About Naturopathy.
Qualified practitioners with the experience to help you make your next big shift.
At Shift, we have several wonderful naturopaths that help our clients worldwide. A ‘naturopath’ can vary widely in how they practice depending on their training, standards of where they practice in the world and also their personal preference of treatment style. At Shift, we follow a unique framework that was developed by leading naturopath and Shift founder Katherine Maslen. Here’s the way we like to roll…
How We Work.
At Shift, our naturopaths are interested in understanding the landscape of your entire health. We are highly skilled in understanding your unique physiology and what makes things work. We look at your body from a systems perspective, then think about what is going on biochemically that might be out of whack.
We work very much like functional medical doctors or integrative doctors, except that we do not prescribe allopathic medication and our approach works a little more holistically.
Our Qualifications and Education Standards.
At Shift, our naturopaths are required to hold a minimum of an Australian Bachelor degree in naturopathy. This includes 4 years of full-time study with high-level education on anatomy, physiology (how the human body works), disease process, pharmacology, nutritional biochemistry and advanced phytotherapeutics and herbal medicine prescribing.
In addition to this, Shift naturopaths are supported to further their education by attending local and international conferences, seminars and advanced training programs to endure they are up to date with the latest advances in natural health care, for which there are many!
Our Diagnostic Techniques and Style.
- Each naturopath will have a different style of assessment and diagnosis, however, all of our Shift naturopathic team use these methods to come to a naturopathic diagnosis for you:
- An in-depth consultation process allows us to extract your story, and all of the relevant parts. You’ll be sent a pre-consult questionnaire to give us the basics, then we will dive into the relevant parts during your first online appointment. Your story is the most important part of the process – every sign and symptom means something to us and it will help us piece together your health picture and help us make decisions about what testing and/or treatment you may require next.
- Blood testing is useful, and often necessary to get the full health picture. Our naturopaths are trained to interpret your blood testing from a health and wellness perspective. This means you don’t need to be ‘in the red’ for it to be relevant, there are signs within the ranges that can point to the early disease process.
- Functional medical testing will sometimes be needed to get to the bottom of what is going on. Common tests that we may look at include stool testing (to assess your gut health and microbiome), urinary or salivary hormone testing (to assess hormonal function) and specific genetic testing.
- Your response to the treatment, or sometimes lack of response to treatment, can also guide us as to what you need to do next.
A Fluid and Changing Treatment.
As you go through your membership with us at Shift, your health will change. The degree of this depends on a number of factors, but as your health shifts, so does your treatment.
At each of your 1-1 online naturopathic appointments, our naturopaths will ask you a series of questions. They are looking for what has changed, what has not and for anything new. Based on this information and any new test results that have been reviewed, your naturopath will adjust your treatment plan to suit your current state, which helps to keep you moving forward.
It is this fluidity in treatment that makes our online naturopathic memberships so effective, as we are working with your body and what it needs at the moment, rather than making assumptions that things will remain the same.
Experience and Collaboration to Help You Arrive.
At Shift, we work under an outcome-based model, which means that we’re always assessing to make sure we are getting closer to the end result. Our 5 naturopaths have over 50 years of combined experience. We call this our ‘brains trust’, and they utilise each others knowledge and expertise to ensure that we are giving our patients the very best level of care.
Our virtual naturopaths have guided thousands of people through their wellness journeys. We recognise that everyone is an individual and healing takes your time, resources and willpower to succeed. We want to make the journey as easy as possible so that you can arrive where you need to be.
