Resource for a Healthy Lifestyle - YourHealthWorks.com

April 24, 2012

Resource for a Healthy Lifestyle - YourHealthWorks.com

with Deborah Gordon

Deborah Gordon of YourHealthWorks.com, who has followed a decade in Family Practice, Migrant Health and Emergency Medicine with twenty years of an integrative medical practice joins the show.

Listen to interview with host Eric Michaels & guest Deborah Gordon discuss the following:

You've just started a website -- what was your practice experience that led you to start a website?
What makes Your HealthWorks different from other health websites?
How does the Consultation process work?
What has been the response to the website in general?
How do you expect the website to grow and change?

I chose a career in medicine because I like working with people and I believe in the body's ability to be healthy. My medical training (University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and Family Practice Residency at Santa Rosa) was inspirational for its devotion to the sharing of human experience but disappointing for its miniscule glimpse into the makings of health. After graduation, my studies of nutrition, homeopathy and the existing medical research into lifestyle questions has enabled me to fashion an integrative medical partnership with my patients.

In both office-based and hospital care, from migrant and rural health clinics to emergency departments and private practice, I have integrated conventional medicine, alternative care, nutritional and lifestyle education for all my patients. In many cases the results were truly remarkable and I learned that there are many different routes to healing. In all cases, I like to focus on the partnership forged between the patient and myself. We agree that a key element to good health is the patient taking charge of his or her own health care.

Your HealthWorks is the result of my passion for vital health partnerships and it is my hope that through Your HealthWorks, I will be able to reach thousands more people than have attended my practice over the past decades and that they too will benefit from the many lessons I have learned in both my studies and my practice.

Many conventional medical practices—massive over-prescribing of expensive medicines, ignorance about basic nutritional information, unnecessary operations—do real damage to our people and our planet. Recent interest in alternative health will follow the same dangerous path unless we realize the difference between cheap, synthetic vitamins in heroic doses and the wise use of food as medicine, and food-based supplements as gentle health reminders to our bodies. I'm convinced that the kind of medicine I practice—integrative, healthy, organic—will make a huge difference to your life as it has to mine. At the same time, together we will be changing our families, our communities and our world.