True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA treats people who are suffering by putting them on a water-only fast ranging from 5 days to as many as 40 days!
How does True North accept 1000 new patients annually WITHOUT advertising?
In this interview, Dr. Alan Goldhamer talks about water-only fasting, how he started this very successful clinic, and what medical students can do to become extraordinary healers.
If you are interested in doing an internship or preceptorship at True North, call Dr. Goldhamer at (707) 586-5555 and let him know that Aron sent you!
The Full Program:
About Dr. Alan Goldhamer:
Dr. Alan Goldhamer is one of the founders and visionaries behind the True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA, which is the largest water-fasting clinic of its type in the world. Since 1984, the center has treated over 8000 patients with diabetes, hypertension, and other conditions due to dietary excess using a combination of water-only fasting and a plant based salt, oil, and sugar free diet to help patients get on the right track to healthful living. Dr. Goldhamer has also taught clinical fasting at Bastyr University and has also published several landmark studies on water-only fasting.
In this interview, you will learn:
- Why Dr. Goldhamer needed to hire a criminal defense attorney when he first started treating patients with water-only fasting
- What types of patients can benefit most from water-only fasting
- Why True North uses a salt-,oil-, and sugar-free diet as a vital part of treating patients
- The importance of research and documenting results in promoting integrative medicine
- How the “pleasure trap” prevents people from getting well and how water-only fasting
- How True North gets 1000 new patients a year WITHOUT any formal advertising at all.
- The key to success – treat people you can feel confident in treating and be willing to turn patients away who are not a good fit
- The importance of setting up a good team with complementary skill sets, personalities, and experience
- What can students do to develop the skills and experience to become excellent healers.
- Why one to six month internship at True North can help you develop more clinical experience than your cumulative experience in school.
Some of my Favorite Quotes from the Interview (There are a lot!):
- “We’re ready for a resurgence of the basic principles of naturopathic medicine.”
- “The power in the medicine IS the diet, sleep, exercise. Everything else is, as they say, the feathers on the rattle, rather than the principles upon which we are getting people well.”
- “If you are going to do work where you spend 10-12 hours a day at the clinic, you are going to want to make sure you work with patients you enjoy working with.”
- “The key to a happy practice is identifying who you want to work with most and who responds best to what you do and only treat those people.”
- On becoming a great healer: “We have to practice what we preach. We have to adopt these health-promoting habits ourselves. If you do not have the capacity to control diet, sleep, and exercise in your own life do you really think you will be in a position to influence patients do it in their lives? And as complicated as you think your life is as a medical student, believe me, there are many people out there working very difficult jobs that have many children and responsibilities that share or exceed the complications and challenges that you face in applying it yourself. We have to start with ourselves. We have to make sure we are getting the rest, the sleep, the exercise and controlling what we are putting in our mouths adequately so that when we are talking to patients we can do it from personal conviction so that we can set an example, and I think that not doing that is really a disservice. You are not going to be effective at convincing these people to make these radical diet and lifestyle changes unless you yourself have figured out a strategy that allows you to do that.”
- “We need to educate ourselves about what we need to know and not just what we want to hear.”
- “One of the real failings in integrative medicine is, I think, is that we haven’t done a good job of evaluating if what we do actually works for the reasons we think it works.”
Recommended Reading:
- The Pleasure Trap by Douglas J. Lisle and Alan Goldhamer
- The China Study by T. Colin Campbell
- http://www.healthpromoting.com/articles