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The former Kaiwaka Ambulance Station will continue to serve the health and wellbeing needs the community when it becomes the home to a new Kaiwaka Health Collective.
The collective comprises a diverse range of alternative health practitioners, including naturopaths, life coaches, spiritual healers, kinesiologists, harmonyum specialists, psychotherapists and more.
The collective will kick off with an open day and market on Sunday, November 10 where visitors can learn more about the services on offer, take advantage of a massage and purchase natural health and body products.
The collective came about when naturopath Cherie Gwilliam went to take a look at the old ambulance station as a possible venue for her own health practice.
While there, she bumped into a couple of other health practitioners on the same errand. That led to a meeting with still more practitioners, who decided that rather than be in competition with each other, it made sense to form a collective and work together to benefit the community.
Ms Gwilliam says by working together the collective can offer an extremely wide range of treatments, which can assist patients with almost any condition.
She anticipates common issues the collective will deal with will include nutrition, allergies, cancer, diabetes, fertility, addictions and digestive complaints.
Other conditions the collective will treat will be more psychological in nature and include depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, spirituality and communication issues.
As well as offering consultations with individual practitioners, the collective will also offer free community talks once a month on different topics and the opportunity for attendees to discuss things that are troubling them.
Some of these sessions will be aimed at youth – giving them space to talk about what is on their mind and to ask questions.
“We are passionately concerned about the high suicide rate in our country, and we are interested in how we can help people see things in a better light and show them how to enjoy a healthier lifestyle,” Ms Gwilliam says.
There will also be practical workshops on things like cooking and soap making.
Ms Gwilliam says a key feature of alternative health therapies is their holistic and integrated approach.
“We look at the patient’s lifestyle, their diet and their emotional stability – the whole picture – because it’s all inter-related and most of the body systems are interrelated,” she says.
“For example, if you find somebody suffering from insomnia and digestive issues, it’s mostly likely they are also having high stress in their life.”
Ms Gwilliam says she finds most conventional medical practitioners are open to alternative therapies, especially if they have reached a stalemate with a patient who has perhaps been on, say, thyroid or cholesterol medication for years and has shown no improvement. Alternative therapies provide a new range of treatment options including herbal medicine, homeopathy, massage and relaxation techniques.
At the same time, Ms Gwilliam acknowledges the benefits of conventional medicine, saying antibiotics and modern surgery have certainly prolonged people’s lives.
“I think GPs are limited with some of the stuff they can do, and we are limited with some of the stuff we can do. But if we work together, we can expand our toolbox of things we can do to help the patient,” she says.
“I think this is the way of the future. Putting people’s egos aside and focusing on what is best for the patient.”
Info: Kaiwaka Health Collective on Facebook
