Does your brain feel like it’s going to explode, spilling brain-juice everywhere, when you do two weekend conferences in a row? Or is that just me? I have returned to my desk after the Integria Symposium and then the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine conferences with ants in my pants. I can barely sit still. No caffeine required.

Right now I want to talk ASLM because it’s fresh in my mind from the weekend but geez where to start? I was testing the water going to this one. What would a conference about ‘Lifestyle Medicine’ pitched primarily at doctors look like? [Editor’s note: yes there were a lot of doctors, but Lifestyle Medicine is squarely pitched the whole multidisciplinary team, along with health policy professionals, educators and researchers.]

Would it be a bit light? Would it be token lip service to CAM with no recognition of the need to also make a paradigm shift? Well strap yourselves in guys because what I heard from their outstanding keynote speakers (Mark Wahlqvist, Michael Berk, Bob Brown…yes you heard right..I said Bob Brown!) were some of the most holistic naturopathic teaching points about individual, population and global health that I have heard in a long time. These three speakers in particular were mesmerising – to naturopaths (yes there were a smattering of nats there) as well as to GPs, specialists and other attending allied health professionals

Some of you may remember having to buy a nutrition text in your undergraduate studies authored by Mark Wahlqvist – I had to buy several and his name was always burned into my brain. Not as a naturopath – far from it – he is a consultant physician who has specialised in nutrition research and policy development internationally – has been an advisor on some of the biggest food and nutrition boards in the world and is now an Emeritus Professor at Monash. As you would expect with this kind of CV he always appeared to take a fairly conservative view of nutrition. Yet this beautifully spoken older gentleman, who continues to be incredibly active in his career, brought the house down with his eloquent argument that individual health hangs in the terrifying grip of environmental health. He succinctly described all things from the frightening loss of food diversity globally parallel to the corporatisation of food, the dramatic reduction of social interaction and cohesiveness, the lack of dirt, green spaces and nature in our individual lives etc and the dire impact all of these influences have on our individual and population wellbeing. I have to say Mark spoke as an elder of medicine and what a lovely surprise to find he has morphed into something akin to a naturopath! 

Delegates all around me during Mark’s address were saying, “Wow!” and emitting gasps of astonishment, clearly surprised by some of the data and facts he presented. I thought to myself, I learnt all this in my undergraduate 20 years ago and rather than seeing this as any kind of negative I felt hope and optimism that mainstream medicine, or at least, one section of it, lead by some of their own highly respected elders, may be on the cusp of significant change. Certainly, those non-naturopathic health professionals who attended, are likely to have heard something through these plenary presentations that they are unable to ‘unhear’.

Simultaneously I felt enormous gratitude for the incredible teaching I received all those years ago at Southern School of Natural Therapies and particularly, grateful to my first and foundational nutrition teacher Faye Paxton who of course introduced me to Mark Wahlqvist via his books and so much more! Huge congratulations to Sally Mathrick and Jason Hawrelak who beautifully represented the naturopathic profession at the conference as well. Sal talked about health and links with deep ecology while Jason of course talked microbiome – and both captivated their audiences and did us proud.

There is so much to tell from these two conferences – I promise I will come back with more and in the interim I will try my very hardest to see if there is some way to access even just these 3 plenary talks for those unable to attend because undoubtedly they were the highlight and everyone needs to hear them. In the meantime I need to get up and do a little dance…because as Bob Brown said, “I’ve decided to be optimistic now because optimism at least gets things done and takes steps in the right direction”…or something to that effect. Too true Bob!

Republished with permission with thanks to Rachel Arthur.