Aloha

I recently made a little recording about what it looks like to be inside of our practice. I made it to show what other options are out there for folks looking to change the status of their health in a very real way (and as the obvious shameless plug). I hope this helps guide you to the practitioners and medicines that will change your life.

Mucho Mahalo

Here’s the transcript:

Hi, this is Dr. Santander from oahu holistic medicine, I'm going to take a few moments and explain to you a bit about us and who we are and how we can help you, or maybe somebody that you know, so I'm going to share the screen, if you're just listening and you're not looking, that's totally fine, I'll do my best to be as clear and precise and articulate as I possibly can. So we believe in treating disease before it arises.

So obviously, a lot of times people will come into the clinic, and people who are looking for medicine will already have something that's that's happening. And that needs to be resolved. And that happens, obviously, so we have a tremendous amount of varied and specialized tools and equipment, and principles and ideas, tactics, medicines, to help people who already have existing conditions, and ideally to to prevent the disease that haven't already happened from happening.

So you know, as they say, the easiest minutes is preventative maintenance. And I think that's very much true when it comes to medicine. So our clinic, we focus on treating a few people at a time, on a much deeper level, we focus a lot of times of chronic diseases, or helping people sort out their health later in life when they hit a point where they say, Oh, I'm getting older, and I think I should really know about my health and know what's going on, before I get older than I am now. For people who are in their 40s 50s 60s, who have crossed that threshold already, I think you know what I'm talking about.

They're like, Oh, you know, maybe God forbid, you know, they've had some friends who have passed, or things are getting creakier, and more painful. Maybe I need to get on top of this before it becomes problematic. So I, my partner, Dr. Jennifer Goto, and myself, we found that a lot of the people who are already coming to us for Traditional East Asian medicine for Naturopathic Medicine, before we even started this particular practice, where people who who fit that kind of criteria, they were, you know, maybe a little bit older, they weren't necessarily usually weren't necessarily in the 20s or 30s, unless they had something that was going on long standing, GI issues, skin issues, chronic pain injury that they can't seem to recover from, like some really stubborn kind of things like that young people tend to be like, you know, shake it off, and go on running, or I'll deal with that later tend to, you know, painting in broad strokes here.

But people in their 40s 50s 60s, who have crossed that threshold, like oh, I need to get things sorted out. They were already coming to us. And those are the people we were already working with. So we said why don't we just focus our practice, specifically in our message specifically to those people, to hey, we're here. But while also at the same time, trying to help broadly trying to help educate people, Robert, so that they know, so that people have an idea of what you need to do what we want them to get what they need to do, broadly, basically, to maintain a better baseline of health than maybe they've ever had before.

And try to reverse some things before they become super problematic. So what our program is, you know, just to talk about the nuts and bolts of it. You know, we want people to get deeply healthy for the first time or take already great health to next level, we're how people again, have a what you call peace of mind, knowing that they're doing something about maybe these problems that are that are lurking. So a lot of what we do is I like to equate it to overhaul that is overhaul maintenance, right?

So it's maintenance. But we're kind of going in and redo doing kind of a deep clean, doing a deep investigation, seeing what's problematic, right? If you were to call and you know, either an inspector to your house to buy or sell, or you had a carpenter come through and walk through and say, Okay, well, this is something that's going to be problematic 10, 15 years down the line, this is something to be problematic five years down the line. Here's the order in which we think you need to address these problems.

That's kind of a lot of what we do, and how we do and the tools that we use for that. We use acupuncture, which is a branch of traditional Chinese medicine, we use blood testing, and these aren't just your regular CBC that you can get done at your MD. There's specialty blood tests, and usually they're super expensive, but they give us a lot of really great information. So ideally, we only run them a couple of times. You know either to get to keep to get and keep these kind of baseline intervals.

Like you know, we want to get a first measurement and then a second measurement on and on and on. Maybe you do Need to take these measurements yearly, maybe you need to take them every few years, maybe you need to take them every few months, but we'll help you start that. Who's naturopathic medicine, which you know, includes the internet, the ordering interpreting of blood tests, but it also has a lot of principles and tactics for using herbs and supplements and food for helping people get healthy.

We use traditional East Asian herbalism, which is a system of internal medicine that's been around for a long time. Diet manipulations, which are not necessarily going on a diet, I think the four letter word diet scary to people. You don't have to just eat like, you know, grass and cellophane on the diet recommendations that we give, because we're not going to give people recommendations that they're not going to adhere to it doesn't make sense.

So we'll we like to look at people's diets and say, Okay, well, if you were to remove carbohydrate, you know, refined white flour, or if you remove beef just for a short time, while we're doing, you know, while we're taking these supplements, while we're doing these tests, while we're trying to create a biological change, then, you know, either we can bring it back later, or we can add something in instead that you love eating, that's not boring.

So the diet kind of stuff that we do is not it's not awful. It's not all flat, you know, when you have when anybody has a super tight emotional attachment to any kind of food, it's hard, it can be hard to change.

But that being said, if you're going to have to change, you're going to have to change a couple foods and change the way that you eat, let's at least make sure that it's going to be super high leverage, and it's going to be the right things that we're changing that are going to give you the outsize results results that are way larger than you know, if you had to cut wheat or dairy or sugar, let's cut the one that's going to give you the biggest benefit rather than cutting all three or cutting, you know hard, hard one for you.

That's not necessarily beneficial. It may be cutting all three together, I don't know but we have that's a more involved discussion.

So we're in the wheat fields. So cupping is a another form of East Asian bodywork. You know not getting too bogged down here, another form of bodywork, physical manipulation, realigning and readjusting the body, a lot of times people's physical pain, you know, just so cupping, guasha, physical manipulation, these all kind of working hand in hand, with some people's physical pain is related to misalignments in the body, which could just be from sitting too long as a in a car, if you're, you know, if you're a mom or dad driving people around for years and years and years, or if you're a commuter, or if you work from a desk, or if you're a maintenance person you work, you do a lot of physical things, those are going to create misalignments in the body, which are going to cause problems. It could be it could be physical pain issues, or it could actually be internal organ issues, too.

So our job is to identify those issues, correct them, and try to get the insight in the internal mechanisms of the body and physical structure of the body working together.

And usually by correcting one can help to correct the other. But if you're working correct on both, and that's great to Qigong, we do a lot of Qigong classes and training and stuff like that, but it's just a it's like, it's like exercise and mindset work all all at the same time. Now, I think mindset where it can get a lot of rap for being like, for being preachy and stuff like that, it's not necessarily about that, it's about focusing on the mind shifts that are going to help the body change very, very drastic and noticeable way.

Changes in the mind changes in the consciousness, breathing exercise, just exercise in general, honestly. So that's just a broad word broad term for that. And other branches of traditional Chinese medicine.

So we've already worked that it's, this is an immersive experience where we go deep, again, like I said, see what's going on, is scary to get images and blood testing done and not know what to do with that information, to not have people walking with you or holding your hand on that. And I'm a doctor and I just got my blood. Some of my blood results back recently. And I was I felt very uncomfortable looking at the results, but I had somebody with me who knew what they're talking about.

So it was way less scary this don't worry, this number is high, this number is low. We're going to bring those back to the middle. But this way it should take about this long.

We're going to take this this so you know don't worry about it. All right. We used to but not so much get people reaching out to us about homeopathy and we thought we were an acupuncture school and they were looking for Reiki or free acupuncture. That's not so much what we do. I'd love to have a free practice and the great people to just come in and get through and never have to worry about about price.

Working on that we're not there yet. I would I would like for that to be reality that everybody could get

acupuncture and any any medicine honestly for free and but I don't know if that's what that's going to be like. So anyway, Dr. Goto and I we met in at the University of Bridgeport together going to school studying traditional Chinese medicine, nutritionally stable medicine, and we decided to put a practice together 2021.

Now, we get a lot of people, fewer now, since we've changed kind of the wording on the website, but people reach out a lot of times looking to see if we can use their insurance, their insurance, for acupuncture. And that's a big conversation.

But let's we'll talk about a few barebone things here, a few the core core parts of the discussion, insurance companies have disproportionate say of what's medically relevant for patients. So that which means that the insurance companies decided what they're willing to pay for,

which dictates the treatments that that

people get. So if you've ever gone to your corner MD, and you've told them you need, you need test for Lyme disease, or you need a strep test, or a blood test, or a particular nutrient test, and they're like, weirdly against it, and they won't do it for you.

They're like, No, we're not going to run that test, which is, sometimes not always, sometimes it's because they might not get covered for the insurance company or your insurance might not necessarily cover it. So a lot of times they won't do it, they won't run it because they get stuck with the cost.

Or you can get upset to see. So insurance companies dictating care is not necessarily a good thing. In my opinion. It means that, I mean, first of all the the adjusters in the insurance offices, the people who are deciding people's benefits, the people who are saying, We should pay for this amount of stuff for people, they're not medically inclined usually.

So if they're not doctors, if they don't understand the underground needs of the patient, then that could lead to some conflicts of interest. So there's a lot of fear and mistrust and doctors nowadays, which is understandable. I believe that a lot of doctors, even some of the ones who were very frustrating to people began their practice, very well intentioned, they wanted to help people probably also wanted to make money can't fault anybody for either of those things.

But somewhere along the line, that connection got severed or got challenged, and that doctors weren't able to help in the way that either maybe they want to or are able to. So another thing that happens is the what I call the turn and burn approach.

So a lot of times doctors will get paid based on the number of patients that they see in a given day. And when I say a lot of times, I need at least in the United States, currently, most, mostly most doctors most of the time, more patients that you see, the more you get paid. So doctors are financially incentivized to work fast and see a lot of people which can lead to getting good and can lead to treating people really well and becoming very, very good doctors.

But we see here that there's a financial incentive to move fast, which frustrates people, because you're cramming a lot of people into an hour, or you're cramming a lot of, you know, you're seeing people for seven minutes, 10 minutes.

And you can you can make a good paycheck that way. But I think that burns people's trust, and they get very, very frustrated. So we've been patients too, I've had my, my urgent care experiences, my hospital experiences that were less than stellar. And we're trying to be part of that change. It's very frustrating time in medicine right now. The public are, you know, we the people, you know, most most of the people, I think, have sort of an idea, at least in the United States today that you take a pill and your problems get solved. And that's not really how medicine works.

And that is something that has been fed to us either consciously or subconsciously from marketing, from advertising, insurance, advertising, pharmaceutical marketing that you cheese and diet, diet, marketing and health food marketing, like you take the thing magically your stuff is gonna start changing and that is problematic to people because I think it sets people up Failure and then their expectations are off. These are these are myths that are reported by marketing experts and not by not reasonable expectations explained by medical practitioners, right?

So our job is to kind of go the other way, and try and give people reasonable expectations, and logical and rational ways to get out of the situations that they're stuck in, and effective ways. And we, you know, we've worked with some people that were like, I know I can help you. We're just doing this, they kind of dropped to help me Obi Wan Kenobi the moment helpline on you say, I've tried everything, please help me I need help. I'll do whatever it takes. And a lot of times, that feels like on our end, okay, I'll do my best to help you.

And a lot of times we get really amazing, almost miraculous results, I'm not going to claim that we can do miraculous things. But I think the body is a miraculous thing, and medicine is pretty amazing when it works. And I think there's a lot that we just don't know.

So I say that to say that there's always another opinion out, there's always a second, third, fourth, fifth 10th 20th, maybe the 30 of the opinion that you get for somebody about a given ailment is going to be the one that's fruitful, the thing that you say, okay, this person is talking logical, I'm going to take their advice and get to work with them, we're gonna get results in that direction. So you know, we're not reinventing the wheel here, we're just doing what we know works. And we're applying it to the time that we live in right now. And the reason that our practice is shaped different in that we're not fee for service come in Bill, your insurance company, send you out the door and Quack, quack, quack, quack.

But we're doing this kind of almost like a membership model or concierge model, is because we realize and recognize that the medicine is not being applied. Oftentimes, the shortcoming of a lot of naturopathic physicians and acupuncturist is in their business savvy, and their the way of of administering, you know, on a per treatment basis.

Maybe it's not necessarily where is what's useful right now. So our, you know, our clinic and our experiment is to say, Can we get, can we find a better way to to conduct the financial portion of this can we find a better way to apply the medicine so that people are receiving enough treatment, they're getting all their questions answered, they're taking the right supplements and herbs and medications. And when they're not taking the right supplements or medications.

There's ample support to switch and give people the right supplements and medications and foods and prescriptive exercises, little homework experiments and all of those kinds of things that are going to get people the results that they're looking for as quickly as humanly possible. I think we're all pretty done with you know, just kind of this wait and see approach. So

that's kind of the nuts and bolts of our practice. Just kind of a little bit of a background about about us.

So Dr. Go to my partner, she's a fantastic naturopathic doctor, and a doctor of traditional East Asian medicine. I'm a Doctor of traditional East Asian medicine myself. If you want to see a little bit more about the what it looks like to be a patient here, the patient journey, at least at the time of recording this video on the about page of our website, there's a video at the bottom this this patient journey to articulate to you what it would look like and what it looks like to be a patient of ours, what you can expect going through the process.

And you can look at that and see if maybe if that's useful for you. So appreciate your time and attention this far. The use of logic for lending us your eyes and your ears and your hearts. And hopefully we can be helpful for you to you.

Reach out to us and ask us anything that you'd like if you don't feel like maybe we're necessarily good fit. Then I just ask that maybe share this with somebody who you think this might be a good fit for them. So thank you so much again for your time. Bye