84: Naturopathic Medicine / Dr. Kayla Cook

A disussion about naturopathic medicine, naturopathic doctors, and what you can do every day to improve your health. Welcome the amazing doctor Joy worked with for Graves’ disease, Dr. Kayla Cook. SOLÉ WATER AANP WEBSITE: Naturopathic Doctors SEED CYCLING Dry Skin Brushing EAT TO EVOLVE DISCOUNT CODE JOYCLAIRE15 www.joyandclaire.com email: [email protected] instagram: joyandclaire_ This is Joy & Claire Episode 84: Naturopathic Medicine / Dr. Cook Episode Date: July 22, 2021 Transcription Completed: August 4, 2021 Audio Length: 77:12 minutes  Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy. Claire: And this is Claire. Joy: And this is Joy and Claire. I’m very excited. We’ve been talking for a while that I was going to have my naturopathic doctor on the show, and Dr. Cook is on the show. We have so much to cover, and we’re going to try to answer all of your questions, but I just want to give a warm welcome to Dr. Cook. Hi, Dr. Cook. Dr. Cook: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Joy: Yeah, so we want to start out really general around your background and education and what your schooling was, just kind of the path to becoming a naturopathic doctor. Dr. Cook: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I think most people are pretty confused by what that actually is. I grew up in the southeast, and everyone back home thinks I went to Hogwarts Medical School. I think it’s something that’s not really well understood. So naturopathic doctors actually go to medical school, and that’s sometimes very surprising. People think that it’s more of a nutrition program or a functional medicine certificate or something like that, but we do actually go through medical school where we get all the clinical training and work in rotations and do all the conventional medical school stuff, kind of like as you would going into primary care. Naturopathic doctors in our medical school, we don’t necessarily go on to specialize in like surgery or one specific thing like a gastroenterologist or an endocrinologist, like that. So by the end of that 4-year medical school and then 2-3 years of residency, primary care is the main idea of what you’re accomplishing as a naturopathic doctor. It’s kind of like two med schools in one though, because while you have to learn all the conventional medicine, pharmaceuticals, and everything like that, you also are learning herbs and nutrition and all kinds of different physical medicine, lots of different modalities, as well as the naturopathic philosophy and the lens in which we look at a case a see medicine. It’s really, really fun because you get to learn a lot more in your tool – your toolkit is much larger than you come out of conventional school where it’s largely surgery and pharmaceutical are the main treatment options. But this becomes a big safety issue I’ve seen, in terms of vetting to find an actual credentialed naturopathic doctor.