EP. 01: This is Holistic Health
Welcome to my podcast!
For those who don't know me, I'm Dr. Heather Heck and I'm a little unique in that I hold credentials in both eastern and western medicine. I actually just closed my physical practice and now I want to share all of my knowledge and real-life experiences with you.
Not only that, but I'm also a mother and I have had so many mom-patients who just want to know how to best create a healthy environment for their kids. I plan to share all the ways I try and do this in my own home.
My goal is to help YOU find the good, better, and best options in your whole body health through education and making sure you're aware of all of the holistic options you have. I am hoping this podcast is the start of many conversations and that I can positively impact your life, even if just by listening!
Show Notes
2
0:00:00
Hi everybody, it's so nice to meet you.
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0:00:20
This is such a long time coming. My name is Dr. Heather Heck and I welcome you to our podcast. So what I hope to cover during the podcast is really just a variety of topics. I'm a mother, I am a clinical practitioner, so I'm a chiropractor by trade, as well as a clinical nutritionist and an acupuncturist. So I just want to share my experiences in the medical field, my experiences in the alternative medical field, and then also my experiences as a mother. What I would love to share with you as well is if you want my personal opinion on a few various topics as well as what the research shows which is really how I practice and
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0:01:05
use that as my guide to make decisions for myself and my family. I have a three-year-old son as well as a nine-month old daughter and surprise we are currently expecting in August. We had such a journey with getting pregnant the first time around. It happened during COVID. We did fertility with the second and then here we go. We're going With that, I also hope to share my experience being pregnant, what I use alternative, as well as how to kind of navigate the medical field with being pregnant and kind of looking for a more natural approach to giving birth, to caring for infants, as well as to raising healthy and happy babies. So just a little bit more about my professional background.
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0:02:01
I have been in practice for about 14 years, and I have worked in a multidisciplinary orthopedic practice. So we had pain management, podiatry, physical therapy, urgent care, and surgical center. So that was all a great experience, and I was able to provide alternative medicine for the patients in that clinic.
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0:02:20
But I've been thinking about this podcast for a very long time, probably about 10 years, God has been whispering in my ear to share some clinical knowledge with the masses. So here we are, I took a leap of faith the past month and I have left private practice to start my own clinic as well as spend more time with my family and do more academic research as well. So having been in practice for 14 years, I noticed that the medical field really changed
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0:03:06
after COVID. So when I started practice, I was seeing about maybe 10, 18 patients a day and spending good quality time with those patients. Post COVID, I was seeing up to 30 patients a day and just not spending that quality time. I was seeing them for chiropractic care, but also answering any nutrition questions or addressing acupuncture with them. So what spurred a change is just wanting to spend more quality time with patients and of course family and friends, but I felt that there was a way to spread this information a little bit better than outside of my practice. So here we are trying a podcast. I also felt seeing as many patients as I was, working long hours, teaching on the side for a couple of universities as well as having two children
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0:04:04
The burnout was real and I really wasn't living my authentic self so with this leap of faith we're going to give this podcast a try and see how it goes and hopefully I can share Any of my knowledge any of my first-hand experience with all of you and then answer any questions that that you guys may have that might not be answered by your traditional MD or DC or DO and kind of help you navigate this arena too. So one of the biggest challenges with private practice that I ran into is being a practicing chiropractor. A lot of my patients and being in a multidisciplinary setting, a lot of patients would come to me with questions that
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0:04:54
they weren't getting answered by their MD or DO and I was able to help them ask the right questions to their medical providers, but I felt that there was still a gap in really making the care patient-centered. For example, I had one gentleman who was having back pain and he had some labs drawn and those were negative, everything turned out fine. And so what I told him is I encouraged him to get a CAT scan just to make sure there wasn't something going on in that low back just to rule out anything that might be ominous. And here, we did actually find a small tumor in his kidney. And he actually had kidney cancer,
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0:05:46
and he went to Columbus to have that removed, and now he's in complete remission. However, if he had not asked me the questions or voiced any concerns of things that were being missed, we don't know where he would be today. And I noticed that I get these questions a lot also from my mom's. My women that are caring for families, they're just being brushed off as, well, you're a woman, it's in your head, or we know better than you do for your child. And I just feel like there's
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0:06:24
really a big gap in the knowledge. I even have experienced that as a mother when I've taken my child only once to a pediatrician and then just left crying as a first time mom, not having, number one, being belittled, and then not having my feelings validated, not having any answers to my questions, and then just getting a large bill and spending a large chunk of time for nothing. So I do feel like
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0:06:55
there's a great need out there to help you, to answer any questions, and then to help give you some guidance as to how you can approach the medical field or how you can apply some of these interventions to your family to optimize their health. So of course, as I said, we do have exciting news. We are expecting our third in August. Maybe the end of July, but definitely August. I did go through quite a bit of fertility challenges. So we used fertility treatments for my second, and of course this one was a beautiful surprise.
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0:07:30
I'll be honest with you guys, I'm 41. So for those of you out there who have been told that you can't get pregnant in your 40s. It all depends on your health and your wellbeing. And again, what questions are being answered or what's not being answered. So hopefully I can shed some light for those of you out there as well.
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0:07:52
And then I hope to take you guys on this journey with me. So experiencing the visits, you know, what we cover. I do defer, for example, getting the glucose test because of the ingredients in the drink as well as that spike in glucose for myself and the baby. So I just work with my doctor on doing tracking for two weeks of my blood sugar and if everything's fine we just monitor from there on out. So those little tidbits of information that you can maybe take to your doctor can help you have more of a holistic and alternative pregnancy while working in the medical field. Besides that I hope to go through because with my first I had a C-section and my second I had a VBAC which was so exciting. We had a C-section
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0:08:44
scheduled with her but my water broke literally the day before on Mother's Day. So she came on her own time and it was a beautiful experience. So just kind of take you guys through those options of what to expect if this is your first pregnancy. If this is a multiple pregnancy for you, answer any of those questions as well. We will be on Instagram so please post any questions, any feedback, anything that you would like me to cover pregnancy, infant care, child care, healthy home topics and any specific medical questions or topics that you guys might
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0:09:23
have as well.
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0:09:26
Well my mom always told me growing up she's like you can't do it all well. So, yeah, because it was funny, I told Collin the other day, well it was yesterday, I'm like, well, now that I'm a stay-at-home mom, I'm like, I'm going to make everything. I'm like, I'm going to make my hand soap, my dishwasher pods. He's like, oh my god, will you stop? I'm like, no, I just want to be healthy, you know what I mean? So there's like that extreme, like I have to be the best. And then there's like, okay, maybe I could just like
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0:10:08
start with like one thing.
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0:10:10
So, it's funny.
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0:10:11
So as we go into this podcast journey, which hopefully you guys will join me with, and I look forward to your questions and any feedback that you have, I just want to leave you with a little thought. And I've told my patients, especially my friends and family as well, because I treat my patients as my family, that there's always good, better, and best with everything. With being a mom,
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0:10:36
with nutrition, with holistic cleaning in the house, you have to reach your happy medium and settle with what you're comfortable and just kind of keep that in mind. Good, better, and best in everything. So I look forward to seeing you guys on a weekly basis and I can't everything. So I look forward to seeing you guys on a weekly basis and I can't
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0:11:04
wait for your questions.
Transcribed with Cockatoo