Natural preventative medicine
Emma Pearce is an experienced Naturopath who has been treating Otago locals since 2004. Her Country Lane clinic provides a range of services including allergy testing, hemaview, and stress management. With winter just around the corner, she’s got plenty of tips to keep your immunity up.
Pearce is passionate about natural health and has always had an interest in food and nutrition. Specialising in medical herbalism, she treats a lot of stress, anxiety, allergy, immunity and gut health issues for local residents. She says that the key to being healthy all stems from diet.
“I do a lot of work on diet and it’s making sure you’ve got adequate protein on a diet, because every single cell in the body, including the immune system, is based on protein. And if you’re not eating enough protein, then you’re not making good, strong immune cells,” Pearce says.
Proteins include those from animals such as dairy, eggs, meat and fish, as well as vegetable proteins such as nuts, grains and pulses. Coming into winter, one way we can boost our immunity is to do a liver detox, which will help our bodies get rid of toxic overload, meaning our immune systems aren’t tied up dealing with toxins. This will leave you fighting fit for any bugs, bacteria or viruses that might enter your system.
You can pop by to see Pearce and get a hemaview done, which is a live blood analysis, where she can develop tailor-made treatment strategies that meet your individual needs. First taking a drop or two of blood, Pearce will look at your living blood cells and analyse them, assessing factors of your health including poor nutrition, high fat diet, stress, smoking, alcohol, immune system health, inflammation and more.
“It’s a really good way of checking iron, folic acid, liver, gut health, and immunity levels. It’s really quite a specialised thing – not many people do it. When you go to get a blood test, the phlebotomists, they stain and kill it, where as we look at it live.”
Pearce also offers allergy testing. The incidence of food allergies is on the rise, and it’s often a multi factorial cause. Pearce explains that a lot of it can come down to where our food comes from, what we are eating and where it comes from. By offering professional food allergy, toxic metal and chemical testing, she can get to the cause of the symptoms.
Pearce loves what she does and says her favourite part of her job is being able to change people’s lives every day through education and support. She likes to show the medication isn’t always the way. She also loves working alongside GPs to come up with the best possible solutions for patients.
“I wanted to go into naturopathy because I wanted to show people that it’s not all airy fairy, hippy, it’s all based on anatomy and physiology, and there’s a lot of common sense in it. Just working with the seasons, working with whole foods. Everything I do is science based, from nutrition to working with anatomy and physiology, but also pathophysiology to study disease,” Pearce says.
Pearce offers consultations, which provide a diet analysis and other nutritional tests if needed – everyone is treated on an individual basis. If you’d like more information about Emma Pearce, her clinic and the services she provides, as well as information on booking an appointment, you can head to queenstownnaturopathy.co.nz
Pearce’s tips for staying healthy:
- Cut down on caffeine: to help ensure you’re getting an adequate amount of sleep, eight to nine hours a night, and listening to your circadian rhythm. You can replace coffee with other warm drinks such as bone broth, miso soup, a homemade lemon and honey drink. “You can still have coffee, but you might just cut down to one cup a day.” Reducing caffeine can also help with anxiety and reducing stress levels.
- Take a probiotic: “The most popular supplement for winter, especially for kids, is a probiotic, because 70% of our immune system lives in our gut.” Probiotics help to support gut health, immunity and overall wellbeing, restoring balance to our gut microbiomes.
- Get yourself a good vitamin C supplement: vitamin C makes up part of the adrenal gland, and taking a supplement will help with its healthy function. Vitamin C also helps your body to produce white blood cells, which fight infections in the body.
