Category: Blog

This time of year has different meaning to many depending on your religious or spiritual background. A few years ago, I wrote an article called “The Healing is in the Feeling” and this article is a follow-up to that. In the first article, I talk about really feeling our feelings – both good and bad, happy and sad, painful or not – in order for true healing to occur. A part of this healing puzzle includes our capacity to forgive. I first learned about forgiveness when I memorized the Lords prayer in Sunday school at the age of 4 and the line “forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us” was recited. Some important questions to ask yourself this holiday season are: 1. Who in my life do I need to forgive? 2. Is there anyone that I am harboring resentment or ill-will towards – either consciously or subconsciously? 3. Who am I slightly angry at or bitter towards in my heart?

Forgiveness is not an easy thing for many. Partly because we may feel that in forgiving someone we feel we are saying “that’s okay…” – that their behavior or transgression is acceptable. This is not what forgiveness is. By forgiving, you are not condoning the behavior, you are releasing yourself from the trap of resentment. It is saying – “the way you treated me or your behavior is not necessarily excused; however, I release and forgive you, as well as myself”. In the Bible, it says “forgive them for they know not what they do” – that is what forgiveness is about. As many of you know, I have had my personal trials and tribulations with my health over the last 30+ years – and my family and friends have gone through some difficult times as a result of my challenges. I consider my true friends and family members to be the ones that are still by my side despite the hardships, struggles and difficulties that having an illness brings. What saddens me to my core is the inability of my family and friends to forgive events/actions that have happened in the past. If you are like me and have loved ones that are stuck in their inability to forgive and communicate, I urge you to read about forgiveness in “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” by Dr. Christiane Northrup (pages 630-637). To summarize, she writes: “Forgiveness frees us. It heals our bodies and our lives. But it is also the most difficult step we must take in our healing process. It takes a great deal of energy to keep someone out of our hearts. The twelve-step approach teaches that we make amends for ourselves, not necessarily for the other person. But when we make amends to those who have hurt us, both of us are freed. Forgiveness and making amends are completely linked. Holding a grudge and maintaining hatred or resentment hurts us at least as much as the other person.

Forgiveness moves our energy to the heart area, the fourth chakra. When the body’s energy moves there, we don’t take our wounds so personally – and we can heal. Forgiveness is the initiation of the heart, and it is very powerful. Scientific studies have shown, for example, that when we think with our hearts by taking a moment to focus on someone or something that we love unconditionally – like a puppy or a young child – the rhythm of our hearts evens out and becomes healthier. Hormone levels change and normalize as well. When people are taught to think with their hearts regularly, they can even reverse heart disease and other stress-related conditions. The electromagnetic field of the heart is forty times stronger than the electromagnetic field produced by the brain; to me, this means that every cell in our bodies – and in the bodies of those around us – can be positively influenced by the quality of our hearts when they are beating in synchrony with the energy of appreciation.”

I first learned of a powerful forgiveness exercise from Dr. Northrup and it is one that I have practiced for many years. It has helped me to heal the hole in my heart that was eaten away by unresolved conflict in my relationships. I have recorded a lesson in forgiveness, as well as this meditation – I urge you to practice on a regular basis and consider it my gift to you.

And from Iyanla Vanzant: “When you become so angry with a person that you want to shut them out of your life, you need to know that there is something going on with you that has nothing to do with them. At this level, anger is a response to your own judgments, the failed satisfaction of your own expectations, your failed attempts to gain control or your subconscious response to fear. If you want to establish and maintain peaceful relationships with other people surrender all judgments of who they are and who they are not.”

This holiday season, may you understand the meaning of the season and give the gift of forgiveness to those in your life that you may be withholding your love from. My gift to you is the Forgiveness Meditation that I have found so helpful in my own journey towards optimal health.

With love, from my heart to yours,

Dr. Christina Bjorndal

Winter has always been my favorite time of year – with the trees losing their leaves, the crisp cool days, the first snow fall and excitement of ski season. The turning back of the clocks at daylight savings time, however, brings the turning back of moods for many people. With exposure to less sunlight, especially in communities in Northern Canada, it can be more difficult to motivate yourself.

My husband grew up in the Yukon where there is very little sunlight during the winter and he never had a problem with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). However, many people do. If you’re like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and may continue into the winter and spring months, zapping your energy and making you feel depressed. It is helpful to know what the signs and symptoms are and once you understand the SAD picture, it is equally important to
know what you can do to help yourself.

How do you know if you suffer from the winter blues or SAD?

Seasonal affective disorder is a pattern of major depressive episodes that occur and remit with changes in seasons. The most recognized form of seasonal affective disorder, “winter depression,” is characterized by at least five of the following symptoms that are present during the same two-week period, nearly every day, and represent a change from previous functioning. At least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure:

Not everyone with SAD has the same symptoms, but common symptoms of winter depression include the following:

• A change in appetite, especially a craving for sweet or starchy foods
• Weight gain
• A heavy feeling in the arms or legs
• Fatigue or loss of energy
• A tendency to oversleep or difficulty getting out of bed
• Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness
• Irritability
• Increased sensitivity to social rejection
• Avoidance of social situations
• Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt
• Loss of interest or pleasure in activities you used to enjoy
• Ongoing feelings of hopelessness or helplessness
• Physical problems, such as headaches and stomach aches
• Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.

Symptoms of SAD keep coming back and tend to come and go at about the same time every year. The changes in mood are not necessarily related to obvious seasonal stressors (like being regularly unemployed during the winter). To be formally diagnosed with SAD, you must have experienced the symptoms for the past 2 years.

If these symptoms ring true for you, a friend or loved one, the following suggestions are a good place to start.

Steps you can take to prevent or alleviate SAD

There are many effective self-help treatments for SAD. The first priority is to increase your daily exposure to natural sunlight by getting outside for a walk or regular exercise during the day. Be sure to expose your eyes to the light and remove your sunglasses. You can also try sitting next to a south-facing window at your home or office.

In some cases, the addition of light therapy to daily exposure is necessary to ensure adequate vitamin D production. In the winter months, we do not produce enough vitamin D because we are not outside for long enough in cold temperatures nor do we have much skin exposed when we are outside. Research has shown that vitamin D plays many key roles in the body – and improving mood is one of these. Light therapy has been shown to be an effective treatment for seasonal affective disorder. Another lighting suggestion is to replace commonly used light bulbs in your home with full or broad spectrum light bulbs. While more expensive than regular light bulbs, these bulbs provide light that is similar to natural
sunlight.

To help prevent SAD, a regular sleep schedule is extremely important to maintain. It may be helpful, for instance, to have your bedroom lights on a timer to turn on a half-hour before you wake. This may help in waking at a regular time every morning when it is still dark outside in the winter months.

Foods have a significant influence on the brain’s behaviour. A poor diet, especially one high in junk food, can contribute to depression. The levels of brain chemicals (known as neurotransmitters) are controlled by what we eat. These neurotransmitters regulate our behaviour and our mood. An important neurotransmitter implicated in depression is serotonin – which plays a role in mood, sleep, and appetite. Low levels of serotonin may result from diets too high in simple sugars/ carbohydrates (e.g., white sugar, white flour, sweets, processed foods) and leads to depression, anxiety,
and sleep disturbances. Diets high in complex carbohydrates (e.g., vegetables, whole grains, legumes/beans), on the other hand, help to increase serotonin and elevate mood.

If none of these suggestions seem to help your depressive symptoms after a few weeks, please consult a Naturopathic Doctor, Psychologist or Medical Doctor who can further assist you. Don’t be afraid to talk about this condition with a professional, it’s nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. With a little effort, the winter blues can be beaten.

How improving your bathroom habits can improve your overall health

Interview Conducted by: Alison Dunn

It’s a favorite subject for any seven-year-old, but for everyone else, talking about bowel movements is a pretty squeamish topic. “It’s kind of a taboo subject,” says Dr. Christina Bjorndal, a naturopathic doctor with the Natural Terrain Naturopathic Clinic in Edmonton. After a certain age, no one seems to want to talk about their movements anymore, but by not doing so, we could be overlooking one of the best indicators of our health. “You can learn so much about your body just by taking the time to look at your stool,” Bjorndal says. “Don’t wait until you get colon cancer before you clean up your bowel function. It’s a completely preventable cancer – but it’s also a deadly cancer.” Most people don’t know what a healthy bowel movement should look like or how often they should have one. The result is that many people are constipated and don’t even know it.

Signs of good health

How do you know if your bowels are functioning properly? According to Bjorndal, a healthy movement occurs 12-18 hours after a regular-size meal. This is what doctors refer to as “transit time,” or the time it takes food to move from the mouth, through the intestines and out the anus.
Want to test your transit time? Try the beet test: Eat a lot of beets, then see how long it is before your bowel movement is a dark, red color. If it’s 12 – 18 hours later, you have a healthy transit time.
What else does a healthy movement entail? Bjorndal says it should be in the shape of your colon, about the length of your forearm and in an s-shape. It should sink to the bottom of the toilet, be uniform in color and be smooth with few fissures or crevasses. There should be no blood or mucous in your stool, and there should not be a strong, foul or offensive odor. A strong odor could indicate an imbalance in the flora or bacteria in your intestine.
Finally, it should be relatively easy to have a bowel movement. You shouldn’t have to strain and it shouldn’t hurt at all or be either too hard or too loose.

What to do if you’re constipated

There are five major factors that cause constipation, Bjorndal says. They are diet, stress level, exercise, liver function and dysbiosis (microbial imbalances in the body). “I find if I address those areas for patients, generally their bowels improve,” she says. “And the first three, diet, stress and exercise, all go together.” Here are a few tips to help you improve your bowel function:

1. Eat right. Avoid constipating foods like pizza, ice cream, white bread, cheese, red meat, white flour and dairy products. Instead, choose leafy greens, fruit, whole grains (brown rice, millet, quinoa, etc.), beets and flaxseed oil, to name a few. And don’t forget water – you should drink about half your body weight (in pounds) in ounces of filtered or spring water every day.
2. Optimize your digestion. Remember what your mother always told you: slow down and chew your food properly. Remember to eat in a relaxed atmosphere and drink liquids between meals rather than with meals. And, if you have ever had antibiotics, you may have an imbalance in your gut flora and could benefit by taking medicinal doses of probiotics.
3. Exercise daily. Whether it’s walking, biking, swimming, dancing, running, yoga or Pilates, try to get some activity every day to help reduce stress and ensure your colon is functioning properly.
4. Don’t ignore the call of nature. If you’ve got to go, go. Find the nearest bathroom when you have that urge to go. And try squatting, as it’s the most natural position for elimination. Put a stool or chair in front of you to rest your feet on.
5. Relax! Stress is a major factor in constipation, so try to find some time to relax. Whether that’s prayer, meditation, visualization or something else that helps you relax, just take some time to breathe and picture your digestive system working properly.

The video stops being shaky after the first minute.

The movie “Feed your Head” was watched in Calgary – and this video shows Dr. Bjorndal answering questions on the spot after the film viewing. The movie is about psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond met in Saskatchewan in 1951, and embarked on a quest to do what traditional psychiatry deemed impossible: to find a cure for schizophrenia. Their work spawned a number of directions for research, many of which are only gaining acceptance in wider circles now.

Their primary contribution to psychiatry was a theory about treating people suffering from mental illness using nutrition. Hoffer and Osmond set out to prove that the symptoms of schizophrenia could be controlled with healthy, unprocessed food and large doses of vitamins.

Linus Pauling was an American scientist, peace activist, two-time Nobel Prize winning author and educator. Pauling & Hoffer became friends and together advocated for mega-doses of niacin, vitamin C and other nutrients in the treatment of all kinds of disease. Pauling came up with the name “Orthomolecular” for this new, yet ancient, form of treatment. Orthomolecular means “the right molecules in the right amounts.”

Hoffer, Osmond and Pauling were way ahead of their time. Their work coincided with a general movement towards de-institutionalization in mental health, releasing patients back into the community with no real support system. At the same time, economic changes were bringing budget cuts to all aspects of health care in North America.

This was also the dawn of the age of Big Pharma. Multi-national pharmaceutical corporations sprung up in the 1950s and 60s, introducing new anti-psychotic drugs that made it possible to control, if not actually help, the mentally ill. Consumers put their faith in the idea of the “magic bullet” and since then, psychiatry has been largely controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.

For their efforts, Hoffer, Osmond, Pauling & hundreds of like-minded doctors were condemned by their peers.

The tide is turning: a growing wave of consumer demand is driving an orthomolecular resurgence. Doctors and patients are being slowly won over by a simple idea that makes more sense every day:

WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.

In my practice, I specialize in pediatrics and I see children with many common conditions, such as eczema, asthma and allergies, as well as more challenging neurological conditions, such as autism and ADHD. I wanted to share a common occurrence I see in practice and that is the treatment of eczema. A few months ago, a concerned mom brought her 1 year old son in as he had been diagnosed with full body eczema. A medical doctor had prescribed cortisone cream and said “he will grow out of it”. The condition had started at birth and since he was so uncomfortable his mother found that he was extremely fussy and cranky. He was also very itchy and would scratch himself raw given the opportunity. After feeling discouraged with the medical care they received, the parents thought they would explore other avenues of treatment, such as naturopathic medicine.

During the patient intake session, I discovered that he was a c-section birth. He had also been quite colicky as a baby and sometimes could not keep food down. Whenever a child presents with the symptom of colic, a few things come to mind: 1) food intolerances 2) a bacterial or “gut flora” imbalance and 3) spinal disturbances. The other symptoms that occur with food intolerances and an imbalance in gut flora are: eczema, asthma, digestive upset, mood disorders, constipation, difficulty sleeping, and bed wetting. Similar symptoms can also appear in patients who are “toxic” or in those whose organs of detoxification are not working as well as they should. In this case the boy’s trunk looked like red welted hives and I asked if any blood work had been done to rule out a true allergy. It turned out this was never offered, so she decided to do an IgE allergy blood test through our office, as well as stool testing to determine the balance of good and bad bacteria in the digestive tract.

When looking at immune reactions to allergies, there are 5 types that the body can have: IgA, IgG, IgM, IgD, and IgE. Most people are familiar with the IgE antibody response (fast immune mediated) which is when you eat a peanut and your throat immediately closes, or you get hives or an anaphylactic reaction. But there is also an IgG antibody response which is considered a “slow immune” reaction, such as a food intolerance. Most commonly, I test children for food intolerances when they are over 1.5 years of age as this is when their immune systems are more developed and they have built up enough antibodies to give a good response. If I test a child and they are positive, it means they have what is known as “leaky gut syndrome” and I start them on a treatment plan. This includes a dietary plan that eliminates the foods they are reacting to based on their individual test results – most commonly wheat and dairy as these are the most common foods that cause problems.

Another important point in this case is that he was a c-section baby. It is important to note that when a baby is born, it gets its first dose of bacteria when it travels down the vaginal canal. These good bacteria or probiotics colonize the infant’s digestive tract (assuming the mother has a healthy vaginal canal) and serve as part of our lifelong immune system. C-section children do not get this opportunity and therefore usually have a lot more health problems versus their vaginal birth counterparts. 1

In this case, I prescribed the following dietary changes while waiting for the test results: eliminate dairy and wheat from the mom’s diet (as she was still breast feeding) and the solid portion of the child’s diet. As detoxification is also an important part of the process, I also prescribed very gentle liver support that involves a three step process:
Step 1: homeopathic remedies to start the “drainage” or removal of toxins
Step 2: glutathione to help the liver get rid of these toxins and
Step 3: a herbal combination to promote better liver function.
Most parents say to me “My child is only x months old, how can their liver be toxic?”. What people don’t realize is that in today’s society children are being born toxic. They acquire toxins in utero and/or while being breast-fed.2 We have five detoxification organs – our liver, kidneys, colon, lungs and skin. If the liver cannot keep up with the removal of toxins, the detoxification process spills onto the other organs and when the entire system is overburdened, symptoms appear such as eczema, asthma or bowel issues.

When I saw the patient a week later to go over the test results, she was impressed how fast his skin had cleared up, he was not as fussy or cranky and seemed to be a more pleasant child. His blood work confirmed the following IgE allergies: peanut, milk, wheat, egg white and soybeans. Based on the stool test results, he also had candida which is a chronic fungal problem. Over time with the correct nutritional support to heal leaky gut syndrome he may be able to eat some of these foods periodically and not get such a severe skin reaction. For more information on Leaky Gut Syndrome – see Dr. Christina Bjorndal’s article: I have a leaky what? Leaky Gut syndrome explained.

After one month of treatment, he was doing really well and we started the second phase of treatment to deal with the overgrowth of candida. This meant that further dietary changes were necessary, primarily eliminating all forms of sugar from his diet, including fruits.

This is an example of a case that cleared up quickly, and illustrates the primary philosophy of Naturopathic Medicine which is to address and treat the root cause of disease and to not give things to simply cover up symptoms or palliate. By taking the time to remove the foods that were causing an immune reaction, rebalance the bacterial imbalance in the digestive tract and support the body in detoxification the patient is actually cured of eczema. It is important to remember that symptoms like colic, eczema, and constipation are signals from the body that it is out of balance or over-burdened. When you listen to your body and support it, the healing process has a chance to take place naturally.

1. Low diversity of the gut microbiota in infants with atopic eczema: The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Volume 129, Issue 2 , Pages 434-440.e2, February 2012
2. Environmental Toxins – Do you know your levels? By Dr. Christina Bjorndal