Friday Dec 30, 2022

How Functional Medicine Treatment Changed My Pharmacy Career

“It just made me realize the importance of health coaching. Not telling people what to do, but helping them realize their wants and their needs, and helping dive into their personal strengths, and getting them to pave their own way. Because they really are the experts on their life and on their body,” explains Heather Cracauer. Heather began her career in healthcare as a doctor of pharmacy and has 14 years of experience as a pharmacist. When she caught covid in the Fall of 2020, she began experiencing chronic health issues like fatigue, headaches, and overall feeling like garbage. Her traditional doctors could not find the issue with standard lab testing and one suggested she see a functional medicine practitioner. That practitioner ran a bunch of tests and the results were shocking. Heather's body was dealing with mold exposure, SIBO, and dysbiosis. She immediately wanted to learn more about functional medicine. Now Heather is a certified functional medicine practitioner who runs a virtual practice from her home offering health and functional nutrition coaching.

Heather went into medicine wanting to help people achieve better health. As a pharmacist, she did not get to spend enough time with each patient to really help them with their health goals as much as she would have liked. When she realized that functional medicine could help get to the root cause of chronic illnesses, she found her calling in health coaching. As a pharmacist, Heather was giving patients medications for their ailments rather than helping them to determine the root cause. But now, she is able to eliminate medicine from her patient’s charts and replace it with nutrition and lifestyle changes.

The difference that functional medicine can make in patients’ lives is truly mind blowing. Heath coaching and nutrition should be treated like an integral part of the healthcare system, yet traditional Western medicine is years behind in this regard. By getting to the actual root cause of the illnesses in the body, chronic conditions can be eliminated and there can be a reduction in the amount of medication a patient needs to take.

Quotes

• “I got the functional medicine tests back and it was shocking. I had mold exposure, I had dysbiosis 10 out of 10 on that scale with SIBO. I had inflammatory markers that were just sky high. Just so many things were wrong. So it's kind of the catalyst that was the light bulb, where I realized there's more to medicine. We can actually get to the root cause.” (4:36-5:33 | Heather)

• “It just made me realize the importance of health coaching. Not telling people what to do, but helping them realize what they want, their wants and their needs, and helping dive into their personal strengths, and getting them to pave their own way. Because they really are the experts on their life and on their body.” (12:28-12:54 | Heather)

• “What has always driven me is just helping people achieve health, good health, better health, whatever that means to them.” (16:56-17:05 | Heather)

• “I feel like health coaching and nutritionists need to become part of the integral system.” (25:35-25:42 | Heather)

Links

Connect with Heather Cracauer:

Website: https://www.cracauerfunctionalpharmacy.com/

Connect with Lara:

Website: https://drlarasalyer.com

Instagram: @drlarasalyer

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Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlarasalyer/

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