The summer before heading into high school, I was celebrating my 14th birthday with my friends by my pool in my backyard. I confidently wore my swimsuit, feeling the warmth of the sun on my exposed skin. It was so smooth. Kind of incredible really. Because …
When I was a kid my skin was constantly red and itchy with rashes. I would break out in a rash from almost everything I ate. I would itch my skin until it was raw and would bleed. In frustration from trying many ways to heal my allergies and skin, I resigned myself to thinking bad allergies and eczema was something I’d just have to learn to live with.
Thankfully, when I was 13, my parents brought me to see a naturopathic doctor. Within a few months of seeing this doctor and following his plan, all of my allergies and rashes cleared up. It was like magic! But everything seems like magic when you don’t understand how it works.
Fast forward to my early 20s, I sat in my car after I’d driven home from a day of school at the naturopathic college, crying and wondering: Am I destined for the same diseases? Was this a case of bad genes? Bad luck? A natural part of the aging process?
You see, my mom had a major stroke that left her re-learning how to speak and earlier that year my dad died of pancreatic cancer.
They were both in their early 50s!!!
This hit me so hard – they were the most amazing parents who moved from the small island of Jamaica to Canada to give my brother and me a life of opportunities. These were the people I loved the most in the world. I cried daily. I felt like everyone else was continuing with their lives and my world had just crumbled around me.
After I finished at the naturopathic college, my grief propelled me to go in search of practitioners and clinics all over the world that were having success treating cancer.
What I learned is that diseases don’t actually exist, at least not in the way we think they do. I understood the magic behind my healing from eczema, which isn’t magic, it’s just a different perspective of how we look at health. We live in a world right now where everyone is medicated, everyone is struggling with some health problem, but if we never treat the cause, then people will never get better. The conventional philosophy of medicine treats symptoms and focuses on suppressing and masking symptoms but doesn’t address WHY a person gets sick and because of this so many people – and their families – are suffering unnecessarily.
The paradigm of health that I learned was that our bodies are designed to heal, recover, regenerate, our body is doing this all the time. We just need to set up the right environment for it to do so.
We see diseases as a collection of symptoms but really all those symptoms are indications that the body is out of balance. Our health is defined by the health of our terrain,…
Let me say that again… Our health is defined by the health of our terrain…
This is the area around our cells, like the soil that our cells live in. In order for our cells to be healthy they need a healthy environment to live in.
Just like if a plant is unhealthy, you don’t manipulate the plant to help it to regain health, you change the soil that the plant is in. If our cells are unhealthy, then we change the environment that our cells are in to help our body to regain health.
We need to create an ecosystem within our body of health and that ecosystem is created by these EIGHT Components:
- the foods we eat,
- the toxins we are exposed to,
- the time we spend in nature connected to the earth breathing fresh air and getting sunlight,
- the water we drink,
- moving our bodies,
- the quality of our sleep,
- our connection with community, and
- our mental/emotional state – the thoughts we think – our mindset
Together, these 8 components all create our internal ecosystem and when this internal ecosystem is healthy then we can grow a healthy garden and this garden is our microbiome.
The microbiome is an ecosystem of bacteria and fungi that live in our digestive tracts that needs to be balanced and have diversity of healthy microbes in order to build health in the body. And this allows our body to self-heal and self-regulate and access that innate ability to heal itself. And this is our protection from all disease processes.
There are other factors to consider. There are 6 stressors or blockades to healing that we need to identify and remove in order to allow the body to heal.
- food sensitivities
- immune challenges
- heavy metals
- environmental toxins
- emotional stressors
- physical stressors
The better able we are to adapt to our environment, the healthier we are.
If we want to see people getting better, then changing our approach to health care is essential.
My name is Dr. Melina Roberts and after two decades in practice, I want to see us improving our health and being able to effectively treat and prevent chronic illnesses. I aim to empower my patients and help them realize that we have control over our health.
I encourage you to start your journey today by walking barefoot on the ground, connect with the earth and pay attention to how you feel.
It’s time to talk about a different perspective on health and healing, where we focus on causative factors, allowing the body to self-regulate and self-heal and cleaning up the terrain of the body.