Dr. Christine Schaffner: Welcome to the Spectrum of Health podcast. I’m thrilled and honored to have my colleague and friend, Dr. Tara Boyd, join us on today’s podcast. Dr. Tara Boyd is a board-certified naturopathic physician with a passion for tackling the toughest cases head-on. Her 15-plus years of experience in physical healing modalities has uniquely trained her to serve a patient population that has seen a rise in conditions that were once rare. With this in mind, she has shaped her practice with a focus on pediatric neurology and chronic conditions including Autism Spectrum Disorder, PANS, PANDAS, ADD, ADHD, and epilepsy, etcetera, and she knows that no single approach is the right for every individual. She’s been trained in a range of modalities, including autonomic response testing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, nutrition, psychokinesiology, neurotherapy, Kneipp hydrotherapy, craniosacral, visceral manipulation and more. No matter the person or pathology that walks through her door, her goal is simple; to educate and empower her patients to find life-long health and vitality. Please enjoy my podcast today with Dr. Tara Boyd.

0:01:22.4 Dr. Tara Boyd: Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here with you.

0:01:25.4 CS: Yes, absolutely. Well, I would love my community to get to know you more, and we’ve been working alongside each other now for six years, seven years, eight years?

0:01:36.2 DB: Around seven and a half, yes.

0:01:38.8 CS: Yes, seven and a half years. I know, I’ve lost track of time, but it’s just been such a joy getting to know you over the seven and a half years and see you become and continue evolve into this amazing naturopathic physician. I’m really excited for people to learn about your journey and the work that you do and everything that allowed you to become the doctor that you are today. We’ll dive in. Many people that I interview often have a story about what led them to their passion and their purpose. For people who are getting to know you, can you share a little bit about what led you to become a naturopathic physician?

0:02:20.5 DB: It was actually kind of a long journey because I started saying I wanted to be a doctor when I was three years old, apparently. I don’t remember that, but that’s the story. I do know that I always wanted to be a doctor, and I went through many phases of what kind of doctor. At one point when I was a teenager, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, things like that. But then I tore my ACL cheerleading when I was 16 years old, and had to have surgery and then had to go to physical therapy. Here I was thinking I wanted to be a surgeon. I was going to go to college, be a surgeon and then I fell in love with physical therapy. My physical therapist was brilliant and we had a lot of fun together, and getting to see what she did with her hands and how she was helping the body to heal structurally kind of spearheaded my love for all things physical medicine. So by the time that I was graduating high school, I had decided that’s what I was going to do. I just wasn’t really ready for college right out of high school, so I ended up going to massage therapy school thinking this was a way for me to dive in to this physical healing modality without having to go through all of the years of university just yet.

0:03:35.4 DB: I became a massage therapist at 20 years old, and I worked for four years as a massage therapist and didn’t actually start college until I was 24. By that time I had come full circle and I was back to wanting to be a physician, and I was pre-med and I was going to be a surgeon. What was interesting was by the time that I was graduating and I had taken my MCAT, and was going to go to med school, my cousin’s husband was actually in medical school, and we were having some conversations with each other, and my years as a massage therapist had, I realized, changed the way I thought of health and wellness. What he was learning in allopathic medical school was not really resonating with me anymore. And so, I went back to thinking I wanted to be a physical therapist, so I became a physical therapy tech just to try it out for a while and decided that was not really where I wanted to be.

0:04:31.7 DB: I knew I still wanted to do medicine, but I had no idea how I could combine my thoughts on natural healing with medicine. And so I just started googling and looking it up and found naturopathic medicine. As soon as I started reading about it, I was like, “That is it. That’s what I’ve been thinking in my head, I just had no idea it fully existed.” I applied to Bastyr University and got in, so within three months, we were moving to Seattle.

0:04:58.7 CS: I knew that story but probably not the exact timeline. Naturopathic medicine, it somehow finds us, or somehow we know it exists before we realized it did. I just love learning the stories of how we all came to this medicine and it’s often after careful thought and insight and that internal conflict of how we want to help people, but we want to do it in a different way. I’m really glad you followed your heart and went to Bastyr. And so, through the journey at Bastyr, we get exposed to so many things. We get exposed to different ways of incorporating naturopathic medicine, whether it’s primary care or chronic illness, and I met you when you were a student at Bastyr, I know that we connected on so many different levels. You were already very hands-on, being a massage therapist, and obviously having this PT background, you were drawn to the healing arts of physical medicine. Can you share where that journey took you while you were in school, learning that part of the medicine? What I love about your practice is that you bring this into all patient care, these modalities that I think are still really overlooked and underestimated.

0:06:24.6 DB: Absolutely. Of course, at Bastyr, we had our physical medicine track, which is a huge piece of naturopathic medicine, and I don’t know if everyone’s aware of that, but every naturopath learns different types of manipulation, osteopathic manipulation and different types of hydrotherapy and laser techniques. We all learned that, but I just remember in one of our first physical medicine classes, learning for the first time about Father Sebastian Kneipp, who was a German priest in the mid to late 1800s, I think he actually passed away in the late 1890s. He was healing people back then. I just remember reading the story about him curing people of tuberculosis with cold water applications. It struck me so hard, how we can literally go out into the forest, out into the wilderness and still be able to help people with their healing journey through just what is on the earth, and through water alone.

0:07:32.5 DB: I really started focusing on hydrotherapy as a huge piece of my learning journey. Actually, a few fellow classmates of mine and I were given a venture grant. We had to submit a proposal and all that kind of stuff, but we were given a venture grant to actually be able to go to Germany and study at the Kneipp Schul, is what they call it, the Kneipp school. So in a little town in Bavaria, called Bad Wörishofen, we actually got to go and spend a few weeks with Dr. Nancy Welliver, who’s one of our naturopathic elders, and we learned from the school that was created by him. And we actually got to stay at the Sebastiana, which was the monastery, but is now a hotel with doctors where they do all different types of water therapy. I thoroughly believe that we can, through water, actually drive people’s health, really greatly.

0:08:32.2 DB: I’ve seen that with our patients over the years, that when we actually add in that component of daily or weekly hydrotherapy applications, our patients actually get better faster. I also studied some spa medicine in Iceland. It was the same trip, but we made a stop off in Iceland and did learn a lot of sauna therapy and hot and cold, it was very cold in Iceland. That’s one of my passions. I also, because of the physical medicine, study a lot of craniosacral and visceral manipulation as well. So again, just these hands-on therapies and applications that can be used that really, I think, benefit a lot of our patients.

0:09:15.8 CS: I’m so glad that you felt drawn to all of those things and went to learn them on a deeper level. I feel that when our patients come to us, a lot of them have tried a lot of things and sometimes bringing them back to these foundational pieces, they are so surprised how that can really move them and create momentum in their health. Can you share maybe one or two things that you often put in your treatment plans that incorporate this spa medicine or this water application?

0:09:49.2 DB: Absolutely. I give my sauna protocol to every single one of my new patients. This is actually a protocol that I learned while in Germany. It’s the way that the Germans sauna. One of the great things is that we have a ton of literature actually coming out of Finland, showing that people who sauna at least three times a week live on average about five years longer, and the more you sauna, the longer you live. They also start taking their children into the sauna when they’re infants. And so, that also changed my mind around heat and when can the body tolerate heat, and also times and durations and degrees of heat. According to the Germans, the sauna should be as hot as you possibly can get it, but you’re not supposed to actually stay in for very long. The great thing about sauna is that when you start sweating, in the first 5 to 10 minutes is when you actually are going to sweat out the most of your toxins. After that, you’re still going to get out some but you’re also going to be losing a lot of electrolytes and things of that nature.

0:10:46.2 DB: The way that I like to do it, which is also the way that I learned in Germany, is that you go in until you start sweating, you sweat for 5 to 10 minutes, you get out, breathe a little cool air and then you do a really quick 30 second to one minute cold shower, and you rinse off and then you rest for five minutes. Then you repeat it two more times. When you do that, it also is training your autonomic nervous system, training your vasculature, and all of that, and it’s also modulating the immune system. That’s something I give to all my patients because I think it can be very, very, very beneficial. The thing with some of our patients is because they’re so sensitive, they may not can tolerate a lot of the sauna. I also will talk to them and tailor that to different patients regarding how long they’re really going to do it, how high the heat is going to be and how often they should do it, and it may just be that we start off with once every couple of weeks, you do a quick little sauna. But yes, I think that is an application that is extremely beneficial.

0:11:44.4 DB: This is not necessarily a water application, but I do have most of my patients do castor oil packs as well. That’s another physical topical application. Castor oil can be a little bit detoxing, but it can also be greatly anti-inflammatory. I do have a lot of my patients do castor oil to their abdomen and especially to their liver a couple times a week. That’s something that’s in a lot of my treatment protocols.

0:12:09.3 CS: I love that we both love castor oil and I think that’s also such a great reminder of how to do that circuit with the sauna because as you’re sharing this experience, I’m remembering my experiences of that really natural high you get when you alternate hot and cold and how you just feel so clear-headed, your body feels so alive. A lot of our patients have autonomic dysfunction, and their autonomic nervous system is having a hard time communicating. So again, it can be complicated, but we can also bring it back to simple techniques and tools to restore regulation within the system. I know people might be thinking, “Okay, what kind of sauna, Dr. Tara, should I get into?” If you could, just share some of your thoughts on the type of sauna or does it even matter?

0:13:00.7 DB: In truth, it doesn’t fully matter, because it’s really more about the heat and the sweating. However, infrared saunas, especially full spectrum that have both near and far infrared, there’s some really compelling research on different metals that you will actually get out of the body, different toxicants that you will actually get out of the body with infrared, that is maybe a little bit deeper and a little bit more necessary for a lot of our patients who are really, really sick. But whenever I give my sauna protocol, I always say it can be applied to dry sauna, steam sauna, infrared, whatever. The people of Finland, they do the saunas where it’s really hot and dry, and then they’ll go and pour water over the coals, and then it gets all steamy. It’s actually difficult to be in there for very long, it’s so hot. They’re not really doing the infrared sauna so much, and that’s where the majority of our research is coming from. So in all honesty, it doesn’t fully matter to modulate the immune system and train the autonomic nervous system. But if you’re truly going for a deeper level of detox, I think the infrared is the way to go.

0:14:08.4 CS: Thank you. So something that you have been so passionate about and that you continue to bring into the clinic where we practice together at Immanence Health, is constitutional hydrotherapy. Can you share what that is?

0:14:25.3 DB: Absolutely. Constitutional hydrotherapy, it’s another really great way of modulating the immune system, it is of that nature, but it’s supposed to be healing and training the entire constitution of the body. That’s where the name comes from. It’s a series of hot and cold applications to the torso. It will be on the front and the back, hot wet towels and then cold wet towels, with a little bit of an electrical stimulation in a sine wave. The pads get placed at a certain level on the back and then later transabdominally, so on the back and the front to have that current go through the abdomen. It’s helping to contract not only skeletal muscle, but also smooth muscles. It can really help with lung health, definitely helps with digestive health and the health of the colon. It works really well in succession, so the more times that you do it, the more of a benefit you get. I’ve seen all kinds of different issues actually get helped with this, especially constipation.

0:15:24.2 DB: Actually one of our administrative staff reminded me yesterday of a patient that I had a couple years ago who we basically fixed her constipation with constitutional hydrotherapy. She’d been constipated for over a decade and constitutional has fixed it. So things like that are amazing. And then I’m always reminded, with constitutional, of a story from one of our elders, who actually had a patient come in with a severe MRSA infection, who was one of the types of patients that we sometimes have that refuse to go to the hospital. And so, she had to just do what she could naturally. And of course, she did some herbs and other things, but she did constitutionals every six hours for several days. The MRSA ended up remedying with her treatments. So I still hold that in my mind too, to remember to trust the medicine.

0:16:18.5 CS: I love that. This is where we obviously connect in so many ways, the premise that the body is innately intelligent, and we just really always have to look and understand, what are the roadblocks to that person’s physiology being able to self-regulate and heal. Sometimes we don’t have the answers, but if we support the body’s ability through constitutional hydrotherapy and support the body’s ability to regulate with more circulation and blood flow, things get better. I love that story. You see a lot of different patients, from children to adults. Can you talk a little bit for people who are getting to know you, who are the patients that you see in your practice?

0:17:04.1 DB: Really, patients of all ages. My passion is children, my passion has always been children. When I went to Bastyr, I thought I was going to be a naturopathic primary care pediatrician. Then, I met you and started working with you and started seeing the massive need for children with complex chronic illness, especially with autism and PANS and PANDAS, ADD and ADHD. And so, a huge bulk of my patient population are children. I love working with the kids and their parents. It’s really beautiful when you see a child who’s struggling, and then you see them months later and they’re living their best little lives, beautiful. I also do see adults, because after studying with you and others, I learned about persistent Lyme disease and did a residency around that. I do see adults of all ages with persistent Lyme and other complex chronic illness, especially neurologic conditions. The brain is one of my big passions as well in both children and adults, so I’m seeing a lot of MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, those types of things.

0:18:17.9 CS: I think that’s great. For those who are listening, we see that children are getting sicker and sicker. We see, unfortunately, this rise in chronic illness in our children today. Can you share some of the common themes you see in children who are diagnosed on the spectrum, or as you said, have ADHD? We also see this increased sensitivity with this rise in all these allergies and reactivity to the environment, so can you just share a little bit of the themes that you see or some of the underlying causes of why our children are so sick today?

0:18:55.0 DB: Yes. It’s really unfortunate. It is true that these generations of young ones that are children are also just being born actually sicker than the older generations. This is the first time in history that this has been documented, that the younger generations are actually getting sicker and sicker. We’re not moving in the direction we used to be moving where with medical advances, every generation actually had better health. We are now regressing. I think personally and professionally, that there’s a lot of reasons for that. I think that our world is being polluted in a lot of ways, our water is being polluted.

0:19:29.9 DB: The amounts of heavy metals that are being found in our water supply, also traces of all of these pharmaceutical drugs that end up in our water supply, and then the massive amounts of fluoride that’s in our water supply as well. This is not natural fluoride from fluorite rock, this is actually nuclear waste fluoride that’s being added to the water. Harvard actually did a study on that, showing that there was a link to the amount of fluoride in the water of cities and the amount of autism in the cities. Now, where has that information gone? I don’t know. Why that hasn’t come out and started to be remedied? I’m not sure. Even with the amount of pesticides that we spray on our food, and that floats around in the air, wind carries it and so we breathe a lot of that in. So, we have all of these pesticides and herbicides as well that actually come from poisons, different types of poisonous chemicals that were used in war, way back in the 1900s. Those are being sprayed on our food and then are floating around in our air. So that’s also an issue.

0:20:38.8 DB: You have toxic food, you have toxic water, so things that you think are nourishing you and healing to you can actually be toxic. They’re very toxic to a little growing brain. These things cross across the placental barrier, so mom is ingesting them, they cross into and across the placental barrier, so the baby as it’s developing in the womb is getting this before it’s even out in the world. Also, there’s been what seems to me a rash of mold and mycotoxins in the world as well. I see this a lot, where the parents were living in a home that ended up flooding in the basement and got mold and all this type of stuff and then they got pregnant. Mycotoxins will also cross the placenta. That can also be an issue. And then I see that too, with these kids coming in, who maybe are resistant to treatment, that no matter what we do, they’re just not getting better. I often find that there’s mold in the home that’s keeping their histamines really high, which keeps inflammation in the body and it keeps inflammation in the brain as well. So that’s a huge piece.

0:21:49.4 DB: I usually find that there’s also some sort of infectious piece. A lot of times mom or dad was bitten by a tick or by a spider, and so there was a little infection that came in. That can also play a role in what’s happening in the brains of the kids. Usually there is a little bit of a genetic variant that basically is blocking detox pathways. So their phase two detox pathways aren’t really working in their liver. And so, they’re not able to clear a lot of these toxins, when most of us seem to be doing fairly well. Our livers are functioning fairly well, and so all of that stuff in our environment that might lead a child to become on the spectrum or have ADHD or any of those types of things didn’t happen to us, because our liver was able to clear it. Not that we didn’t have some other issues, but our livers were able to clear, and so there wasn’t this massive buildup in the body that then crossed the blood-brain barrier.

0:22:44.8 DB: So I see a lot of that, but I am seeing across the board, children and adults, more and more people being just extremely sensitive and having these huge histamine flares. I think that there’s a lot of a lot of reasons for that. I think a huge piece is, again, just maybe a lowering of the immune system, lowering of clearance through the liver, and allowing in the mold and mycotoxins and heavy metals. Then the immune system tries to go after it, and it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, so it overdoes everything and then you have huge flares.

0:23:24.3 CS: That’s an excellent overview. There are so many things we’re bombarded with right now. The human body is so resilient, but there’s a point where some little bodies can’t handle that stress, and so we have to support them as much as possible. I know you highly individualize your treatment plans for those patients that you see, but for some people who just listened to all of that and are like, “Oh my God, where do I start? What can I even do today,” are there a couple tips that you can share to help people to feel empowered, especially if they have a kiddo at home that is struggling?

0:24:00.2 DB: So I always talk about obstacles to cure. One of the best things that you can do that doesn’t cost you a ton of money, you don’t have to go see a bunch of doctors and spend a bunch of money on supplements, but one of the best things you can do is just start to clean up the environment. Something else that I give to all my new patients is a whole list. I start with home health and mitigating mold toxins, water filtration systems, electromagnetic radiation mitigation, all of these types of things. So, making sure your living environment is clean, that your food is as clean as possible, so really you shouldn’t be eating any processed foods, and you should try to make sure as much of it is organic as you possibly can, trying to make sure you’re not ingesting any food allergens or anything like that, that might be a food intolerance, and then cleaning up your water. Water should be highly filtered, a Brita pitcher isn’t going to do it. There are whole house reverse osmosis systems, there’s the Berkey filter, which I love.

0:25:00.3 DB: So, making sure that the food you’re eating is clean, and the water you’re drinking is clean. Then also just making sure, again, that the air that you’re breathing in the area that you live the most, which is your home, is as clean as possible. I always want to make sure that we’ve tested the home for mold, to make sure there’s no active mold growing in the home. You can also get HEPA air filters in the home which can help to clean the air. We have now clean food, clean water, clean air. And then one of the main things that I have seen, and this is kind of a common denominator theme that I’ve seen from a child on the spectrum to a neurotypical, is reducing the amount of electromagnetic radiation in their home to as low as we possibly can in the world that we live in today. That includes ethernetting instead of Wi-Fi, making sure that there’s no cell phones on in their room while they’re sleeping at night. Different things like that can actually really help.

0:26:00.6 DB: So really thinking of those obstacles to cure and what you can change or eliminate, that can vastly change someone’s health. Especially when you have little growing brains, you want them to be exposed to as little as possible of all of these things, because as their brains are growing and developing, they’re going to be taking on more and more of this and it can start to alter the different functionalities of the different parts of the brain.

0:26:28.0 CS: That’s great, and empowering. I want to land on something because for people who are listening, this might be even a new idea, that you have seen and worked with kiddos who have been on the spectrum as well as with kids that are what we would consider neurotypical, and so maybe share your experience with that, painting that picture of hope and what’s possible for people.

0:26:52.6 DB: Absolutely, it is possible. I get this question a lot. Do you actually see kids get better who are on the spectrum? And honestly, I wouldn’t continue to do this work if I didn’t see that, because that would just be depressing. But absolutely, I’ve seen many kids go from on the spectrum to neurotypical, and at the very least, we see great gains. If the kiddos come to us when they are already teenagers, sometimes we don’t get to full neurotypical, but we see huge gains and a lot of standard life functionality come back, but when the kids come to us when they’re really young, we see a lot of children be able to become fully neurotypical. Now, with children who are on the spectrum, their blood-brain barrier, it tends to be a little bit leaky, so you do always want to be careful with just not thinking like, “Yay, they’re better and now let’s go eat McDonalds.” So you’d want to be careful of that, but absolutely, we do a variety of treatments in order to get there. The way that we practice here at Immanence Health is that we tailor all of our therapies to every individual, and we’re looking at a whole litany of different types of exams and history taking and all of that to determine what’s actually happening with the kids.

0:28:14.0 DB: There’s always going to be some piece that’s going to be the diet, some piece that’s going to be cleaning up the home, and then some herbs and supplements, and also that whole physical medicine piece and physical modalities. I have a lot of parents end up being able to do things with the kids, from liver compressions to castor oil packs, to different types of laser therapies, and that’s also a really great bonding for the parent and child too, when the parent is so involved in the child’s healing.

0:28:43.7 CS: Great insight, and again, the thing that we have working for us, there’s so many things, but the kiddos, they’re full of vitality, they’re full of life and their body really is doing everything possible to heal, with your help, of course. Dr. Tara, I know that you and I love learning, we’re both really passionate about learning, and we realize, okay, we know this now, but we’re going to know so much more even in six months, or in a year. Maybe share with people, what are you most excited about learning? I know that you’ve been to some new conferences, so please share if there’s anything that you’re diving into and feeling like, wow, this is the next thing that we need to embrace.

0:29:22.3 DB: I decided this year to start a MAPS fellow. It’s an organization for pediatric special needs. It’s a ton of doctors from all walks of life and nurse practitioners, so MDs, DOs, NDs, nurse practitioners, and everyone’s trying to be on the forefront and cutting edge, so the amount of information that comes in from those conferences is actually really, really great. I am really, really excited, though, to start focusing. We have, in the clinic, a tool called the AO scan, so this is more looking at frequencies and energetics, and I’m finding more and more and more that the kids really respond because their nervous systems, unlike adults, the nervous system is still going at all times, but we get a little bit more stiff, we’re not quite as spongy. But the kids, their nervous system and their neuroplasticity, their connections are just constant. I’m finding more that the frequencies and the energetics are really resonating with the kids, and I’m seeing some good results. So I’m really excited about kind of bringing back…we think this is new medicine, but we’re actually bringing back concepts that are very old, about using these types of frequencies. I think that’s what I’m most excited about at this point.

0:30:41.9 CS: I love that. The first time my daughter Ann Marie got sick this week, I did the AO Scan with her and I had her listen to theater music and she was so happy about it, and she was better so quickly after that. There’s something really amazing about that technology, especially for the kids. So that’s awesome. Well, Dr. Tara, how can people work with you and how can people find you? I’ll have all the information of course in the show notes, but I just want you to be able to share how people can connect with you.

0:31:13.0 DB: I’m very happily working with you at Immanence Health, and we are located in Queen Anne, which is in Seattle, Washington, and so people can work with me either in person or even through distance and through telemedicine. I work with people in both ways that way. You’ll contact Immanence Health and you’ll speak with one of our scheduling staff. We do, with the kids, usually do a first phone call. Even if you’re coming in person, I usually do a phone call with the parents first, just because our visits can be two hours, and a lot of times the kids, they cannot hang out in a room for two hours. I do a lot of times, a first phone call and then do the in-office visit, where we do our own different types of testing. We do a type of testing called ART, that’s basically how we tailor our protocols. We can do that both in office and we can also do that through telemedicine from a distance. Then we’ll have follow-ups. Even if people travel to see me in person, a lot of times our follow-ups are through phone calls or through the distance, because a lot of our patients don’t actually live in the state of Washington, so a lot of those follow-ups are from a distance.

0:32:30.3 CS: Great. We’ll have all of that information, again, in the show notes. Thank you so much for being part of the podcast. You gave a lot of people some amazing things to think about, and I got to learn some things about you that I didn’t know either. So again, it’s always a joy connecting with you, Dr. Tara, and again, I’m just so honored to work with you. We have this feeling within the office that I often say: Faster alone, but farther together, that we really create team together. And we really do believe that together we can change this paradigm in medicine so that we can help more people like the kids who so desperately need answers, so that they can re-engage with life and fully recover from the things that they’re struggling with. So thank you, thank you for being here. Again, we’ll have all the information about Dr. Tara and how to connect with her in the show notes. Until next time, thank you.

0:33:24.3 DB: Thanks for having me, Christine.

0:33:25.9 CS: Absolutely.

0:33:28.5 CS: Thank you for listening to the Spectrum of Health podcast. I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with Dr. Tara Boyd. Please find more about her in the show notes, and if you’re interested in becoming a new patient, please check out immanencehealth.com where she’s accepting new patients. Thank you and have a beautiful day.