Why This Nutritionist Quit the Medical System for Good

Choosing Nutrition to Help Young People 0:00

I decided to go to school for nutrition to help people with their health. I was a dancer in my youth and I saw a lot of young girls and young women really treat their bodies poorly. With the food choices they would make, I saw a lot of people with anorexia and bulimia. And so one of the reasons I decided to go to school for nutrition was to help especially young people. But as I got further into school, all the people, with their health and nutrition and knowing what to eat to health them. I graduated from Madonna University with my bachelor's in nutrition.

Um, i was really excited because i saw an ad in the paper that U of M was hiring. and so i went to work at a very prestigious hospital. I felt really good about that because I got a job there and I thought this is where I can really make a difference and make change for people and started to work there, and rapidly found out that I was getting to people much too late in the game. The nutrition recommendations that we would make were actually against what I personally learned was correct in school because i had done research papers, I had studies, written papers on that artificial sweeteners were bad.

And I had learned in school that sugar raised your triglycerides. But then we went and told people to eat low fat and use artificial sweetness. That's what we had to tell them in the hospital. It didn't feel ethical to me because I felt like I knew better and I know different. I saw a lot of people very ill and not recovering from the diseases they had.

Hospital Work and Ethical Concerns 1:35

We were catching them much too late and giving, in my opinion, poor recommendations. So I worked there for a while, was transferred to the children's hospital there, and I would say that did me in. It was very sad to see the kids being given very bad food, macromia and cheese and jello and sugar, things that wouldn't help their health at all. and a lot of kids being very sick and dying in the hospital from cancers and things that maybe weren't preventable if they had been better earlier on. But hard to know, but that beat me up pretty good.

So I would drive home very frequently crying in a car. I had a young daughter at home at the time, so I decided that I will quit that job. all my money on a big degree that wasn't going to then do me any good because I wasn t going use it. So I went back to teaching dance which was a job I had had before. and decided I would get trained in Pilates, get certified in pilates so I could help people with exercise instead of nutrition because I felt like I had wasted my degree. So I did that, I got certified to teach Pilate and I started teaching that to individuals, kind of ran my own business in the studio that I taught at and taught Pilaties for several years.

It was during that time that i started having back pain so i I say started having back pain, but I'm going to say woke up one morning with debilitating backpain. So woke-up, showered, barely, was standing almost falling down in the shower because I couldn't bear weight on my legs.

Leaving Hospital Care for Dance and Pilates 3:34

Walked down the stairs, I was laying on the living room floor and calling my husband home from work because couldn stand up to take care of my daughters. Long story short, He came home from work, drove me to the chiropractor I was seeing at the time. She told me I having bladder problems. she told I should start eating like I had cancer, which freaked me out because I'm 36. And so I did change my diet based on what she had told. I started having massages more regularly.I was doing all these healthy things.

and trying to fix my health that way, but it was only working minimally. It was helping, all the self-care things with chiropractors and massages that I was doing was hoping, it wasn't fixing anything, so I started to see MDs at the time as well. During this time, I also came to this office and started seeing Dr. Schmidt, and within three visits of seeing Dr. Schmidt, I was diagnosed with osteomyelitis. I had an MRI that diagnosed me with that infection. By the MD. So I called by the M.D. after that MRI and told I needed to start IV antibiotics right away because this was an infection that IV drug users and very ill people got.

And again, very young, healthy, teaching dance, running, doing all these things, and thought, this doesn't make any sense with me.

Back Pain, Diagnosis, and Nutritional Healing 5:15

So I did not do what she said. I told her I would have to call her back. In a visit with Dr. Schmidt at that time, I was told by Dr Schmidt that I had a virus affecting my spine through muscle testing. The doctor was saying bacteria. Dr Schmitt was seeing virus. In that visit, after the diagnosis of the osteomyelitis, I was extremely upset. I scared that I making the wrong decision by doing nutrition instead of following the doctor's advice. Needing support, needing to be told what to do. And in that moment, was told by Dr.

Schmidt, what have you got to lose? And what I had to lose, in my opinion, was a lot, you know, being able to walk, and being to play with my kids. But I was doing better with the nutritional therapies that he offered. And that decision, that choice to go with what we were doing, it made a whole lot more sense to me. It seemed logical, It seems nutritional, So it was what made me change my whole path at that point. So I had nothing to lose. I decided I would absolutely do the nutritional program and make sure that I was doing everything I could with my diet.

And it worked. so I never had to do anything else with the doctors. Um, and it wasn't in that visit at the moment that i decided this would be the place that wanted to work. But this will be a place where I help people with nutrition again. This opened my eyes to that there was a place for my nutrition degree. I just didn't know this existed. So it was that visit and that moment that I decided I would work here. Um, I, decided at the time I wouldn't be Dr.

Becoming a Practitioner and Helping Patients 7:27

Schmidt's assistant, um, because I didn t know I could be a practitioner. so I wanted to at least assist him in helping people in their health and nutrition. to about 2012 and I was trained in nutrition response testing and muscle testing. So I became a practitioner myself in 2011 and started doing this work on patients myself. When I see patients in this office, I love seeing kids, especially because I feel like I'm changing the future generation. I am changing how these kids will see nutrition, how these kids will see muscle testing, alternatives to medicine, that they will then maybe use this as the norm.

It won't be an alternative, it will be the normal in the future. So when I see kids their changes happen really quick, usually they're healthier, their immune systems are a little bit Stronger so I can mix changes in kids usually pretty quick. I've seen skin changes happen over very quick time frames I had kids get well from illnesses, you know immune challenges viruses colds things like that super fast and that's awesome and cool to see when I work with adults who I also love I I tend to see their changes happen more slowly and the people that will stick it out with me and love seeing their change over time.

How their diets will change, how they evolve and how the nutrition can benefit them over the long, long haul. So good. One of my purposes, one of the reasons I do what I go on camera and where I want to tell people about what we do here in the office. This, as Dr. Schmidt says, hardcore, holistic nutrition. I what people to know that alternatives, which I consider the norm, do exist to what medical doctors might tell you. That there are nutritional solutions, that there diet solutions that can make a change, and that this could be an answer to things that they're having problems with.

So I just want people to know that we exist.