Your Role as a Patient at the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor
Becoming truly healthy requires a pro-active patient.
Your role or job as a patient in our office is different than at other offices. This includes chiropractic, medical, physical therapy practices or other holistic practitioners offices. In order to have the greatest success with your health improvement program, it is necessary that you know this and take responsibility for your part in getting and maintaining your optimum health and wellbeing. Taking control of your health and wellbeing is easy with The NHCAA.
The first thing to do as a new patient is to educate yourself at the first visit by reading and understanding the New Patient Orientation packet.
You receive your initial Nutrition Response Testing examination at this visit. Then you come back in a few days for the Report of Findings. This is when you learn what your body needs for nutrition. Your current state of health is reviewed by you and how it can be expected to improve. At this visit, we determine if we are going to start the patient-doctor relationship. Most healthcare practices do the similar procedures. The biggest differences come next.
After we start the program together and you decide to take full responsibility for improving your health our next several visits are therapeutic nutrition visits, meaning we are working on improving the primary health challenges we’ve found.
These visits are once a week for the first six weeks. During this time you begin changing your bad health habits and “normal” lifestyle that has put you in the condition that you are in now. You begin creating improvements in your health with gradual simple changes. These short, educational visits help you start rebuilding and repairing your body. Part of your role is writing down exactly what you eat every day and counting the grams of carbohydrates that you ingest so we can both see what your dietary habits are and what needs to be fixed. You can also use an app such as Cronometer to keep track of your foods and macronutrients.
After 4 to 6 weeks, we re-examine your health and note the progress.
At this point, your visits are every two weeks. You are now in what’s called the “Healing and Observation Period”. During this time you are producing a healthy body. You are performing the new, healthy habits that you learned in the first six weeks to repair your body and create a new level of physical health.
Also, there are continual discoveries and education for you as you learn more about how your body works and attend educational lectures that teach you about health and nutrition.
This phase may last 3 to 6 months or even more. During this time you are also setting forth your own personal policies regarding your diet. For example, many people discover that just because there’s a birthday cake in front of them doesn’t mean they should eat it. They’ve realized it causes them to feel bad for several days afterward and they’ve determined it’s just not worth it. So their personal policy becomes, “If I see cake, I don’t eat it unless I want to feel bad.”
When your body and health challenges are stably improving you graduate to the next phase which is called the Maintenance Phase.
These visits are every 2 to 4 months. At this point, you are very familiar with what you need to do in order to continually and gradually improve your health. There is no relaxing or dropping out the actions you now know are beneficial. Your understanding of health, nutrition, and your body make it fairly easy to stay away from bad foods and only eat nourishing food. You don’t even waste time walking down the cereal aisle of a grocery store or searching for food at a gas station since you know that there is no healthy food in either area.
At this point, your health is on a steep upward climb.
You look back and discover what helped you the most and make sure you improve it even more. For example, you may have noticed by cutting out bread you no longer get bloated or maybe your heart has improved because of a particular whole-food supplement. So you figure out if there are ways to decrease grains and refined carbs so you can feel even better. And you certainly know you should keep taking whatever supplement improved your heart health.
Our best patients eventually become so healthy that most if not all their previous health challenges go away or improve so much they are in a whole new plateau of good health. Most likely they are enjoying their new found vitality and able to do more than they could before. They are extremely healthy, their attention is no longer stuck on their own health challenges and they want to help others. They know the wrong thing to do is try coast on their own because they’re part of the team that creates this new healthy life. They also know it takes work to maintain health so they keep a schedule of visits even when they’re doing well. It may be every 3 or 4 months but they don’t stop coming in.
For most, their new, self-appointed job becomes helping their family and friends conquer their own health challenges by introducing them to what we do. They also stay in touch with the people they help to assist them if they encounter roadblocks in their health improvement program.
We are expecting you and counting on you to reach this optimum level of health and wellness and help others get there too. Today’s healthcare in the United States results in incredible amounts of unnecessary suffering – physically, emotionally and financially from the hands of drug and surgery-based medicine. Our communities, our economy, and our families need you and your loved ones healthy and vibrant, not sick and drugged.
Yours in health,
Dr. Schmidt
