As a youth, many of us were having the time of our lives being couch potatoes and eating up a storm of junk food. As an adult, many of us have a hectic lifestyle, spend hours on the job, hardly ever get eight hours of restful sleep, pop pills and rush to the doctor for a prescription as soon as we feel a virus coming on and push our bodies to the limit. Living healthy and working out regularly is probably just a worn-out, tired resolution you bring out every year on New Year’s
Day and discard two days later. Sherene Ramtahal however, is nothing like this.
She is the epitome of health and avoids the side effects of conventional medications like the plague. Her passion is to get people off all the medications they are on, which she does through naturopathic medicine.
Ever since she can remember, Sherene has had a keen interest in illnesses, health and wellness. She has always believed that there are natural remedies for every illness, that the body could fight the common cold on its own, and that the side effects of conventional medication just were not worth it. By age 13, she already had a gym membership and employed a healthy lifestyle. Today, this petite, pretty and bubbly 29 year old practices naturopathic medicine.
After secondary school, Sherene was looking at medical school and stumbled upon natural medicine. “I typed in natural medicine (in the search bar) just to see if there was something out there and there were all these sites. Then I discovered my school and I did the research on it and it was the perfect fit,” she says.
She then left Trinidad at age 19 and flew to Canada to study naturopathic medicine. After four years at the University of Western Ontario to pursue an undergraduate degree and another four years at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine (CCNM), Sherene returned home to start her practice in her hometown of St. Joseph village in San Fernando.
Usually at CCNM, interns don’t go into specialities like the medical doctors, but instead practice family medicine; thus, she had to go into private practice. There isn’t really availability in the hospitals locally for naturopathic doctors – another reason she had to start out on her own.
“At first business was a bit slow because people here are not aware of naturopathic medicine. Through the little marketing that I did, I was able to accumulate some patients and through word of mouth, I’ve gotten most of my patients,” Sherene explains.
Today, she has a good retention of clients. They come back and they bring their family members and friends.
Even with the skepticism in the medical field (and in general for natural medicine which may stem from just not understanding it), the negativity has not reached Sherene thus far. In fact, she works alongside a medical doctor in Barry Crescent, Chaguanas to help diabetic patients.
“Whenever the medical doctor sees patients that can benefit from what I do, and who are willing, he will call me and I will go,” she says.
The response has been very positive and she has been getting very good results.
“He discovered some new cases of diabetes and he wanted to see how I would treat it naturally. So we didn’t put them on the conventional medicine, and we just did diet and lifestyle and a couple of botanical and their blood sugar went right down.”
At her own practice, she meets patients after they have met their medical doctor and been diagnosed. Then they bring their lab work, blood work and scans and she develops a treatment method for them. She treats the same conditions conventional doctors treat, but does so with different methods. Her way includes natural therapies such as botanical medicine or herbs, homeopathic medicine, acupuncture or Asian medicine, massage therapy, clinical nutrition, and lifestyle counselling.
Instead of pacifying the symptoms of illnesses, she finds the root cause of the problem and prevents further harm. She is on the path to help Trinidadians lead healthier lifestyles overall.
“Trinidadians are on so many medications; for diabetes, for cholesterol, for hypertension just to name a few. Just with simple changes in diet and lifestyle, you could overcome these things and not have to take all these prescription meds and not have to deal with all the side effects.”
To get the message out there, Sherene hopes to get the forum soon where she can educate the public about staying healthy through lifestyle changes and natural medicine, especially the schools so that people can start living healthy from a young age.
“I would just like to see naturopathic medicine grow to its full potential in Trinidad. It’s so prevalent in the States, Canada and Europe and its accepted there, I would really like to see it accepted here amongst all the health care professionals, for everyone to be aware of what the medicine can do and how the medicine can work with you.”
