Ep. 69 - The Role of Self-Care for the Treatment of Chronic Disease - with Dr. Millie Lytle

Dr. Millie is a licensed Naturopathic Doctor who specializes in helping people address chronic fatigue and mind-body-spiritual well-being. She holds her license in the District of Columbia and practices virtually in New York City.    She is also the founder of Nat Med Coach, a published researcher, an avid public speaker, the author of Eating for Meaning, and the host and curator of Virtual Health Club, where she provides supervised self-care to help you stay out of the doctor's office.   Today, Dr. Millie is going to teach us about the role of self-care for the treatment of chronic disease:   Self-care is important for everyone, but especially those with chronic illness. Taking a breather for you can help in your healing journey and it’s very important to keep our bodies in Homeostasis so that the healing can take place.   Self-care is defined as the action’s individuals “take to lead a healthy lifestyle; to meet their social, emotional and psychological needs; to care for their long-term condition; and to prevent further illness or accidents.”   Conventional medicine has historically focused on sick care: diagnosing, treating, aiming to cure diseases. On the other side of the spectrum lies wellness care, typically already healthy consumers seeking better-than-healthy goals.   In between sickness and wellness care lies a gap – an abyss for many patients, especially autoimmune patients struggling with slow or inaccurate diagnoses on the sick-care side but unable to progress to the well-care side.   Self-care, however, may help temporarily bridge this gap, advancing us towards disease prevention and reversal because it provides powerful tools for all of us to maximize well-being.   The science of self-care:   “Scientific research has shown that what we do and eat can affect our gene expression, and maybe influence the gene expression of our children and grandchildren. New understanding of the microbiome shows a connection between our gut and immune system — with the right personalized diet, some of us can manipulate our microbiome to possibly prevent or ameliorate immune-related conditions,” Dr. Millie says.   So, where do we start?   Because let’s face it – when people get to a point of Chronic Dis-Ease, most people start going down the wrong rabbit hole and end up spiraling downwards until they can get care from the sick care system.   Dr. Millie provides a number of digital resources that you can incorporate in your self-care toolkit:   Personalized trackers: MyMee, Vida, or other coaching apps Sleep: Sleepio Food: myFitnesspal or Fooducate <span