Greetings. It’s naturopath, Eric Bakker, from New Zealand. I’m the author of Candida Crusher and also the formulator of a range of supplements called Canxida. Thanks for checking out my video. I’ve got an email here from a medical student. I love getting emails from medical students. And this one is from a lady called Sarah Berry. Sarah Berry is from Sydney, Australia and she’s a second year medical student.
Sarah is saying in an email that I shouldn’t be seeing patients because I’m not medically qualified or fit to see people in any kind of clinical setting. And she’s saying that only medical doctors are real doctors and, therefore, are qualified to see patients. Naturopaths are not qualified. They have no clinical or medical skills and should not be practicing medicine. Thanks so much for your email, Sarah, I really appreciate these emails.
I always say to people like you “Come back and talk to me once you’ve been a doctor for 25 or 30 years. Come back and let’s have a cup of tea and let’s have a talk to see what you feel then about your clinical practice. And, in fact, if you’re still seeing patients at all.”
I just read an interesting survey on the internet that was completed where about 40 percent of doctors, in fact, consider dropping out of medicine quite early on their practice and they rank dissatisfaction as one of the main reasons why. They’re not earning enough money. They don’t enjoy practice. They’re not getting results. They’re quite annoyed with the whole medical system and there are many reasons why they cite this.
It’s a sad fact that when I qualified from college myself nearly 30 years ago, I discovered that the dropout rate for naturopathic physicians is extremely high five years after qualification. In fact, 95 percent of naturopaths don’t even practice in a clinical setting five years after they qualify because they just don’t really get the clinical support, the education, they don’t make a good enough income, and they’re many reasons why they can’t continue on, so they scale back to a part time practice, which is very sad.
I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had really good support from my wife who has helped me for many years. I wouldn’t be able to work without her. She does all my bookkeeping for me and helped me for many years booking patients in, which is now automated online, thank goodness. Without proper support and continuing education yourself without improving your own skills, you never really maintain that sharp cutting clinical edge. And again, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve always maintained apart from my clinical practice, I’ve maintained technical interest in the industry, so I’ve traveled quite a lot to America and throughout Australia and New Zealand. I’ve gone to many different medical conferences, integrated medical conference, and natural conferences. I’ve networked with a lot of fantastic people who I now consider some of my best friends all throughout the world who are specialists in integrative and natural medicine who have really helped me to advance my education and I’ve, in turn, helped to advance theirs to some degree.
Sarah, the best advice I can give you is “When you’ve got 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 patients under your belt, then I’d like to talk to you.” Because students have often got a lot to say, but they don’t really mean anything. Nothing beats experience. Now, you can say all you want about my lack of skills and qualifications, but I did do a Bachelor of Health Science degree focusing on complimentary medicine. And I did spend a few years doing post-graduate training in different countries. And apart from that, I’ve got an incredible amount of clinical experience spanning now 27 years. Surely, that must account for something.
During my travels, I’ve met some incredible doctors and some of them, in fact, have no medical qualifications whatsoever, but they were fantastic clinicians. Purely because of the way that they interact with people. What you will learn, Sarah, over time is medicine is not all about giving pills or surgery. It’s to my understanding a big part of healing people or facilitating the healing process is understanding human nature, is working with people, and really understanding how they get sick and how they develop their own sickness through their mode of living, through their occupation, through their relationships with other people. It’s not just about diagnosing diseases and then giving pills and that’s what medical students tend to think. They tend to think that we find the disease in the human being, we give the pill or the surgery, and the patient is cured and they’re healed and they get better again.
Well, that’s a lot of crap. That’s not what happens. But that’s what a lot of students think. One of my best friends, in fact, many years ago qualified alongside me as a naturopath and a homeopath and that man went on to become a medical doctor several years later. He now, in my opinion, has become very pharmaceutically indoctrinated to the point where he thinks natural medicine is a load of crap. When a patient comes to him with a cough or a sniffle, that patient get an antibiotic.
It’s incredible how people can get brainwashed into this disease model thinking. My advice to you, again, more advice is please don’t get brainwashed by pharmaceutical interests. Keep an open mind in healing. Pharmaceutical medicines are wrong. They certainly have their place. But in my opinion, they have no role in healing people from long term chronic illnesses. All they do is suppress symptoms and that’s something that you’ve got to learn over time. Symptom suppression sometimes is necessary, but it’s very evil in many cases and it will never get a patient to the point where they’re gaining optimal health.
So the offer for the cup of tea or cup of coffee is still open when you qualify and you’ve got many years of clinical experience under your belt, do come around to my place and let’s have a kind hearted conversation and I’ll maintain this email on my file. I’ve probably got about 500 emails like this from specialists and doctors. I’ve got some fantastic ones from a cardiologist called me the ultimate quack. None of my potions work. I’ve a great one from a gastroenterologist, from cardiologists, from different kinds of people. And a lot of them like this from medical students. I keep them all in a couple of different folders just in case that person might want to come over for that cup of tea.
Thanks for tuning in.