I would challenge anybody, go and see this clinic. I’m coming down to your clinic.

Brett: Thanks. That’s cool.

Andrew: So I have to ask, expectations versus results. Now, this is such a convoluted question, I get it. But when you’re dealing with patients who came in with that first expectation that they’re going to get a few supplements and now they’re educated into just how important it is to reset that allostasis…or homeostasis, forgive me, what’s the change and what’s the acceptance? What’re the outcomes for these patients?

Brett: Yeah, some people engage with it on different levels, so the expectation, not everyone engages in multiple levels. So a large proportion of our clients will come in and do the traditional naturopathics with the complexity. If they trust us, then they immediately trust the system. So then we guide them through, “Well, these are the things that you can do, and these are some of the other ways we can enhance these results.” And as long as there’s a really good trust and they understand the system, then they tend to be able to move forward in that approach to engaging in other aspects of it. It gets down to time and effort and money for most people. So it’s different for everyone. So we really try and tailor-make it for what the individual needs, rather than pushing them into a position that they can’t really negotiate in.

So it’s about what the client can do as far as their resources are concerned, trusting us that we know what we’re talking about and the system does work. And then they tend to trust us. It’s about trust. And so coming into this clinic, them really not knowing what we do, some do, a lot do now, but often they’d place their trust in us, and they say, “Well, if this is what you think is best for me and I can manage this in some form, then let’s go for it.” And that’s always the exciting part when you, you know, make that breakthrough with someone that trusts you enough to then engage in such a complex system.

Andrew: When you’re showing me around again, I saw, you know, like, you’ve got a far infrared sauna, there was the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, there was thermotherapy there as well. I can’t remember what you called it, it looked like a cocoon. But can you detail a few of these pieces of equipment that you have, how they fit into a person’s treatment, what they are beneficial for?

Brett: Okay. So it’s best if I just start from the beginning, I guess, and what we do. So we use things like what’s called pulse electromagnetic fields. And if you basically look at what the cell is, individual cells are like a battery. They’ve got a negative and a positive charge. They’ve got mitochondria. We all know this. This is basic biochemistry. But how can we have an impact on it? And so we use PEMF to actually instigate and exchange between the cells. So often someone who’s chronically ill doesn’t have the capacity to exchange effectively. They don’t have enough charge in their batteries. So we do it artificially. So that’s the first stage. And that starts this detoxification. It starts the possibility of the cells starting to regulate again. And then we put them on what’s called GForce, which then squashes the cell and it starts to then get the exchanging more effectively.

And then once that exchange happens, we use hypothermia, which then starts a whole different dialogue, complex dialogue around getting the body detox more effectively, getting the hypothalamus to engage in stress response and starting to regulate around heat. It starts to get the metabolic rate up, starts to get the heart rate up. All these people, you know, don’t have a lot of capacity to actually exercise. So this is doing the work for them while they can’t do it themselves. And so hypothermia does that, then there’s a recovery process. So it’s a push and recovery process. Then you might just sit on one of our PEMF mats and sit in a frequency for a while that might just allow them to relax or help stem cell production or pain management. Then after that, we often do IVs as well, then we might do a neurological process.

So we do brain entrainment. We’re using heart rate variability to then mediate the parasympathetic nervous system. So there’s a little bit of, you know, the introduction of sounds and visual frequencies on an infrared mat. And then they do a bit of that, and then we put them into a hyperbaric chamber where they can sleep and recover. So one hour in the hyperbaric chamber means about four hours sleep, hyper-oxygenated in state. So we’re using things like ozone as well in that process. So we’re putting more oxygen in the body. So once you get more oxygen, then metabolically the body starts to regulate at a much higher level than it probably hasn’t done in its entire life. But we do it artificially until the body can do it itself. Again, it’s about knowing what homeostasis is, the body wanting to self-regulate, but really not having the resources to do it. So we do it artificially until it can do it itself.

Andrew: When you’re talking about stressing the body, especially in somebody who’s quite ill, how acutely aware have you gotta be of the safety issues around these? For instance, somebody with atrial fib, heart failure, somebody who might have a flare with rheumatoid arthritis going on, how acutely aware have you gotta be about how their health is going even during that treatment?

Brett: So we’ve got the capacity to work with people before they start to use the equipment as well. So we might often use lots of anti-inflammatories, herbals, nutraceuticals way before we actually introduce the equipment. But we can so start on something very slow. So you can imagine we’re dealing with people with cancer, with autoimmune diseases, with Lyme disease. So we’re dealing with people that are quite compromised. So we’ve got their capacity to resource them well first, then we start very low. So then we just give these little pushes, scan them, we’re measuring all the time through these treatments, you know, what’s their heart rate doing? What’s their internal temperature…how’s it responding? How are they actually going through the system? Are they resourced enough to be able to do it? So we start off small, start to get these small changes, and then we start to build over time.

So it’s not something that one size fits all, it’s very individualized. And often people won’t get to use the equipment for some time. Like, I was just working with some clients today, and they seemed like they’d been here for a long time, and they said, “This is our third week. You know, we missed two weeks because, you know, we weren’t resourced enough.” They had to go back. They had to take more time to recover, do more things around herbals, actually, you know, resource them a little bit more, get their diet a little bit more effective, then bring them back in. So it’s being individualized all the time.

Andrew: Do you find that when you’re talking about giving the patients these resources that a lot of it has got to do with quite simple stuff, chewing your food, relaxing before…around mealtime, you know, choosing foods from around the outside of the supermarket than the inside, things like that? Do you spend a considerable amount of time on these basic natural medicine tenets?

Brett: Yeah, we actually spend a lot of time on that as well. So, as a naturopath, I’m working on mainly the biochemistry, but I’ve also got a nutritionist and a health coach that works on the other side. So he’s working on nutrition individually. So we might be doing, you know, food sensitivity tests, we might be doing hair mineral analysis. You know, there are other aspects that we’re

measuring, and he’s working on that diet, lifestyle, environment side. He’s saying, “Well, this is what you can do as far as food substitutes. This is what you can do. Here’s an app that helps you to work out, you know, when to get the sunlight to maximize your vitamin D.” So that is his part, and he’s supporting the people through that process as opposed to just me doing the naturopathic side.

So we have someone that’s constantly…and it’s actual fact what his job is, is he’s working with those people while they’re in the hypothermia. So they might be doing the…well, they do the hypothermia for half an hour, but during that half an hour, our nutritionist will be talking about food, he will be talking about lifestyle choices. So there are other aspects that come into it. So when you come into the clinic, you’re not isolated, you’re always with a practitioner and always under guidance. And we are having that information exchange all the time. That’s why that initial language that we’re all sharing has to be consistent because we’re all giving our own point of view, but we have to have some basis of knowing what everyone else is doing, or else there are four or five different conversations. But I developed that language very early on. So we all share that same language.

Andrew: Okay. Just talking about, you know, the treatment programs that you offer and that it may be some time before people basically come through the whole program if you like, but I guess the thing that…when you’re looking at quite complex machines, machines that aren’t accepted by orthodox medicine, logging change would be of paramount importance, wouldn’t it?

Brett: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: So have you ever thought about validating this with orthodox biochemicals method or measured things that an orthodox, or let’s say a naysay, a sceptic, would just have to accept that you’ve elicited positive change? Do you ever do those [biochemical measures? Yeah.

Brett: Yep, so we are measuring. So that initial consultation where we’re drawing those baselines, we’re always measuring against those baselines. So we are remeasuring all the time. From day one, I said we record all the data. I don’t know what to do with the data yet. There’s a lot of it, a lot of it just written on paper, but we record everything, everyone’s results on every single treatment is recorded. So there’s lots of data. I guess it’s someone smart enough to be able to sift through that and see the validity in the data. I certainly don’t have that capacity, but I know it’s important and hopefully one day it can be validated. It certainly can be validated by the people that go through the system. And that’s the most important part. But it’s all there, the data’s all there. And it’s not only what we are collecting, but they’re also collecting. You know, we’re working with oncologists, we’re working with integrative GPs. We’re not isolated in this process. So there’s lots of pathology that come through, and we can validate those through pathology as well, not a problem. That’s just not held by us. That’s held by their primary physician. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. But that’s brilliant that you’re actually validating and working in with these orthodox practitioners who are…even if they’re holistic, they still are under the auspices of their scope of practice. And so you working in with them is showing that validity in the care of that patient. Brilliant. I’m just so overwhelmed with this model, the way that you’ve done it. You know, I’ve gotta say, you’ve got my thumbs up of approval.

Brett: Thank you.

Andrew: I have to also ask…you know, it’s a question that you and I have spoken about just briefly previously, but there also might be something pretty interesting happening along an education line. Is that right? Can you tell us anything maybe about this?

Brett: Yeah. So we really want to open the clinic up to other practitioners, and we really want to show that there are other options as far as clinical naturopathic models out there. And so what we are hoping to do in the future is to be a training ground for new graduates to allow…we’ve always allowed naturopathic students to come into the clinic. We’ve always had an open-door policy that they could do clinical hours, but we’ll formulate that and we’ll start to develop the capacity for students to come in here, train in this, look at different options, look at different models, and hopefully start to train a new type of naturopath, where you’re not just sitting in a room waiting for your next client, where you’re working with a team of naturopaths using equipment in different areas you can work in, you can specialize in, but it’s all within one clinic. That’s gonna start. It’s a big story again, and that’s my next interest is to start to work out how we can support student naturopaths and really start to look at a very modern clinical aspect. This is returning naturopaths into the clinic and being expert clinicians as far as what we do really well.

Andrew: You’ve mentioned biochemistry quite a bit. What about psychology? Do you ever enter referrals? Do you work in, or do you even have visiting psychologists, counsellors? And the second part of this question, 20-part question…no, the second part of this question is do you find that people as they’re progressing through some of these therapies actually might have their own onion clearing, their own catharsis, particularly, you know, things like far infrared saunas and maybe you were talking about the mat that you use?

Brett: Yeah. So I guess the psychology part, we are always referring back. What happens when you start to take the warrior out of the system when the person’s hyper regulating all the time about fear of their own health and you start to relax that nervous system, all of a sudden the vulnerability starts to appear. And really, you need really good clinicians that work in that area to actually take over. So we’re very aware of that. We’re very aware of what we do and what our niche is, and we don’t assume that we do everything. So we’ve got a really good team of other practitioners in the area that we refer to as…and suggesting even before we start the process that people if there are things like trauma, you know, complex mental health presentations, that they actually seek out their practitioner and talk to them about what we’re about to undertake, and that this is what the process is and their services may be required in a slightly different aspect.

Again, we’re using things like brain entrainment, which starts to create a little bit more plasticity. It’s all about getting the body to get some plasticity back again, this rigidity that we can…you know, whether it’s our nervous system or our immune system, the rigidity then gives the body a lack of adaptability. So, as we bring that adaptability back in, then lots of stuff comes up. So that onion layer, then as you start to see the onion layer start to unfold, often it could be psychological brain entrainment just allows plasticity. All it’s really doing is allowing you to start to see things from a different angle. If you’re in a stress response, you’re always gonna regulate from the worst-case scenario first. What happens if you start working from the best case scenario at first, both are as real as each other, but most people don’t choose the best possible option.

So it starts to allow people to think about options rather than response, an automatic response and subconscious response. That plasticity starts to come in, then the onion layers start to peel off. And people will spend years coming back and forth into the clinic, outta the clinic, using other therapies and just working once they understand that health is a never-ending process, as we all know, and it takes time, and people come in and outta the clinic as they need to access our services, but they become really well-educated in what we can do and how we can enhance that onion layer effect.

Andrew: One of the things I was wondering about was you have the machines in the clinic, the therapy session ends, what do patients do at home? Do you have things like exercises, or do they perhaps have, you know, take-home equipment that you might hire, or do you direct them to other equipment that they might be able to get? What happens there?

Brett: Yeah, things like the hyperbarics are mobile to a certain extent, so people can hire these…they can hire the mats out. Like, you know, often we will hire one of our PEMF mats out for someone that might be going through intense chemotherapy or recovery processes, you know, things like rebounders, these mini tramps, you know. I don’t know how many I’ve sold for whoever builds rebounders, but just rebounding, just getting someone who’s chronically ill, who never gets an opportunity to move just standing on a mini-tramp and just moving on there, and that just starts getting the lymphatics moving, getting fluid moving, getting muscles moving again with low impact. The majority of people are taking up some exercise, we work on diet. They might have their own equipment. A lot of our clients have got bits and pieces that they use at home themselves.

Once you get that traction of momentum, you just wanna keep that process going. And so we might have someone that does a two-week intense within the clinic, in here every day, maybe three hours, four hours a day in here, and then they’ll go away and they’ll continue exercising, continue taking supplements, and then they might do that for a month and then come in for a day. And so we’ve got clients that we initially treated maybe three or four years ago that are still consistently coming in irregularly, or when they feel they need to, you know, have a top-up, they’ll come back in and keep that traction and momentum going.

Andrew: I gotta say I’m enthralled by this model. I definitely wanna come down and visit you. I would urge every budding practitioner, certainly new graduates to contact Brett and Darren at Core Naturopathics to see if they can have a walkthrough. Brett, thank you so much for taking us through this today. It’s very exciting what you do, what you’re doing.

Brett: Oh, thank you.

Andrew: And it’s also more exciting for what the future might hold certainly with an educational institution. Have I been as [inaudible 00:36:17] as I can in that?

Brett: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: But I wish you the best in that. It’s gonna be a very exciting time for you.

Brett: Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew: Thanks so much for joining us.

Brett: Appreciate your support and thanks for having me on. Thanks a lot.

Andrew: And thank you everyone for joining us today. Remember that you can find all of the other podcasts and all of the show notes for this podcast on designsforhealth.com.au. This is “Wellness by Designs.” I’m Andrew Whitfield-Cook.

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