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I am so overwhelmed by all the responses I got on my first post and I really can't wait to share more with everyone! I felt like it would be meaningful to share more of my background and how I got to where I am. 10 years ago, I would never have thought that I would be on the path that I am now!!!
Let's start with 10 years ago. I was 16. I had just arrived back from a trip to England where I was an au pair for the majority of the year. I had finished school (matriculated, as we call it in South Africa) in March 2008 and was on my way to study something sport related at university and I was determined to have a career in sport.
Somewhere in December, 2008, I bumped into a 7-year-old girl that I knew from school and she asked me so innocently, "What do you want to be when you are big?" In the second that it took me to respond to her question, it was as if my life flashed before my eyes and I knew the real answer suddenly. I said, "A missionary," and shocked myself into some serious action. I needed my dad's help to change my course of study at university from sport stuff to Nursing Sciences. I somehow got accepted with less than a month left til classes started, with a bursary that covered my studies and all my student-life expenses.
My four years of studying got me a B.Cur degree in General, Community and Psychiatric Nursing and Midwifery. I was 20 years old after completing my studies and ended up with the highest average marks for theory and practical exams and graduated Cum Laude. I started working at a clinic in a township called Ikageng.
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It was during this year (2013), that I first started questioning the western medical system. I saw thousands of people coming to the clinic month after month with problems that were never solved. The clinic had loads of generic medications that we would prescribe to everyone coming in, and there wasn't any improvement. I was saddened and frustrated by the sad state of health of the community surrounding me. And I knew that it wasn't just in my community, but probably in most of the world where western medication is depended on for getting by.
I got involved with a company in mid-2013 that opened my eyes to the world of natural health. I started researching and found masses of studies and news reports about how medication is killing people. Here are just a few links:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/prescription-drug-killing-nearly-many-8997584
https://bjgp.org/content/66/645/172.short
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1403265/
https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm612995.htm
I started realising that the medications everyone was using so freely had risks far above I had ever imagined. I decided to stop using medication and haven't used any since September 2013. My body is still recovering from the negative effects of medication that I didn't think twice of using and that the prescribing doctor never mentioned any side effects of to me (hormonal birth control, if anyone was wondering...). I felt betrayed by the medical system and furious that so many people were being lied to (not telling the whole truth counts as lying) about what was beneficial for their health. My training at university had made me so comfortable to advise young girls with irregular menstruation to go on birth control pills to help regulate their cycles.
Now I know that I only helped to further ruin their hormonal health. But I will go into detail on the horrors of hormonal birth control in a later post. What I really want to say is that I was an uninformed health practitioner, doing just what I had been taught to do, without question. And when I started questioning, I knew that I had to make a radical change and that my journey to help people attain optimal health and well-being was, in fact, just beginning.
I am grateful for my years at the university; I do not in any way regret them. I know that my time there equipped me to be the effective researcher that I am now and it was a vital stepping stone on my path. I now am a real food and herb advocate when it comes to addressing health issues. I will definitely be sharing more about this soon, as well as how I came to be a home birth midwife. In fact, I will share about my midwifery journey in my next post, and follow that up with my own birth stories.
Keep a look out!!