Three Important Discoveries from Nature’s Medicine for your Brain and Mood

Ever since I immersed myself in the field of health sciences over 25 years ago, I’ve been passionate about understanding how regular day-to-day exposures and habits affect our mental and cognitive health.

With the closing of a decade, I thought I might mention 3 discoveries/areas of research in natural medicine, or actually nature’s medicine, that have the capacity to offer profound benefits to our health, if widely shared.   What are they?

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Why We Need an Integrative Approach to Brain Health

Many unanswered questions

During my graduate degree in Neuroscience in the 1990’s, the more I learned, the more I realized how young the field was.   While the lectures were comprehensive, when I’d start to try to take what I learned into real world scenarios of how these mechanisms affected the individual, there were more unanswered questions than answers.    No wonder the solutions to so many mental health, psychiatric and neurological conditions felt so inadequate!

So as a patient, when doctors would tell me that I would have to learn to just accept my condition, or alternatively that “it was all in my head”, I knew both answers meant that the doctor didn’t know how to help me.

And because they didn’t have solutions, and I wasn’t crazy about taking the drugs they were peddling, I started looking to see what Alternative Medicine had to offer.

My Search for Integrative, Holistic Brain Health

I tried acupuncture, chiropractic care, cranial sacral therapy, Body Talk, Neurofeedback, brainwave entrainment, yoga, meditation, herbs or supplements.  I adjusted my nutrition to optimize my mental and cognitive health, and maintained a well balanced exercise regimen.

But other than addressing diet and exercise, none of these methods, addressed root causes.   I believed root causes had to be addressed from more than just the traditional Western medicine point of view.   Whatever I was searching for, it had to be embracive of the wisdom imparted by healers from a variety of schools of thought.

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