#147: Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic)

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:00:00]:

I'm thinking about it more from a therapeutic philosophy perspective in that not understanding how one medical intervention is related to another medical phenomenon and how that's related in time over the a person's life, like, that's not really looked at. And, I mean, I think that's turning out to be a bigger issue than than anyone realizes, and that's that's a huge difference in how I approach anyone who comes up. So to me, the proof is in the pudding, and that if you do what I ask you to do and you see that it works and you have an experience, like, that shouldn't be disregarded as anecdotal evidence. It's someone's personal reality.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:43]:

Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Aron Holston Singh. Erin is the founder of Options Naturopathic, the Ohio Association of Naturopathic Doctors, and has been in private practice herself since 1999. She had her 1st encounter with natural medicine at 15 years old when her mother developed a perplexing and seemingly incurable health condition, which opened up a broad new world full of possibilities and ignited her passion for true healing. Since then, Erin has made her life's work unlocking the mystery of nonspecific illness that keep people miserable and sick When no other solutions were to be found from conventional medicine.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:46]:

Over the past 25 years, she has worked to help patients avoid and stop pharmaceuticals By shifting practices that contribute to premature death, using the learnings of natural medicine to actively decode what is going on in patients' bodies and minds across all their health issues. Undying quest to find answers landed her in the realm of cancer care where she is now focused on creating a new culture of health care from the ground up. This was truly a perspective enhancing and unconventional conversation, in that Erin lays out her deviation from the conventions of traditional health care. Erin shares her journey through the world of medicine, her philosophy on care, her learnings from the status quo and desire to change the culture of health care, her entrepreneurial journey, starting and building a practice and options naturopathic to a $1,000,000 natural medicine business. What natural medicine even is, the power of meditation, the implications of psychedelics, and a whole lot more along the way. So please enjoy my conversation with Aaron after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, Many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast realize their own visions and build these great organizations.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:11]:

I believe in Impact Architects And the people

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:03:14]:

behind it so much

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:14]:

that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation Or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. In preparing for, this conversation today, I did my best to understand the, you know, the nature of of what it is that that you're actually doing. I think the maybe the most interesting place to start For for those who may be new to the concept of naturopathic medicine, as it's certainly not something I was aware of, just kinda take us through What it is and and how you came yourself to to be interested in it and building your whole business around it.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:04:19]:

Sure. Absolutely. So naturopathic medicine actually comes from 2 different methods in holistic health care. One is called NatureCure, and that came out of, like, 18th, 19th century European hydrotherapy using alternating hot and cold water in various forms. That was 1. Like, it was really a a vital what we call a vitalist approach, like believing that the individual or even animals and livestock, it was used a lot in, could heal, could produce a healing response if they were stimulated with hot or cold water. So it's about this whole concept of what we call naturopathic medicine the vis or the vis medicatrix nature. It's Latin for the healing power of nature.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:05:09]:

It. We all got it because it's just what nature does. Right? You know, you cut you cut a hole in a tree, it's gonna get a big, like, knobby thing over the outside of it. It's what we do. We we heal. So it's taking that reality and that principle of observing nature and kinda putting it into practice. So that's one half of naturopathy or naturopathic medicine. The other half comes from homeopathy.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:05:33]:

And homeopathy is a school of medicine that believes that you can take something to its infinitesimal amount and you can percuss subcut it and then which is, essentially, a process of shaking it or, like, pounding it. And that potentizes it, and it takes, really the vibration of the original substance and transfers it to the medium, the carrier medium, whether it's water for soluble substances or whether it's like, lactose or sucrose for non soluble substances. So homeopathy is about stimulating the this, and nature care is about stimulating the this. And I see that as the fundamental principle of naturopathic medicine because it's all about how do we use nature and how do we help your body to heal itself. It. That's naturopathic medicine if you ask me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:21]:

Awesome. And I think we'll unpack a lot more of Yeah. In practice what that that looks like. Sure. How is it that that you came to find yourself, you know, interested and and wanting to learn even at the onset to to actually practicing?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:06:35]:

Well, my my journey was a bit of a rough one early on in life. I really got interested in natural medicine by getting expose to some folks that were in the Amish community. And I was also very disenchanted and very set and, you know, even downright angry with the conventional health care system because of a pretty serious misdiagnosis they'd made of my mother when I was 15. So the reality was that she had a degenerative neurological condition that really impacted her over many years, and she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. So you can imagine the treatment that they gave her as a schizophrenic actually drove the chronic neurological degeneration. You know, this took decades to unpack what was really going on, and I think that was really the main impetus of why I wanted to study natural medicine and why I was, you know, frustrated with the conventional system. And then I really went looking very deeply plea about what were those differences and how do I how why does this methodology make more sense? And it. So that was, you know, both a little bit of my spark into natural medicine, but also my entrepreneurial spark.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:48]:

Yeah.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:07:49]:

Because the it. The story of my family was that, oh, we don't have any money. There's no money. There's no money. There's no money. It was like that was the thing that I was always hearing. So I just sort of thought when I was a kid. Like, I'm gonna have fem for myself.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:08:02]:

I'm gonna have to, you know, do well in school. I'm gonna have to figure this out. And that, you know, by the time I got through naturopathic school, just really fed into my entrepreneurial nature, but I think it. I had an entrepreneurial nature already. You know, I used to make earrings and sell earrings. I called them Aaron's earbuds. I like you know, I went India for the first time in 96, and I, you know, saw how inexpensive these beautiful silk scarves were. And I just bought a ton of them, and then I brought them home and I sold them.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:08:33]:

You know? It's, like, just kinda helped me. Things like that really helped that. Getting just that idea, that mindset of getting by and knowing that I was gonna need money, I had to figure out how to how to make it work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:48]:

Yeah. It was interesting Because in in, again, researching, you know, the kinda overview of the space, I found that maybe a lot of people's path to To this kind of of practice comes from having exhausted maybe the the conventional path and and being somewhat, Like you said, you know, disillusioned, unsatisfied with the, you know, the the the treatment of symptoms and lack of holistic understanding of maybe root cause and And things that are that are actually going on.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:09:18]:

Yeah. I mean, that's that's at least, you know, 40 plus percent of the people that come to see me as patients is that that's one of the first things they say. It's like, I've been everywhere. I've done everything. I've exhausted all hope, and and I'm always like, you haven't tried this.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:34]:

Right.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:09:35]:

So it's really satisfying work because I'm able to really help people who think that they there is no hope, and I'm able to give People Hope, it's it's one of the best parts of my work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:45]:

So I wanna, you know, maybe play a Skeptics advocate here early on in the conversation so that, you know, you can kind of address it upfront. And and I imagine it's something that, you know, you often Do have to address, you know, from patients, from patients' family members as you're getting to know them at the onset of your relationship. So with with that preface, you know, if you if you Google naturopathic practices online, I think you'll find that in pockets of the Internet, Practically uninsurable and medically unproven in in some capacities. And I'm sure you've contended with a certain skepticism over over your career. So so how do you respond to that kind of skepticism that you might encounter from prospective people who are are looking for for treatment and for for help?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:10:35]:

It. You know what's kinda funny, Jeffrey, is that that doesn't almost never happens anymore. Yeah. Like, that used to happen back when I first started my practice and I was, you know, the 1st naturopath in in Ohio and in Cleveland. I mean, to stay here. There had been other people before before me, and I should say the modern era too because there were, you know, naturopaths back in the day and, like, you know, the mid fifties, forties, and whatnot. But in any event, I don't get that kind of skepticism anymore. And I think, you know, if I did, I would I would approach it as saying, well, the evidence.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:11:09]:

You know, the proof is in the pudding. It's like, why is it that the hospital gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the cancer centers, like, they have their own building now. Like, both university hospitals and Cleveland Clinic, they have their own entire buildings dedicated to cancer. Like, why is cancer getting bigger? Well, if you look at everything else that they do, it must be kind of a funnel. I don't know. That's I mean, I say I don't know, but I I working with cancer, I understand what it is, what it takes to make cancer and to perpetuate cancer and to destabilize a person who's, you know, got a cancer. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:49]:

There's certain profit motives. And Well,

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:11:51]:

I'm not even speaking about the profit motives. I'm speaking about I mean, everybody in a capitalist world, people need to make money. I'm thinking about it more from a therapeutic philosophy perspective in that not understanding how 1 medical intervention is related to another medical phenomenon and how that's related in time over the a person's life, like, that's not really looked at. And, I mean, I think that's turning out to be a bigger issue than than anyone realizes, and that's that's a huge difference in how I approach anyone who comes up. So to me, the proof is in the pudding and that if you do what I ask you to do and you see that it works and you have an experience, like, that shouldn't be disregarded as anecdotal evidence. It's someone's personal reality, and it's a very important part of the story that I think, has gotten, you know, disregarded or maybe it has, you know, some lip service. There's not it's not really truly implemented in the practices in terms of long term thinking about the over the course of somebody's life.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:59]:

Right.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:12:59]:

That's where it gets its miss, and then the relationship between a disease or an issue that you had in your childhood to your adulthood, like, who's talking about that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:09]:

Right. The that holistic, you know, patient history, that's inclusive of a lot more than maybe what's even documented.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:13:16]:

Yeah. I mean, it you know, you might look at really serious conditions, but there's a loss of understanding of the person, of the, you know, we talk about pay patient the patient become the person becomes a patient and the patient becomes a case, and the case has to do with these very serious medical issues. And if or aren't serious medical issues, people don't think it's important. I mean, I'll give you an example.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:39]:

Yep.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:13:40]:

I have on my intake form, you know, how many courses of antibiotics have you taken over a horse year life, and people invariably say, oh, not many. Just a few. How many is a few? Could you guess? You know, is it 1 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to fifteen, 10 to 20. Yeah. You can't believe how many people have had 15 to 20 plus courses of antibiotics over the course of their life, and they don't think it's a big deal. But what we're now understanding, what science has shown us is that we're composed of the microbiome. Them. We think we have a microbiome.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:14:10]:

No, people. We are the microbiome. You know, the microbiome is this, like, structured phenomena of organisms, little things that live in us. They really are us. We're not separate from them. So I think when we keep prescribing antibiotics, and this goes for the livestock and our food systems as well. You know, you kill the soil, you just kill the human gut. There are parallel phenomena here that are in very related and that the human gut is like an interiorized landscape.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:14:38]:

Right? So you kill this, you kill that. They're both related. And then when you're killing the gut, this is the fundamentals of naturopathic medicine too, I forgot, which is that we really say all disease begins in the gut. It. And, you know, naturopathic medicine the term naturopathic medicine was coined in 1902. So we've been saying that for a 121 years at this point, and that's, you know, since we gave ourselves a name, these eclectic physicians that were understanding we don't wanna use Calomel, which is mercury, one of the big medicines at the time. Mercury was medicine. Right? So understanding, I don't wanna go in that direction, the toxic stuff, because we see what's happening.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:15:17]:

We wanna go and use these other things that are stimulating a person's capacity to heal. Very different.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:24]:

Very different. So this this is all fascinating. Let let's let's, let's maybe ground it in what options Naturopathic is and Kinda the nature of of your practice and your business and, you know, how it is honing in on on your your entrepreneurial spirit that that you mentioned. Like, How did it actually come together, and and what did it look like when it got started?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:15:45]:

Sure. Sure. Well, I would say that Options Naturopathic is, fundamentally, at this point, about 25 years in, a repository of information. We are naturopathic doctors and and other practitioners supporting education. We do a lot of metabolic terrain centric cancer care. It. We ultimately wanna teach people how to use nature as medicine and understand their bodies as sense organs as, systems that show you and lead you to your purpose and and help you understand yourself in the context of your life. And then to speak to your 2nd question about, how how I got started in the business.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:16:34]:

Yeah. It. So, really, I was, you know, a lot more naive at what what whatever it was, 28, 29, when I first you know, graduating from school. And I just was like, I'm gonna go back east. There's nobody there. You know? No naturopathic doctors there. And it was like I walked down the street and everybody I saw was a potential patient. That was just sort of like how my mindset at the time.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:16:59]:

And I knew that there was a need. It. It's just that people didn't understand what it was that I did. But if they just liked the basic concepts, you know, the the sick six basic principles of naturopathic medicine, treat the root cause, identify and address that, you know, the VISS Medikatrix naturae, the healing power of nature, looking at the past, treat the whole person, use education, the doctor's a teacher, like, all of those things. People would resonate with that, and then they'd come see me. And I'd be kind of amazed. Like, you didn't know anything about me or you just looked me up on the Internet and you would come, like, find my website and you'd come see me. And, of course, I was one of the 1st naturopaths to have a website too.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:17:37]:

It's like, this is 1999, 2000, and all that was just getting started. So, you know, I also had a little bit of of support. I started my business with very, very little capital. I mean, less than $20,000. And, I also have the support, I have to, you know, give a a call out to, Sal Russo who, in his negotiation of me and my, you know, terror to actually start paying rent for a space. He just kept giving me another month of free rent. So, like, after, I don't know, an hour or something, I got, like, 6 months of free rent to start my practice in the Heights Medical Building in Cleveland Heights where we still are today. We were in a smaller suite until 2021.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:18:22]:

January of 2021, we we moved to a much bigger suite in the space. We're above Luna in Cleveland Heights, and we have a little shop there, a little apothecary, and we have an online STORE, and I took on a resident in 2018. So for, you know, many, many years, it was just me and my 1 admin person. And then I also have to qualify that I did live out of state for a total of 6 years and maintained my business because of my husband's work. It. And then I, also had kids 2 kids during that time. My daughter was born in 2015, and then that was right around the time that I found another naturopathic doctor who had really figured out how to address cancer. A path of doctor who had really figured out how to address cancer, doctor Nasha Winters.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:19:04]:

And so I really started studying deeply with her and her work, and it. That's really when the business kinda got crazy because it was not only her, it was me kind of just taking on a resident, having more employees, having more people, and then hearing about EO, Entrepreneurs' Organization. And I somebody asked me to come and speak first, about meditation and then later about what I do. And I was like, what is this EO thing? Like, I'm an entrepreneur. Like, I need to be a part of that. So then I joined the O in 2018. So the combination of all of those things, my business really it it doubled between 2018 and 2022, somewhere in there, like, that just

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:50]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:19:51]:

Kinda took off. And I actually Ran into another, local Cleveland person, business owner on Saturday, and she said something really profound. This is, Jackie Bebanroth from Muse, the marketing firm here in town. She said, if you have someone who starts a business for the just intention of starting a business because they're gonna sell something or make something, that's very different than somebody who starts a business because they're practicing their craft and then they're trying to scale that. And it. I'm sure there you probably have talked to so many people. That's something you've I'd love to hear what you have to say about it, but I'm like, oh my god. That's the problem because I'm entrepreneurial, but I'm not by nature a business person.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:20:33]:

I'm also very empathic and, you know, managing people all has been really a a huge learning curve for me, also a huge gift in terms of my own self development and self awareness, and it's the last 5 years have been have been pretty intense.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:49]:

Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. It is interesting you mentioned that. I I've been thinking recently about the it's not a novel concept, but the idea of, like, a life's work, the the opus, the the thing that you're trying to build That is like an expression of who you are for other people. I think there is this this thread pattern for for entrepreneurs that, Like, ultimately, it's it's an attempt to, like, manifest that in in what it is they're building. Because it's not it's not enough to just, like, Wanna be successful in business. Like, there everyone has got a little bit more motivating than than that.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:21:25]:

Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, when I it. I was never looking to grow and you you join entrepreneurs organization in the accelerator program if your business is under a1000000. And I was like, I never cared about getting $1,000,000 in sales. Like, that was absolutely had nothing to do with my purpose and my mission and my goals. And, you know, I hardly saw myself as, like, a business owner. Obviously, I knew I was a business owner, but it wasn't like I was thinking of this is what I'm doing as a business, and that's been something I've had to really kinda shift into and, at this point, accept because even though I have a whole other vision and and purpose that's larger. You know, I'm I'm using the business to help achieve those goals and then sometimes I'm like, am I gonna be able to use the business to achieve these other goals? So it's really a lot to to think about and to figure out and a little frustrating to not have more time to focus on my goals because I'm so much focused on the business and, you know, having to manage the administrative side still and while I'm still seeing patients and, you know, being one of the key sources of revenue in the business.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:22:41]:

It's really hard to find the time to work on the business, let alone have 2 kids and work on

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:45]:

For sure.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:22:46]:

Everything else that I'm trying to accomplish. So I'm just consistently trying to find the people who can help me as they say, who, not how. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:53]:

Right. Right. What have you learned from the business side of it that has been interesting to you? You know, maybe things that you weren't Expecting to be transferable or applicable in in other aspects of your life, but as you've, you know, grown a a seven figure business, things that that you've taken with you that that are interesting.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:23:13]:

Oh my goodness. Well, I think it's kinda funny that we're recording this here at Impact Architects it does a lot of work with traction because traction is one of the key things that has really when we're when we're humming along and we've got a good clear team running traction using that methodology. The entrepreneurial operating system has been one of the greatest tools that has has really helped us along the way. And, you know, I I really wish I had more time to read business books, but, fortunately, that's something my husband does. And so I've really learned a lot from him. He has an MBA, and he he came to the US from India. And he's worked in Fortune 500 in private equity, and he has his own family office fund, and he's an investor, and he's also a CEO. So while our lives are crazy because we're both running separate companies.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:24:08]:

I have learned so much from him, and, you know, he's really just a wonderful person to for me to bounce things off of. And, you know, when I come into a difficult situation, I'm like, hey, hon. What do you think about this? And at the moment, we don't have as much time as I'd like to talk about my business because, you know, he's he's just a busy guy. Right? So it's kinda crazy that Yep. I don't get the same access as you would think that I'd get. I mean, obviously, I I do, but we just don't have the time. So I've learned a lot about people from him. That's, I think, probably the hardest part for me because I just see people as family.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:24:46]:

I don't know. It's it's it's challenging, but I'm really learning a ton. And it just, you know, keeps you on your toes, like, having to shift and change and the overlap between what's kind of happening across the globe with respect to people knowing that the leaders have to change and the people in charge have to change and be more vulnerable, be more self aware. Like, all of that really resonates with what I do on the other side of my business where I'm actually, you know, the the doctor that's helping a person see themselves and use their body as a tool for self awareness. Like, I just think it's kind of a beautiful time to be alive and to be doing what I'm doing because I've been at this for a really long time, and now the whole world I feel like the whole world is moving my direction. And There's a part of me that has a little bit of a difficult time when all these people are starting functional medicine practices, and I'm like, wait. We were the original functional medicine docs, but, like, if the whole world's gonna use nature as medicine, like, we're gonna need a lot of people to move in this direction. It.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:25:54]:

So one of my slogans for the business now is cocreating a new culture of health care in healing, which is kinda speaks for itself, I guess. I hope I would hope.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:04]:

Yeah. No. I I think so. What you mentioned, it it brings up and maybe this is not the right lens through which to look at it. But as a business, and we can we can tie in the the other side of the coin here if you'd like, Is is traditional or conventional practice competition? Like, how do you think about what what competition is in in in pursuit of, you know, helping people heal.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:26:29]:

Really good question. I have to say, the first differentiation I'd like to make there is between conventional and traditional. Because most Semantically. Most people Those

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:39]:

are different.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:26:40]:

They're very different. And Most people will come and say, well, I just really have exhausted, you know, traditional medicine, and I say, hold off. Hold up there because it. It's really the convention, conventional medicine. You know, when their new study comes out, they're gonna stop this practice. They're gonna throw the old practice out. Right? Like, that's the convention. And the convention of modern allopathic western medicine, it.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:27:06]:

It has been building for probably 2,000 plus years. I mean, this is the Cartesian separation of mind and body or, you know, the evolution of natural philosophy to natural science to just science. And what we do, what what I consider myself to be as a traditional medicine person. So the traditions are what go back millennia.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:30]:

I see. Yep.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:27:31]:

And The traditions are based on experiences. They're based on observation. And it is it's also scientific even though people don't see it that way, but, you know, there's this there's kind of a dogma of science these days, unfortunately. And I think science, you know, we need it, and I love the methodology of it, but it has absolutely become a bit politicized. You know, there's even a term they call it scientism scientism, whereas, you know, looking at it more like a belief where there are practices that haven't been validated, but it's the culture of what happens in the medical system. And I'll leave it there, but there's one there's one other thing I wanna say about traditional medicine, which is Mhmm. This piece around how the conventional, what we would, you know, typically called evidence based medicine. It disregards that experience.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:28:24]:

And when you look at the history of humanity, we really went from being mystical beings, you know, more spiritual. If you go back to India, some of the first scriptures that were ever written in the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, odds. It's talking about knowing the answers by going within and referring internally or meditation, yoga, these types of things. And then We started looking at the exterior world, and then we had natural philosophy or what you can call empiricism. So observational Mhmm. Looking and then knowing what is true. And then that evolved into, well, like I said, you know, philosophy, science, natural science to science. And that's really more about breaking things down into the parts, the reductionism trying to understand what's going on in the body by understanding the organs and then the cells and then the DNA and then the little things inside of the cells and all of the different organelles that are inside the cells, the mitochondria.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:29:26]:

And all of that is so important, but not if you don't then back out that lens and look at the view from a a truly holistic perspective and integrate it. And I don't think that happens. So we lose a lot there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:41]:

I I think you you just kinda introduced this this idea, but Soup to nuts. I think it'd be really helpful to to understand, you know, what what this looks like and can look like in practice and perhaps also in contrast to some of these limitations of of conventional care that naturopathic practice might assist in.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:30:02]:

It. I think the thing about the conventional care or what, you know, we might call the standard of care is they're they're trying to find these particular standards that work across the board based on research. I think the issue or the problem within that is following something that happened back in, I think, it was probably the fifties. Might have been the early sixties, but there was essentially a meeting of physicians looking at the clinically controlled trial. And they sat down and they said, let's look at this. Let's see if does this really work? Is this an effective way of assessing? Is this a good tool to see if a drug or a or a procedure or practice actually works? And one of the key aspects of these types of research studies is that you have to have what they call a homogeneous group of people. So a homogeneous group of people is people that all fit the same demographics or the same gender or ethnicity, whatever. You're trying to find that a group that you can then study.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:04]:

As a control.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:31:05]:

As as like a control. One of my favorite authors, his name is Harris Coulter. I'm always sending, like, young medical students to Harris Coulter's work because he wrote a 4 part history of medicine called divided legacy that really clearly differentiates the vitalistic and the rationalistic, so the naturopathic and allopathic sides of the way you can look at the human body in medicine. But so Harris Coulter wrote this little book about the clinically controlled trial, and he talks about how When they had that meeting and talked about a homogeneous group of people, they realized that it didn't really work because there's no such thing. So you can you can lump people together based on ethnicity or age or gender or whatever, but people are so fundamentally different. And they have different experiences, and they have different backgrounds, and they have different traumas and all these pieces that they they actually realized in the meeting that it didn't work, but they didn't have a solution, so they just kept using that method. And that became one of the foundations that we now see is being called the standard of care. Again, they're trying to lump everybody into the same thing.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:32:13]:

So when we some see someone with the same diagnosis of the same type of cancer, for example. They wanna give them exactly the same treatment and that's the standard. But why is everybody scared about the c word? Because what's being done isn't working. By and large, most people know that they get freaked out when they have cancer because it's threatening your entire life. And the the therapies that are available, it's kind of crapshoot. Right? So homogeneous to standard of care. It. And what do we do? What we do is we evaluate what are the causes.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:32:49]:

And I think of cancer, you know, as a as an excellent example of just that layer caking of there's so many different things that are off. What we really have to do is we have to assess the person's whole we call it the terrain, and I can explain what that means. It. Terrain is really the field. It's the the whole internal aspect of a person, but it's also that internal part of someone in the context of the external. So it's the internal and external environment that's really composed of what food you eat, what nutrition is in that food, what's the soil that the food was grown in, what toxicants were put on the soil, what toxicants do you put in your body? What are you putting on your skin? What makeup are you wearing? What's your personal experience? What's your history? What's your family history? What's the impact of your family history on your epigenetics? So what turns your genes on and off? How are you thinking? How have you processed, how do you interface with the world, how do you process the world both, you know, mentally as well as physically. So, you know, everybody's hearing this term, methylation. You know, it's processing.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:34:04]:

It's like, how do I move the different components and the different molecules around? How do I eliminate them? How do I detoxify myself? How well does my liver work and is your digestion, of course. Right? So that history of a person, the experience, all of that is the terrain. It. So that's what we're assessing. That's what we're looking at to help someone see what is broken and how do we help you fix it? How do we help you become whole again from these these fractionated parts of yourself, these alienated parts of yourself, this pain maybe that You can't look at I mean, it's the gamut of it that has to be considered when you're working with somebody in natural medicine. That's the difference.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:50]:

That is helpful context. There there is a lot.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:34:53]:

There's a lot to talk

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:54]:

about. I'm

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:34:55]:

sorry. It's just it. It's so much.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:58]:

So proof in the pudding, you know, take us through, like, a patient comes to you.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:35:04]:

Okay.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:04]:

Right? And how do

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:35:06]:

we do all that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we definitely have a pretty comprehensive process for the sicker folks, the cancer folks. But if you're just a regular person, you know, you got maybe a chronic cough or maybe you have some bloating or maybe you have, you know, PMS or some of the simple stuff is the way I see it. You know, chronic sinus infections, like, things that, you know, it's like a piece of cake. We have you fill out an intake form. We come in and we just take your history.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:35:36]:

And we might, you know, wanna look at blood work if you have some. We might have you get some blood work done, but, by and large, we're just helping you understand yourself in the context of your history and, you know, what interventions had been done in the past. You know? How many vaccines have you had? How many courses of antibiotics have you had? What medications have you taken? You know, where'd you grow up? What's the circumstances of your family? How is your relationship with your parents? Like, that's a question I ask almost all my patients because it's really telling of their world view and their emotional state, that perspective. So I really take that into consideration very deeply, and then we'll give you a plan. And the plan is gonna consist of generally 3 broad sweeping areas. One's gonna be lifestyle.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:28]:

Mhmm.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:36:28]:

So you're looking at food. You're looking at exercise. I call it stillness movement. Stillness is 1 section, movement is another section. Maybe you're looking at, you know, detoxification, what you're putting into your system. You're looking at diet. You're looking at what are you eating. You're looking at your metabolic health.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:36:45]:

You know? How well are you able to burn fat for fuel versus being stuck on burning carbs for fuel, something people don't think about a lot or understand that in the context of mitochondrial function. So that's a big part of what we look at and how we help people know when we gotta support this because that's not working. So all that's really evident in the history that we get, but then we look a little deeper when we need to with objective numbers looking at blood work. And we assess labs in a very different way than just looking at the reference range as the reference range changes from city to city and state to state and year to year depending on the population. So if you have a population getting sicker, You don't wanna be using just your standard reference ranges. You want an optimal range for humans. And we use doctor Nayshia's ranges, the gal that I trained with with cancer because she's, what, 32 years out from a stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis and has been looking at her labs and thousands of patients' labs. And now, of course, I've done the same over the last 7 years of just, I mean, countless, countless, countless people's blood work.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:37:51]:

And you can very clearly see what's happening in the terrain based on their labs. Really useful information because even though I can see what's happening with the person, they may not necessarily believe me, and sometimes people need that validation. They need that kind of objective feedback so that then they can see themselves and understand when it's really important for them to do something about it rather than just somebody saying, hey. You know? Some people are really good listening to to doctors and some people are not. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:25]:

Yep. Well, it's always, I think, a challenge because there's there's a this information asymmetry always between patients and doctors and And how I I like your concept of the the doctor is the teacher, because I I always felt like it should be more like that, in in practice.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:38:41]:

Yeah, you really wanna teach people how to understand themselves and what they need to know about themselves rather than just kinda dictating what they do. I mean, I always say that that era is over. Like, it's a collaborative partnership and how we work with people, you're you're also a part of it as the patient. In fact, I I wrote this whole document that I still haven't put into use it's called the expectations agreement that explains what's our work, what's your work, and what's the work we're gonna do together. And I think that's a really important way to approach someone's own life. You know? Like, I can be your coach and tell you what to do, but it's up to you whether you wanna do it or not. And it's not my responsibility if you don't get well because of what you didn't do when I knew what you needed to do. And, you know, so a big part of that, of course, is trust and the relationship.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:35]:

Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a two way street.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:39:37]:

It's a two way street. Absolutely.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:40]:

So you had mentioned earlier, you know, an uncertainty if If ultimately, in its entirety, you know, the business will will allow you to achieve, you know, maybe what it is that you you want to ultimately achieve. So I would love to just ask, you know, where where are you trying to go? What what does success look like, and and what is the overlap of of those 2 worlds?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:40:01]:

It? Yeah. That's another difficult question that is a little bit of a stumper, but I think there's 2 sides to success for me. One is living my own medicine. Being in my own truth of being able to slow down, be in the present moment, which I like to call power now. You take space time and you get space to power time to now. So power now because there's nothing but the present moment. So if I the more I can remember to do that and just know that I can't control the future. I can only do what I can do right now.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:40:41]:

I can get myself organized. That's success. Success. Right? Yeah. That's that's one side of success, which is maybe my own internal personal success. But In a in a larger context, for me, success would be, you know, achieving my larger dreams. I have a book that I've written that really needs a lot of editing to be a finished product. That's incredibly frustrating to me because it's been almost four 3, 4 years since I really wrote the bulk of that and have not had the time to do it or attend to it or even give the energy to it to get a proper editor to help me.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:41:19]:

I'm trying to figure all that out still. But then another piece of what would be what I would qualify as success is what I've realized in this process over the last 4 years when I keep asking myself, like, what is it that I really wanna focus on? I have I'm a visionary. I have so many dreams. I have so many things that I'd love to see change and happen in this world with respect to this cocreation of a new culture of health care and the world becoming more, you know, valuing indigenous aspects, values of the world, more equity, all those kinds of things, like having a healing center. What's really speaking to me is significantly helping, impacting the epidemic of mental health, what's happened with children being put on Ritalin and Adderall, you know, people abusing not abusing, but, you know, the maybe the doctors others abusing the prescription of antidepressants and people not knowing where to go. Like, it's one of my fortes. It's one of the things that just, you know, it speaks to me so much because I've seen it work with something so simple. Like, I have this program we call the mind body temperament balancing, and it's actually something anybody can do for $150.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:42:33]:

So I'll give you a 3 month program, and you can try it. It's all on my website. But it's something I learned from my mentor, and then I put it in practice for 25 years, and I see, oh my god. Like, this is incredible. Like, you see what happens to people. People who have nightmares, they no longer have nightmares, and all they're doing are some remedies that are matching their consciousness, their condition, their physical state, and it's completely not toxic. So, you know, I can get people off antidepressants and Adderall and Ritalin. Like, when they come to me, they're like, I don't wanna take these things or they don't and they failed in the past trying to get off.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:43:10]:

But, you know, somebody just told me they heard on NPR the other day that the not the suicide rate, but the homicide rate between 15 year olds and 24 year olds has grown by 90%. I mean, that's that's outrageous, And it it breaks my heart because I know that there's a solution. So that's another part of what I'm trying to do right now is to figure out how to take this training of I was thinking initially practitioners or, you know, naturopathic doctors to this other a thing that my mentor taught me that he called the brain protocol. I call it the optimal maturation program, and it. It's one of our private labeled products. We have a brand called Divine Influence, and it's the idea of taking nature as medicine, but the a whole maturation program walks a person through the stages of development Mhmm. Because it's helping to flush out the damages or the traumas or, you know, either physical or iatrogenic or emotional, mental events that left an impression, it helps to flush that out, and it helps to normalize the signaling in the body and the endocrine system. So this is, you know, not what you would conventionally call evidence based.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:44:29]:

It's more something that we observe and we see how people respond to it because it's an energetic medicine.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:36]:

Yeah.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:44:36]:

So it's very, very weird thing and a very difficult thing very difficult thing to sell, but it's experiential. So I have a training course that I'm I did it, like, 7, 8 years ago, and I'm trying to rebrand it with the new languaging of optimal maturation. And And I was thinking I wanna do this for practitioners, but now I realized, like, I really wanna teach this to just anybody who wants to learn it and practice it because it's something that should be in the hands of humanity at this critical time when we don't know how to not use pharmaceuticals for these very serious and very, you know, scary and challenging aspects of what's going on. And it's the beautiful thing is when you address the mind and you use homeopathy, you're also addressing the body,

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:19]:

which is

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:45:20]:

why I call it the mind body temperament balancing because you can't separate mind and body.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:23]:

No. They're Definitely.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:45:24]:

Right? Like, it's we think of them separate, but they're not separate. So getting all of that going and figuring out a way to not just be seeing the doctor 1 1 patient at a time. But being able to train people is one of my big goals.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:39]:

So it's like the a scale concept.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:45:41]:

It's it's a scale concept, I I suppose, but I think that's the part I'm really bad at. And so, you know, it goes back to the whole thing about practicing my craft versus being the business person. So that's been a big part of what this past year has been teaching me is how to get focused. You know, I'm very scattered as a visionary. I've got a lot of ideas and really honing on what are the few things that I wanna focus on and then being able to be efficient and find the time to do it effectively is you know, I'm I'm learning. I'm still maybe a little young, but I feel like I'm old, so it. I'm getting there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:17]:

Yeah.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:46:18]:

Stay in the present moment.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:20]:

What does that experiential treatment what what what does it, like, look like in practice? I'm just trying to

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:46:26]:

Okay. So the so the 2 things I talked about are our healing programs that you can actually do not as a patient. It. Yep. And if you have any issues, I certainly encourage you to come in and let us support you because that's part of us being like a repository and knowing what to do when you get acutely ill. But the 2 healing programs, 1 is essentially just homeopathic medicines that you take once a week. It. There might be a 5 day onboarding, and they're just little, like, sucrose pellets.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:46:55]:

You toss them in your mouth, and you let them dissolve under your tongue, like, once a week. That's literally all that you have to do after you fill out a questionnaire or after you've seen one of us as a patient, and we give you the prescription, if you will, of homeopathic medicines. So that. There's a lot of material about that on my website if anybody wants to read about it. It's a lot to explain, but it's essentially mirroring the energetics of you with substances that came from nature. It was those diluted and potentized substances, homeopathics that I talked about. And then the other half of it is that optimal maturation, which historically was a homeopathic medicine. Now it's made in a little different methodology, but it's essentially, capturing the vibration or the essence of the developmental stages that a person goes through.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:47:47]:

We call them phases, and it's capturing that through the different organs and glands and tissues that develop in sync with one another in each of those phases. So when you put those 2 together, you're dealing with what happens to everybody in development, and you're looking at the individual and how they're unique and special and not homogeneous. Right? So It's really putting the 2 together, and it's it's something that I do in nearly every patient because it's what I learned from my 1st mentor, right, when I graduated from school, the doctor Gamio from he was a he was a medical doctor in France who studied all the holistic rules of thought and was also a very spiritual person. And just put this methodology together, and after doing it, I'm like, it is amazing. So wanted to wanted to scale it, I guess, in another way, and I I think I need some help with marketing. I have I have, like, 3 or 4 people emailing me every single day about marketing, and they know I haven't figured it out yet. But it's coming. Watch out.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:54]:

A Oh, it's it's it's fascinating. Well, one one thing I wanted to ask you about in kind of like a a magical hypothetical world Is, you know, given omniscient power, what would you change about the existing health care system? Wow. And is there, like, any low hanging fruit?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:49:14]:

There's definitely a lot of low hanging fruit, but I when I think about the conventional health care system. I think about it just the way I think about human development. I think about it, you know, as I was talking about all the practices funneling into cancer Mhmm. Because the first practices are layer caking on to something bigger. I think about it developmentally, like, we should take care of the children first. So if I were gonna, you know, be head honcho in the world of health care, I would be working with the children, and I would have the children be working with the soil, and I'd be incorporating, you know, organic agronomists it. And deep soil, my friend has a business named Deep Soil who is an agronomist, and we would work together. We'd help with the farmers.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:50:00]:

And that whole we would reconnect the world of working with earth and working with healing. And I'd probably also, you know, connect to the shamanic world and, you know, again, the indigenous. Like, I always had a calling to the shamanic world. I used to read Carlos Castaneda when I was, like, 16. And I think

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:23]:

Shamanic being shamans.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:50:25]:

Shamans and just, you know, kind of the It's sort of like the western side of the eastern mysticism. Right? Like shamans, you think of like South America, and You think of plant medicine and things like that, but it's also the coming together of, like, the eastern mysticism and the looking within. Like, I'd really bring and bridge those worlds into the world of science and, you know, what we might think of as conventional medicine or or scientific research. Like, that's how I see us. Like, we use that and we use the the traditional science and the empirical knowledge. We put it all together, and we don't separate out a piece of it and leave it hanging. But back to the how would I, you know, work with the health care system. You know, it would be working with the kids and it would also be really reintroducing the philosophy of medicine, which is the the core component of, you know, what we practice as vitalistic naturopathic practitioners is understanding that when you have an acute illness, the acute illness is really the healing crisis.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:51:38]:

So what is a healing crisis? It means your body you, your consciousness, your feeling states resolve something and then you get sick. So I could give you probably 50 examples of how that happens. You know, you're you're a stressed out college student and you take your exams and then you sick. Why does that happen? Well, you were in this high state of stress and then you resolved all your fears and all your anxieties about your exams or your papers, it, and then everything comes out. And instead of looking at that as infection, we think of it as outfection it because what you're really doing is you're clearing your old self. You're clearing that fearful part of yourself. You're resolving something. You're becoming whole again and you're discharging the old you.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:52:23]:

Until the until the medical world understands that, I think we're gonna be really stuck for a really long time because we're we're killing ourselves. When we're taking antibiotic, when we think we have an infection because we think a little bug jumped out from you over to me and made me sick, But we know that the microbiome and the diversity in the microbiome is what makes our immune system stronger.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:44]:

Right. Because, like, fundamental still In in both worlds is is the Hippocratic kind of idea, right, of of do no harm and

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:52:54]:

Well, you would think, but, Unfortunately, I don't think that it's that's another area that's not really put into practice.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:00]:

Right.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:53:01]:

So I'm always asking, when are we gonna reconcile germ theory with the microbiome. When is that happening?

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:08]:

Right. Well, you answered your point earlier about, you know, we used to prescribe mercury and bloodletting and, You know, it's the

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:53:15]:

You know what? The funny thing about that bloodletting, sometimes we do actually tell people to to do what we call a therapeutic phlebotomy. Because if they have too much iron in their blood, it can be really a problem of oxidative stress. So bloodletting in the right circumstance when you've been appropriately assessed if you need it. But I get it what you're saying. It sounds pretty crazy. Leech leeches on a person. But, you know, there is even something to that in Chinese medicine. Like, when there's stagnation in the blood and you need the blood flowing, then they would, you know so I don't know that the bloodletting and the leeches were so bad, although I'm really glad we're not using leeches.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:50]:

Sure. Yeah. What is the role of psychedelics in in in in that going forward?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:53:58]:

Mhmm. So psychedelics are making a huge, huge renaissance. I mean, you'd have living under a rock to not have heard about the renaissance that's happening in the research realm in psychedelics. And, you know, I always have a little bit of a kind of a personal connection, I guess. And this is one of my entrepreneurial stories that I just realized this morning thinking about, you know, coming here and thinking about my entrepreneurial background was that I used to go to Grateful Dead shows. And it's like, you know, everybody who was following the dead, they were all little entrepreneurs it. Because they'd, like, sell they'd set up their booth and they'd, like, sell stuff. You know? They were selling bracelets or they were selling amber, this, like, perfume stuff or they were selling hats or stuff that they made or they were selling LSD.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:54:44]:

Right? And so that was another thing that I got very interested in when I was in high school. And, You know, I was managing my own trauma at the time. So you remember what happened with my mom? Like, I mean, I'm not really ashamed to admit it in a public way because it was a huge influence on my life. It actually led me to my spirituality, to the meditation practice that I've been doing for, what, 32 years or something like that. Meditation on the heart. It's called heartfulness. The psychedelics, I think, our a way for humans to understand that we're more than just this, like, you know, hard matter, this this dense world of physicality, it helps people to open their eyes to understand that we're something so much more than that. And if if we're only thinking about the physical world, I think that's really where we've gone awry in medicine because we're our spiritual beings, our mystical beings.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:55:45]:

And so I think you know, I personally believe these little substances were either left for us, you know, by the great consciousness to be found Yeah. Or, you know, even people have a little bit of a bias against some of the man made psychedelics like LSD. MDMA is not classic psychedelic, but, you know, making huge headway with FDA trials right now. Yep. Tons of research, but people have a bias against the chemical substances. And, you know, I'm like, who are we to say how these things arrived even though they were man made? It was still an accident. You know? And Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD from Ergot, the the rye. Like, he had no idea what it.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:56:31]:

It sat on the shelf for, what, 5, 8 years, something like that before he accidentally got some on his finger and and then ended up having that that historic bicycle ride home.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:41]:

Yep.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:56:43]:

So I think psychedelics are, you know, definitely becoming part. Maybe it's Maybe they're the way that the conventional and the indigenous or the traditional medicine is going to be able to come together because it gives that a truly holistic perspective. So, you know, I'm a big advocate and I don't even think you can call it a believer because You can't argue with somebody's experience. And, you know, it's part of what is real medicine to me. And and at the same time, I think that even then, even with, you know, as amazing as psychedelics are, we have to be very careful and we have to understand that it's not the end all be all. And beyond that is those spiritual practices and the mysticism and coming full circle back to the practice of going within, listening to your inner being, listening to the heart, and the the evolution of consciousness is really something that we're doing with our minds, and we don't really even need the psychedelics ultimately. But, you know, maybe they're resurging right now because humanity is in such a crisis. Does that answer your question?

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:00]:

It does. Yes. Yeah. All all very fascinating. I feel like we we've covered, quite a a breadth of topics. If there is something within your own journey related to the work you're doing, the the practice that that you you have that we haven't talked about yet that that you think is important.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:58:19]:

Well, as I think about what else I think about me being a visionary and all the dreams and all the difficulty that I've had in the last few years finding that focus, I, I have 2 other areas that are really also important to me. So, you know, one, obviously, is my current business. Like, just maintaining the current business, enlisting more awareness for Options Naturopathic, and letting people know that we're there to support them. You know, we really wanna be a world class service organization in the sense that we we provide consultations, we provide information, and we provide a vetted repository of medicine. So herbs, homeopathics, supplements, all those kinds of things. We have an online shop, shop.optionsnaturopathic.com. And I really appreciate people's business for for just, you know, coming and looking at us. We're it's very difficult in this day and age for a naturopathic doctor or even the functional medicine folks to compete with the big big guns, the the big online retailer who must not be named, we might say, right, that just thinking about shopping locally and, you know, coming in and and saying hello and helping us grow.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [00:59:40]:

Like, if there's anything that I've said here today that people resonate with. Like, we'd love your support, and we're horrible marketers. What can we say? Like, you don't know that we're here because we don't know how to get the word out. But I'd love to see options just get better and better at what we do and being able to have the the time to structure the business and grow the business in a very methodical way because we have the bandwidth, the amplitude to do that with respect to having the appropriate revenue to be able to grow. Right? Like, it's very it's difficult to compete in the medical world all alone, and I think we succeed because, you know, being all cash based because what we do works. You you know, people always come in and they say, well, why is this why isn't this everywhere? This makes so much sense. And it's like, well, it's a big competitive world out there, And I think, historically, the the powers that be, the methodology, the viewpoint really succeeded in people not believing in themselves or knowing how to listen to the body and, like, thinking that the doctor had to tell you what to do, and the doctor had to prescribe you a pill. And it was all from, I don't do anything.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:00:50]:

I don't have any accountability. I just take what you give me and it make it go away. And that whole world is changing to something else, so That's what we do. The other half of the big vision piece is I talked about, you know, impacting the realm of mental health and children's crisis with ADHD and and all of that, and what that ends up turning into for people, like, really wanting to make a change and a shift by teaching people how to use these particular tools. And then another piece is having a healing center. A lot of folks in the Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights area where I live are aware that I've had this big vision for the Carmelite Monastery on the corner of Lee and Fairmount, and it's it's owned by a local a developer that has kinda decided to not develop it at this point. So it's just sort of sitting there and it's like sacred land that. The Carmelite sisters lived on for 80 years and they had a double plot garden.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:01:51]:

They have a little fruit orchard. I mean, it's really becoming more rundown. They thought they were gonna tear it down and maybe part of it will need to be torn down, but, I mean, what could be done on that property? Like, I'm looking for other investors or other entrepreneurs or business people who are interested in working with me and doing that because I realized, like, I can't achieve all my dreams. I can't do it all, but I have a really beautiful vision that I've been working on for, like, 7 years for that property, and I've had to it keeps resurfacing and it keeps not going away and they you know, they're not developing it. So I'm just throwing it out there because I've I've got a lot of really amazing ideas that kind of bring together everything that we've talked about here, you know, everything we've talked about here for that one particular location, but, you know, I'm not a real estate developer. I'm not even certain that I'm, you know, cut out for owning real estate. That's not really what I'm after. I'm just I'm wanting to provide what is needed for humanity, for the people.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:02:56]:

It. I wanna give back in that way and be of service. I spent my life. You know? My whole this is my life's purpose, my life's mission, and it. It's so clear to me that all that happened to me when I was young is part of what I'm meant to do. So I just gotta keep doing it and remembering to be in the present moment. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:17]:

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Erin, for coming on and Sharing your story with with all

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:03:24]:

of us. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be given the opportunity to have a voice and to speak to so many of these things that are so near and dear to my heart. So I really appreciate you asking me to come on.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:38]:

Absolutely. I'll ask you our, traditional closing question

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:03:41]:

Yes.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:42]:

Which is for your favorite hidden gem in Cleveland, something that other folks May not know about, but but perhaps should.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:03:49]:

Oh my goodness. There's so many great things about Cleveland. I feel like Cleveland in and of itself is the hidden gem that, like,

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:57]:

how great it is to live here, because

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:03:59]:

the cost of living will go up. So Cleveland in and of itself, I just you know, I've moved away from Cleveland no less than 3 times in my life, and then I keep coming back here. So Cleveland, but if I had to pick, can I say a couple places?

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:13]:

Oh, absolutely. Okay.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:04:14]:

Well, I think one is, of course, options. Options not to breath. They're like, my little baby. I think people need to come and check us out above Luna in Cleveland Heights. And then there's the Shaker Lakes Nature Center, which I think is an incredible little gem right there that was saved from the interstates in the sixties, that little Doan Brook, you know, Horseshoe Lake all the way down to lower lake and the nature center in between is just such a gift. I'm a big fan of nature, obviously. And then there's that a place at the end of MLK. I don't know the name of it, but they, like, dredged the Cuyahoga, and they took all the what they dredged and they dumped it there at the end of MLK, and it's like a whole bird sanctuaries, like a park and a walking area, and most people don't know about it, and I don't even know what it's called.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:04:59]:

Yeah. But there's almost never anybody there, and you can, like, go birdwatching there, and there's a beautiful little vista of the of downtown when you get out to the edge of it. Do you know the name of that place?

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:10]:

Not not by name, but I do have a sense where, geographically, it is, but I don't know what it's called.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:05:16]:

There's another place that I haven't actually been to yet, what I'm really excited about, and it's a new little nonalcoholic cocktail bar in Hingetown named Verbena. It. And I talked to this woman about the monastery, like, a year ago, and here she's already opened a place in Hingetown. She was at the Nature Center last week, and, oh my god, like, making interesting drinks out of herbs and different exotic flavors, but no alcohol, I'm like, this is my jam. I gotta go check this place out.

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:49]:

That's awesome.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:05:50]:

It. I love putting plugs out for other local business owners. I think I've mentioned, like, 3 or 4. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:55]:

You got a few. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, if people had anything they wanted to, Follow-up with you about it. What's the best way for them to do so?

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:06:02]:

Well, I would say my website, optionsnaturopathic.com, and there's all kinds of ways to reach out to us there. I mean, I'm on I'm not very good with social media right now and, you know, kind of comes in fits and starts, but we have, you know, Instagram page and it. I'm on LinkedIn, and I have my own, like, kind of personal little Instagram page, doctor erin_ metaphysician that I've started. But I'm, I'm not I'm not a millennial, so, like, the social media piece for me and just haven't quite figured out how to really get that all going. But I'll I'll be there, and I'll be there in the future. Maybe by the time somebody hears this, it'll all be exploding on there. Who knows. Who knows? Who knows what the future holds?

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:47]:

Yeah. Well, thank you again.

Dr. Erin Singh (Options Naturopathic) [01:06:49]:

Thank you so much, Jeffrey. Appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:53]:

That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an to Jeffrey at lay of the land dot f m or find us on Twitter at pod lay of the land or at sternjefe, j e FE. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on tunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.