Patricia Worby Holistic Health

Hello, my name is Patricia Worby and I am qualified in Nutritional Medicine, Advanced Clinical Massage, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and Reiki. On this website I share knowledge about how you can make yourself healthier through nutrition and I discuss some of the issues around health and wellbeing. I also offer holistic treatments based on these principles from my home in Bitterne and Spring Chiropractic in Portswood, Southampton. If you would like an appointment please ring me on 02380 321766 or 07973 417312. For clinic appointments at Spring Chiropractic ring 02380 553000. 

My services and rates are shown below:

**special offers - 10% off if you recommend a friend, 6 for the price of 5 if you book 6 consecutive treatments**

Clinic times are; Monday afternoons (at Spring Chiropractic, Portswood) 2 - 6, Weds 2 - 6, Friday 9 - 6) and Saturday mornings (9 - 1) at my home. Some evenings can also be accomodated subject to availability.

Holistic treatment

I approach treatment holistically, choosing which of the many different tools will help you to achieve wellness as quickly as possible.  Massage is the basic tool to help you connect with your body - your physical vehicle for your time here and worth treating well. I am training in Advanced Clinical Massage (ACM) at Jing School of Massage; this is in addition to my initial qualification in Sports therapy and Remedial massage. ACM is an outcome-based treatment - I am to reduce pain and dysfunction in 2- 6 treatments. I specialise in treating back, neck and shoulder pain, wrist, leg and knee problems in addition to offering general relaxing massage..

Depending on your particular needs I may then recommend nutritional changes or Reiki for raising your energy levels - where all healing begins. For unresolved emotional issues then EFT is a simple and powerful tool for clearing these blockages to your personal growth. We can discuss these options at your first visit. As I have personal experience of everything I recommend, this is a very integrated and holisitic approach that sees you as a person not an illness or condition and involves you in your own health and wellbeing. For some more information on Massage see this article http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/massage-000354.htm which is a very balanced discussion of the benefits and efficacy of massage. Note massage in the UK is not as well regulated which is why you need to be sure your practitioner is well-qualified. For more info on holistic health see below. You deserve to feel good!

Patricia Worby, BSc. MSc., PGDip Nutritional Medicine, Dip SNHS Nutrition, Advanced Nutrition, Stress Management
Therapeutic massage, Metamorphic technique and Reiki practitioner.

10 Tips to improve your health 

1.     Change the fats you consume – use unrefined oils like extra virgin olive oil (for dressing, steam-frying) or groundnut/ coconut oil (for stir-frying). never re-use old oil, keep out of the light and away from heat  Use butter or olive oil spread rather than margarine. Avoid anything with trans-fats in (sometimes disguised on labels as ‘hydrogenated’ vegetable oil).

2.     Buy fresh (preferably organic) food in season – or grow your own. Find out where you nearest farm shop is or subscribe to one of the many vegetable box schemes which deliver. Many offer recipes on their website to help you use the vegetables you are unfamiliar with. Including one or two raw ingredients into your diet per day will make a huge difference e.g. raw carrot sticks with oatcakes and humous for a snack, seeds sprinkled onto your salad or soup. I make my own muesli now to avoid processed cereals (which are not health foods despite the advertising hype!). Use organic oats as the base.

3.     Avoid poor quality processed ‘foodstuffs’ - anything with more than 5 ingredients. These are not foods they are chemical foodstuffs designed for long shelf life/palatability rather than human nutrition. Avoid cheap carbohydrates - especially fizzy drinks) and anything with health claims. 'Low fat' products are often high in sugar which is stored as fat.

4.     Drink more water. Most of us are chronically dehydrated as we turn to sugary drinks, tea or coffee to quench our thirst. This causes more dehydration from the caffeine and will destroy our blood sugar control. Use filtered water to reduce the toxins (nitrates, organochlorines) in tapwater. It tastes nicer! Carry a water bottle around with you so you always have some to hand.

5.     Supplement - most people are deficient in vitamins and minerals as our food no longer contains them in sufficient amounts due to intensive farming.  Most importantly Vitamin D₃ which most people are deficient in (it is now known that it is a pre-hormone that is involved in a vast array of processes from immunity, cardiac and bone health and needed in higher amounts than previously thought). Also supplement omega-3 fatty acid EPA - modern diets are so imbalanced in this that even eating more fish might not be enough to redress the balance. A high dose purified fish oil with at least 500mg EPA is best.

6.     Aim to cook/prepare at least one meal from raw ingredients every day (even if it’s only you own home prepared muesli!) Try and share meals with friends and family as it makes you more likely to enjoy the social aspect of eating and may encourage you to try new recipes. Sit down to eat and remember to chew properly – this really helps your digestion. I call it ‘conscious eating’. Shovelling down something infront of the TV is counterproductive. As is dieting..

7.    Start Juicing - blending combinations of fruits and vegetables is an easy and nutritious way of enhancing your diet. With a blender you can consume far more vegetables than you would be able to physically eat and because they are already liquidised they are easily digested. My favourite combination is spinach and orange juice. You can't taste the spinach but you get all the benefit as Vitamin C aids Iron absorbtion. You can experiment with your own combinations or buy a book to encourage you.

8.    Add superfoods to your diet. These are foods that have particularly powerful effects on the body. Examples are; garlic, ginger, broccoli, green tea, blueberries, turmeric, cinammon, raw cacao, chilli, seaweeds (tulse, etc), spirulina and barleygrass. Some of these are protective agains cancer, others help balance hormones or blood sugar. You can buy them from health food shops or online and sprinkle them in your cooking, drinks and salads.

9.    Combat stress. Ongoing chronic stress is the modern disease. We are not even aware how stressed we are till we take a break.  This lowers the body's natural immunity (highly implicated in more serious diseases like cancer too). Learn mindfulness techniques or practice meditation - just 10 minutes a day devoted to something relaxing can make all the difference. Do something that you find cuts of your incessant thinking.  Deal with your emotional issues that lead to stress. See a therapist if you feel you need help. Counselling, hypnotherapy and EFT are all powerful tools which help us to understand and deal with our subconscious influences that cause us to have addictions (smoking, drinking,etc) and to live lives to less than our full potential.

10.   Take responsibility for your own health. Learn everything you can about health and wellbeing – via books, the web and courses. Encourage your friends and family (especially children) to understand why it is important. Maintain your health actively with help from diet, exercise and therapies. Prevention is much more powerful than cure and is our responsibility. Begin now as I have done. Small changes have big results. Don't wait til you get ill to act!

Holistic Nutrition information

Alkalising the body

The body is in a constant metabolic acidosis (the medical way of saying your body is too acidic) caused by eating too many acid-forming foods (meat and dairy) and not enough fruit and vegetables. This has profound implications for bone health in particular as the body must take calcium out of the bones to neutralise the excess acid. The easiest way to reverse this is to cut down your meat and dairy intake by having smaller portions or looking at alternative sources of protein; soy products, sprouted seeds, etc. The other really important change to make to your diet is to start juicing - or more correctly, blending vegetables into smoothies - as described above. For more info on juicing see;http://www.therawdivas.com and for suppliers in the UK check out www.nutri-health.co.uk or http://www.red23.co.uk/.

A note about cholesterol

There has been a great deal of debate around cholesterol in recent years. We now know that dietary cholesterol hardly affects your blood cholesterol level and the type of fats and carbohydrates you eat may be more important. The link with Heart Disease is far from proven and many claim it is simply an old defunct hypothesis kept alive to promote statin use - one of the most profitable drugs ever developed. My recommendation is to reduce processed fats and replace them with natural mono- or polyunsaturated fats and avoid refined carbohydrates which upset the body’s fat metabolism by shunting fructose straight to the liver where it is converted to fat and stored around in the abdomen - so called 'central adiposity' which is the most dangerous type of fat. Also supplement with more omega-3 oils as above. For the whole story regarding cholesterol and omega-3 see here.

The dairy dilemma

Whilst dairy produce has long been promoted as a valuable source of calcium and other minerals the downside is that it contains lactose (to which many are intolerant, especially Black and Asian people) and casein (which has been linked with eczema). You might find it useful to reduce or cut out dairy products; tofu and leafy greens are alternative sources of calcium and, if you like dairy, yoghurt and cheese are the better choices as the enzymes present in these foods help to breakdown lactose. Low-fat dairy is not healthier. It is likely to contain more sugar and will still have the growth hormones and other additives that modern milk production now requires. It is far better to cut down or eliminate dairy from your diet than eat these so called 'health' foods. Put it this way; rates of cancer in non-dairy eating countries like China and Japan are far lower.

Artificial sweeteners

Many people seeking a healthier diet opt for low-sugar or diet drinks not appreciating that the alternative sweeteners such as saccharin and aspartame have been linked to mood swings, memory loss, numbness and tingling, headaches, depression and even lymphomas and leukaemia. They can be addictive so they so are best avoided altogether. Encourage yourself to eat the natural sugars present in fruit and natural sweeteners like honey, stevia and agave syrup. Once you start to change your diet to more natural flavours you will crave artificially sweet things less and less.

My path to optimum health

My road to self-knowledge has been a long one, but I’ve been lucky enough to have friends who introduced me to concepts of energy medicine, macrobiotics and eastern techniques like Acupuncture and Shiatsu although it took me a long time to consider them relevant to my life. Not unusually it took a crisis in my life to make me sit up and take notice. Here is my story.

I have always considered myself a well-adjusted person but it took a bout of post-viral depression and chronic fatigue to knock me off my perch and make me realise I was not so invulnerable.  For no reason I or my doctors could determine, all my joints (particularly hip and knee) swelled up and walking became painful for me. I felt very anxious and tired, my sleep was affected and I began to believe nothing could be done (my GP’s final suggestion was 3 months supply of Paracetamol!)  In desperation I sought help from a Chinese herbalist – I did not expect it to work at all (a lifelong sceptic and a trained scientist) but had reached the end of the road in conventional medicine.  A very kind and knowledgeable Chinese doctor asked me to describe my symptoms and asked to see my tongue (which I had never been asked to do before – this seems incredible to me now – so much is shown on the tongue). She took a very long and detailed history of all my ailments, took my pulse and temperature and said my body was not detoxifying and they needed to flush out my system with herbs.  None of what she said made much sense to my scientific way of thinking but I said to myself, "I’ll give it a go – what have I got to lose?". The herbs, as she warned me, were disgusting – the smell of them boiling was quite unpleasant and the taste worse. However, I was determined to give it a go and dutifully swallowed the liquid. The result was quite dramatic– let’s just say my system was flushed out quite successfully within a couple of days. Then something really surprising happened. Within 3 days I started to feel great improvement and within a week my symptoms had all but vanished! I was absolutely astonished and humbled that my previous opinions had been so wrong. I started to look into this and other alternative therapies – I had some acupuncture to follow up and began to investigate the mind-body connection with reading, learning about other therapies, diet and nutrition.

I was beginning to think how I could incorporate all this information into my life but hadn’t really done much more than that when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with bowel cancer at 49. She died within 9 months after enduring chemotherapy and radiotherapy which made her last few months a very painful and frightening time for her, and for those of us who loved her. Once again, I was forced to realise that changes needed to be made – in my life, and those of everyone around me. I determined to learn more  about bowel cancer – what causes it, how we can prevent it and generally strengthen our immune systems to fight that and other diseases more effectively. The answer, it seemed was largely with nutrition and lifestyle. 

At that time I was working in University health research but I began to have ethical problems with a lot of the studies - most are based on a model which has been designed around pharmaceutical drugs not nutritional intervention and are largely about making profit for the pharma industry. I finally made the difficult decision to leave and find something more in keeping with my developing interest in health and wellbeing.  I enrolled on the best course I could find in Nutrition (there are many out there and all offer something slightly different). I wanted a course that would give me recognition and reward plus the best teaching and awareness of current knowledge. I chose Nutritional Medicine because I wanted to see how food can be used therapetucially.  I am now on my way to finding an answer not only to my health problems but those of my friends and family. I don’t pretend to know everything, but I have learnt so much I want to share just a part of that with others.  

I hope in many ways that this becomes a journey for you too – where you learn more about yourself, how the body functions and what can be done in a practical way to enhance the body’s own natural capacity for healing. For that is all we need to do. Now that I have studied Anatomy and Physiology for my Therapeutic Massage I have increased my body awareness too.

I will be adding more to this site as I can -(see below for more on the politics of health) please check back in soon,

Tricia

I wish you all a health, happy 2012…  see also my blog @http://twitter.com/pworby

and patriciaworby.blogspot.com

Patricia Worby, BSc. MSc., PGDip Nutritional Medicine, Dip SNHS Nutrition, Advanced Nutrition, Stress Management
Therapeutic massage, Metamorphic technique and Reiki practitioner.

The politics of health

Governments, corporations and individuals are waking up to the notion that the Western Diet is killing us. It is responsible for the huge increase in the chronic diseases of obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes to name but a few, despite the agreement that nutrition and lifestyle are key factors in the aetiology of these diseases². From the point of view of sustainability it is clear that the current Western medical paradigm of healthcare as 'disease management', largely with ‘new to nature’ therapeutic agents and high tech surgical interventions is not supportable long term. Particularly as the nature of illness has shifted from the infectious diseases of the last century to long term chronic conditions which currently affect more people than acute illness and accounts for 78% of NHS costs.

The notion of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM –a staple tenet of UK General Practice throughout the 90’s), originally designed as an ‘analytical approach to medicine by which the results of clinical and basic research, clinical experience, observation and empathy with the patient are combined (my emphasis) to provide the most appropriate treatment and care by the clinician’ has been high-jacked by  pharmaceutical interests to be widely interpreted as exclusive reliance on evidence from randomised clinical trials (RCT's) for the determination of treatment and care regimens^2. In fact if you look at the medical journals and the media that report on research you will find no mention of anything but clincial trials as the evidence.

The role of Nutrition in Preventative Medicine has been ignored due to the lack of sufficient graduate and postgraduate education of medical doctors in nutritional and lifestyle approaches. Mainstream health professionals have very limited formal training in these approaches and healthcare delivery is primarily curative rather than preventative in nature.  The costs of this to the NHS are completely unsupportable as chronic disease (like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, etc) rates increase year on year.

Integrative Medicine – supported by Prince Charles and other luminaries is the new paradigm where the best of conventional and complementary medicine is being combined.

Increasing interest in East-West medicine – the dialogue between older medical traditions and the relatively recent Western tradition is increasing. The Foundation for Integrative Health (FIH) for instance has recently opened a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Clinic where patients are referred for TCM and acupuncture;

‘Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture seem to give an answer for long-term conditions. 80 per cent of our patients have a long-term condition.  Allopathic medicine and complementary therapies come together in a cost effective and efficient way.(my emphasis) FIH  

Empowering the patient

 We very strongly believe in empowering the patient. It’s very important for people with long-term conditions.  iv

Your own commitment may prove to be the most important factor, whatever the treatment. v 

‘Research is starting to reveal that when patients are equal partners (with the health professionals they see) in the management of their own health, it can actually have an affect on their 'clinical outcomes' ³   

As disease is multi-faceted in origin so must the cure be. It is not a balanced outlook either to completely blame yourself for disease or delegate responsibility totally to the medical profession. The answer lies in a balanced approach to both. Blaming yourself is not healing and giving over all your power to others is not empowering. A new approach stresses taking control of those parts that are within your power – i.e your attitude, your environment, etc.  

This is a new approach as the current medical model views the doctors as the ‘experts’ who can fix us while we have no responsibility whatsover⁵..

Individualised treatment  

Current research into the environmental influence on genetic predisposing factors (termed ‘epigenetics’) is isolating different combinations of genes that may influence our ability to remain healthy or develop disease. This would enable tailored health interventions – one size will not fit all! This research is at an early stage and results so far have been disappointing but it is a very hot topic and looks set to provide some interesting insights.  

The limits of (conventional) medicine.   

There is very little emphasis on the psychological and emotional parameters of health. Health is not simply the absence of disease, it is a complex state of being.  This is difficult for healthcare practitioners to ascertain given the limitations of the current 8-10 minute consultation of state-funded healthcare. Complementary practitioners typically spend up to an hour on gaining information and providing whole mind-body care, but few are funded by the state.   

“better treatment does not mean better health” for many it means living “longer with their illnesses” vi The increase in life expectancy has been largely won by reducing infant mortality NOT by improving the life expectancy of adults. Currently an adult male can expect to live to 74. In 1900 life expectancy once you survived childhood was not much different at 70⁵.

Modern diseases are degenerative diseases to which modern medicine has surprisingly little answer. Even those medical conditions which do respond to drug intervention seem to be creating a new phenomenon of resistance – MRSA, etc.

“A survey of intensive care units showed that > 20% of patients they examined had infections acquired in the unit which were resistant to antibiotics.  As fast as we find drugs micro-organisms  become resistant to them⁴

 And it is startling to realise that Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR’s)from prescribed medicines  and preventable deaths from surgery constitue the third leading cause of death in the US and is similar in most other Western countries costing £2billion annual to the NHS²

 Education in nutritional and lifestyle factors

We need a radical re-development of training for healthcare professionals in preventative healthcare – with a specific focus on active health promotion via nutritional and lifestyle education – more focus on factors that promote wellness rather than illness. We also need to ensure effective and long-term adherence to health living by proper evaluation and monitoring of such schemes. In the future health insurers may operate a 'no claims bonus' type scheme whereby people who are actively maintaining their health (by diet, exercise, and belonging to a health program such as IHS) will be able to pay less than those who make no effort.