[Want to help your family live a more natural lifestyle? Here are some simple tips to help you embark on your holistic health journey!]
It started with a choice.
It felt as though I had reached a fork in the road, and my intuition was telling me to take the road less traveled.
This was my first meaningful decision as a mom, and my baby wasn’t even born yet.
This small step helped lead me down the path to natural wellness and self care.
The choices we make as moms are many.
They can vary from everyday choices to bigger more challenging, up all night decisions.
Self care is taking care of the whole you. Body. Mind. And Soul.
So the choices you make on your wellness journey, even the tiny ones are a part of your self care.
Are you ready to feel more empowered in the area of your and your family’s health and wellness journey? Taking care of your health is an important part of your self care in this episode of the Soul Care Mom Podcast. I talk with Scott Manduck about holistic health and the importance of empowering yourself and tuning into yourself on your natural health journey.
There is no one right path for everyone, and I hope this chat empowers you to tune into your own needs and not only find what works best for you. but allow yourself to always be open and curious so you can create a flexible wellness plan that helps you and your family to thrive on your natural wellness journey.
Click the play button below or keep reading to discover the steps you can take to move forward on your natural wellness journey and learn about the first big decision I had to make on my motherhood journey.
[Disclaimer: We are not health professionals. This chat is solely based on research and personal experience.If you have any concerns, please seek out the help of your trusted health professionals.]
[Please Note: This post may contain affiliate links. This means that Soul Care Mom may receive a small commission if you click through and make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. Please see disclaimers for more information.]
Catherine Wilde
Hi, Beautiful Mama. Welcome to the Soul Care Mom Podcast.
I’m Catherine Wilde of soulcaremom.com. I’m a mom of three amazing kids. I’m a Soul Care Mom Coach and yoga and meditation teacher. I have helped hundreds of women, and I’m here to help you feel calm and find your unshakable confidence as a mom. Think of this as a lunch date with a girlfriend. Grab a cup of tea and get cozy. It’s time to get honest and vulnerable and shift the traditional mindset around motherhood.
Be sure to subscribe to be the first to know when new episodes are released. Get ready to grow and feel empowered as a mom, I’m here for you, Mama. Let’s dive in.
Catherine Wilde
Hi, Scott, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today.
Scott Manduck
Catherine, thanks for having me on the show. This is amazing.
Catherine Wilde
You shared with me that your holistic health journey began with some health challenges that your family was facing. Could you share more about that journey with this?
Holistic Health Journey
Scott Manduck
Sure.
Well, it’s been a long journey. It’s been it’s been just over nine years. And with that, just to give you a little background on myself, is I was not in holistic health care before this. I’ve had my own printing and marketing business for many, many years that work with fairly large companies like Disney and Google and Microsoft and stuff like this all my life. So I didn’t I did not have the background of the holistic way. My mom worked at a hospital so very Western and then my wife that I met 20 years ago, she was also in Western medicine.
So she was an ultrasound technician or sonographer, as lot of people call them. And just over nine 1/2 years ago, it kind of started wit with sonographers or ultrasound techs ta sore shoulderhey typically have bad shoulders, neck pain and stuff like that just because of the awkward in odd positions that they’re in for long periods of time throughout the day. So obviously, with a sore shoulders or neck and stuff like that came some chronic pain with that. So it started with that just under 10 years ago.
But it really started triggering a lot of other symptoms within her body, which we did not know what they were. And that is where the the journey really began to figure out what was going on. Some of the symptoms, just to give you an idea. You know when you sleep on your arm and when your arms coming out of that sleepiness, if you will? Which means there’s no blood going to that extremity. It’s very painful, for your whole arm, because the blood is now going through, right?
Catherine Wilde
Yes.
Scott Manduck
So that pain is what my wife has been feeling for the past probably, seven years because she hasn’t had in a while like that. But it was seven years from the top of her head to her toes. Her entire body was like that.
Catherine Wilde
Wow.
Scott Manduck
So that is one of the symptoms that we’re trying to figure out what that is. And we’ve seen neurologists, obviously MRI’s, CAT scans, all these sort of wonderful things, especialty doctors all over.
So we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars trying to figure out what was happening with that. And then eye pressure, headaches, migraines, it kept on going down to chronic pain in her back, her feet, her pelvic area. It was just going all over to the point where about seven years ago, she could barely walk up the flight of stairs. She would step up one stair, pause with two feet. Use the other foot to get up, pull yourself up one stair wait. Get up to the next stair and wait.
And it was it was just it was it was just heart wrenching to watch my wife, who at the age of forty-three, could barely walk up a flight of stairs and thinking that it was cancer, this or that or whatever. We did all those tests and all of it came back negative.
So like, OK, what the heck are we dealing with? And so we just kept on going through different Western medicine ways. Then we started going into holistic, so chiros, massage, acupuncture, Chinese teas, you name it.
Scott Manduck
And nothing was really clicking, nothing was really sticking. So we turned to a few things, Dr. Google and Dr. Facebook, as I like to call them now.
And so we went we kept on going down that rabbit hole. So what we did is we found this book by Dr. Amy Myers and the book is called “The Autoimmune Solutions” and the reason why I’m bringing this up, because it was kind of a pivotal point for my wife, being a stay at home mom at that point because she wasn’t able to work with all the pain we turned to food and food was a big part of our journey to start the journey.
The kick in the pants, if you will, that we needed and that book gives your body and gives you the understanding of what food does to your body from an inflammation standpoint. So obviously we all know that sugar is bad for us. That’s obviously a no brainer. So it’s going to be the sugar is the caffeine gluten and stuff like that for a certain time period. And then you can slowly introduce certain things back to see how your body reacts.
So with that book that within a month, literally thirty days almost to the day, we reduced my wife’s inflammation by ninety five percent.
Catherine Wilde
Oh, that’s amazing.
Which is to me, it’s one of those things being not in medicine at the time or holistic health care or know what I know now that’s a big deal. Because there are so many different diets out there, like the keto diet and all this other stuff. But they’re not a sustainable diet for someone to live on a long period of time. That’s what we found. Wthere aree tried them. It just doesn’t work. And that’s our personal opinion.
Scott Manduck
This book, there’s so many different options for you to look at. And it’s not saying that you can eat meat or only eat meat or any of this sort of stuff. Everyone’s body is different. And that is the one thing that we learned with diet is everyone’s genetic makeup at the cellular level, wants and needs different things and we need to pay attention to that. So once we reduced the inflammation, we’re finding that she was still having some symptoms of inflammation.
So it’s like what, we reduce the inflammation because we did test for it. And what we found within that is there are things called oxalates and oxalates show as the form as inflammation within your body is the same type of symptoms, which is sore joints and stuff like that.
And what we found when we talked to nutritionists that Alon didn’t understand or know what Oxalate were. And at a very short point of view of it is stuff that seems to be healthy, like tomatoes, kale, uncooked broccoli, legumes, almonds and stuff like this.
These are very high oxalate foods. But if you’re in chronic pain and chronic illness stage where your body is in fight or flight mode, I urge you to look into these sort of things. Just go into Google type in “high oxalate foods”.
Once we started to do that, that was like a whole set of like she was able to walk up the flight of stairs.
Catherine Wilde
Wonderful.
Scott Manduck
So she still had some other issues with some bacteria and stuff that we’re finding in her blood through some blood tests analysis that we’re doing.
So we’re trying to figure out what that was and doing more research within Google. We came across an actual ad and it had to do with your teeth. I was like, all right, so with your teeth, your teeth are like your breakers to your body. And a lot of people don’t realize that as we did. And low and behold, my wife had a root to root canal done about six years ago now, just over six years ago now.
Scott Manduck
And there’s a we did X-rays after X-rays and different dentists. Three different dentists, I think ended up being at the end. And they found that there’s nothing wrong with the two root canals.
But we found this documentary in the documentary at the time was on Netflix, which then it was pulled off Netflix within about six months because the dental association was ended up getting in some deep water with it is that documentary was pretty much my wife’s journey literally to a dime. It was quite humorous and funny and scary all in one.
And what it is, is that when you get a root canal done, they obviously take the roots out and then they put in screws and they have a cap. So at the end of that screw, they leave a little gap.
Scott Manduck
And that gap is a breeding ground for bacteria because it’s hot and moist constantly in your mouth. Those two teeth that were affected have a direct correlation and link to her liver, which she was unable to detox anything because those two teeth had bacteria growing at the end of them.
So that was found because of that documentary that we found. So we had them holisticly removed. And that night she was able for the first time to have a night’s sleep with no eye pressure migraines, headaches and stuff like that, which was a massive, big thing for us, because when you can’t sleep, your body can heal.
It’s scary in a lot of people are having that. So it sounds really weird to figure out if you have got chronic pain and the scan is called a cone scan. So if you are having some kind of issues, chronic pain, chronic illnesses and stuff like that, get this cone scan done. It is covered. If you’re in Canada, if you’re in the United States, it’s obviously you got to pay for it.
Scott Manduck
But it is literally life changing. And that was a big kick to us towards more holistic healing because we had to get a holistic way because a normal dentist would just pull them out and all the bacteria from those two root canals basically would have went into her body.
So from those two teeth being in Canada, we were not able to do a biopsy and literally I call it a biopsy because that’s what they called it and it just sounds funny of our of the two teeth were pulled.
Scott Manduck
So we had to send them to the states as being Canada. And we paid the seven hundred bucks to get the biopsy. We found 16 different types of bacteria attached to those two teeth. Unbelievable. So now we know that she has all types of bacteria in her body.
We then obviously start on a journey of trying to detox all these different types of bacteria. And a lot of the bacteria that were labeled in there have the symptoms of the chronic pains that she was dealing with, with the eye pressure, with the joint pain as well.
So it’s compounded on top of all the other things that we’re working on. So with that comes auto immune disease, leaky gut. And when your immune system is compromised, your body goes into fight or flight mode, therefore, your body can’t heal.
So when your body can heal, you have a hard time meditating. You can’t meditate. When your body’s at that in that kind of a state. Your mind just can’t quite itself. And that is we spoke to tons of healers around the world, tons. And it’s just unbelievable.
And going through that, we ended up coming across. A friend of ours introduced us to part of that journey of finding different types of spiritual healers to help her be able to quiet her mind enough to be able to heal herself.
Literally. We came across a friend of ours that introduced us to essential oils. So me being a skeptical person by nature, I’m like, what the heck are these snake oils?
And I don’t need this stuff in our house. We need proper medicine. And then I’m thinking, well, why am I saying this? Because right now, all the other things that we’ve done haven’t done anything. We found all these solutions on our own.
I was like let’s just try it. And the box sat there for a few months, didn’t really dig into it. And then there’s this one night, which is kind of the pivotal point literally in our holistic journey that I will never forget, because that’s where I really jumped on board two feet in the swimming pool in the deep end.
Essential Oils for Natural Health
Scott Manduck
It was around 11 o’clock at night, 11 thirty. And I’m watching a movie just the other day. My wife’s upstairs jumping out of the bath and I hear some crying. So I come upstairs and my wife is on the floor in our bedroom in a fetal position, bawling her eyes out in pain. Obviously, I’m freaking out right now at that point and I’m like I’m going to call 911. Every second matters is what I’m thinking in my mind. And we had some essential oils on our bedside table with some carrier oil there.
So I just grabbed the bottle with carry oil squirted into my hand and went all over me all over the floor. I put some lemongrass, I put some lavender. That’s what was there. And from what I was told my wife previously that I actually remembered, thank God that that sort of stuff helps with muscle and nerve type support issues. So I was rubbing that all at her belly and I’m sitting there for another maybe 15, 20 seconds that felt like hours.
And she looked at me like, OK, it’s past. I’m like, what past? Like, what the heck are you talking about? And I’m like, so I’m going to try and make light of it.
And she’s said, “no, the pain’s gone”. So at that point, me not being the scientist or the biologist, understanding what essential oils were, I started drilling her with questions, which I probably shouldn’t have but I did. And she started telling me a little bit more about them.
I literally spent the next week researching on what essential oils, how they work, how they help the body. Put your body in a position to heal itself literally, and how they work in our bodies and behold, I found the power of essential oils that you putting the proper essential oils. Therapeutic grade in essential oils in this matter on your skin, breathing them in.
Within 20 seconds it reaches the brain cells. Literally within two minutes, it’s in your blood. Within 20 minutes, it’s in every cell in your body. So knowing that information we really dug into doing. We spend probably another that month, probably about six hundred bucks, which wasn’t a lot at the time, knowing that we spent trying to get her back to where she was when all these different oils, we spoke with a lot of different people to figure out what I could do to help support my wife.
Scott Manduck
So using that to basically cleanse and make sure that we didn’t have any bacteria going into our mouth. So using clove and all these different oils and frankincense and all these different types of essential oils to help her body heal and to boost her immune system, we found her body was able to start to heal itself.
Her liver started to work better. She was able to detox and actually see the detox coming through her skin. So she was taking some charcoal as well to help binde the toxins in her body to help detox.
And we actually started for the first time in a week. After that, we started seeing the toxins being released in her body. And you can see her starting to have more energy, be able to have a conversation, to be able to remember things because her memory was gone.
And I shouldn’t say her memory was gone. It was lax. She has a hard time remembering things, which is not like her. And we just started doing protocols on her literally every second day we went to a clinic which teaches you how to layer essential oils for different ailments. And there’s many different ailments that we can help support now that I know that. And we started doing that and. That was a big part of the essential journey.
And because of that, she is now playing badminton. As of yesterday, we were playing basketball. She’s riding a bike.
And stuff like that, she’s not one hundred percent better, that is for sure, but she’s in a much better position now than what she was.
Catherine Wilde
Hi, Beautiful Mama!
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Let’s get back to the episode.
Scott Manduck
What is the most here’s a trick question for you. What is the most polluted place in the world?
Your house. Right, and most people go. How is that possible?
Look at grab every cleaning solution that you use within your household. When I say that what do you use to clean your floors, your counters, your sinks, your stove, your fridge, your dishes, your laundry detergent, your shampoo, your conditioner, you, too, your toothpaste, your mouthwash?
Scott Manduck
Look at all these items and look on the back of them and see a lot of the stuff, like the long description of the back of those bottles and what’s in them.
And what you find is these are toxins to our body. So your body will naturally take those toxins in and naturally try to detox them, right? That is what our bodies are made to do. It’s made to absorb and detox stuff on it were made to heal ourselves
Catherine Wilde
Yes.
Scott Manduck
But if your body is dealing with ailments for a long period of time, it can be massive headaches, psoriasis, eczema, migraines, it can be, you name the ailment.
It doesn’t matter what it is if you start to eliminate the known toxins in your life, which are those chemicals, which is actually very easy to actually grab a natural product, which is a vinegar and water in a couple of drops of essential oils, you can now clean your entire house.
Everything in your house can be clean with those. It’s actually a fraction of the cost. It’s better for the environment. And it’s a billion times better for you. Right.
Scott Manduck
So if you’re dealing with chronic illnesses and chronic things, that is the very first thing I do. What is it’s costing a fortune. Implement natural products. Right. So my wife was, like I said, to stay at home mom.
She’s amazing. So going through all this and I’m obviously I’m working with my business, so I’m trying to bring in a bit of money for us to survive. And she needs to now try to find ways to do these things. When I get home and try to help clean and make dinner and all this or prep lunches and all the sort of stuff. But these are easy tools for our stay at home moms and dads, for that matter, to really look at.
Scott Manduck
And you will find a huge shift in your health very quickly just by doing that one step alone.
Catherine Wilde
I totally agree.
We there’s so much added stress on our bodies and using more natural products can help alleviate some of that and support our bodies healing.
And I think that’s an amazing journey that you shared. My first steps into natural health was when I was pregnant with my first daughter and I had every intention of going the conventional path and giving birth in a hospital with an O.B. But there was something that was just a little bit off for us. I had a healthy pregnancy and OB was very talented at her job, but each visit felt rather impersonal and I would only see my actual OB every other visit for about ten minutes or so.
And when I had a question, I felt like I was a nuisance, but I was like, Oh, this is my first baby, this is just how it goes. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was really blessed to have a good friend who had gone through the experience of pregnancy a few times. And she helped me to process what I was feeling. She helped guide me to seek other options, which was something I didn’t even think of.
Catherine Wilde
I didn’t think like, oh, I can choose who I talk to and who I work with. And so we began interviewing health professionals to figure out who we wanted to work with and who best fit our needs. And that led us to an amazing midwife who empowered us to educate ourselves. And she answered every single question and we ended up choosing to have a home birth. And so, I mean, it was an amazing journey.
And I really appreciate the medical system. But I also felt so empowered to be able to understand my body better, my needs better. And that’s an amazing feeling. And I can see the process that you guys went through to figure out what you need and to think outside the box a little bit and empower yourself to be curious and learn.
Scott Manduck
And that’s exactly it, be curious. Don’t accept no as an answer. Don’t give up because you have your best interest at heart. You in your own mind, if you will, because I think it’s only you that you’re dealing with what you’re dealing with. Right.
Your husband or your wife depends on who is what. They’re there to support you, but they don’t know one thousand percent what you’re dealing with on the inside. So you need to be that. You need to be your own shining light.
Unfortunately, in this particular case, this is just a question of saying this is not right. I need more answers. What else can I do? And don’t give up until you’re until you feel satisfied. To me, that is why. You have a support system, and I say that is because if you’re dealing with chronic pain, whatever it may be, and even for you to make that decision that you made, which was phenomenal, is you made it together with obviously your husband because it’s the best scenario for you.
And reach out to your husband or your wife or your best friend or your aunt or mom or dad or whoever maybe. Just ask questions because everyone has their own journeys and their own connections and own little network, and they may know something that can put you on a journey to health and like you did. You need to ask those questions.
And look, what happened was phenomenal.
Simple Natural Wellness Tips
Catherine Wilde
And it can also be so overwhelming to know where to start when you’re when you’re pivoting on your journey. One of the biggest struggles for me personally was I was really content with going with the norm, you know, and following the quote unquote rules. So when I started to feel a pull towards something different and things that weren’t necessarily new, like essential oils and things like that, or, you know, working with a midwife or going to a chiropractor, they weren’t new, but they were off the beaten path or what I was used to and I had to do in internal and intentional work around that.
Catherine Wilde
And you were talking about that where ideas that were coming across your path were unfamiliar and you felt skeptical around them. But so I had to do work around the idea that I was doing something that I wasn’t supposed to do. And I had to allow myself to let go of what others would think and give myself the freedom to kind of figure out what I needed and what was truly needed for my family to thrive. And it was a challenging but also really freeing process.
Catherine Wilde
So do you have any tips on that like mindset when you’re exploring a new way of living or venturing away from conventional wisdom?
Scott Manduck
Absolutely. A big part of it once again is you need to try different things because your body makeup and your cellular structure is very different from everyone else around you. Even if it is your brother or sister went through something very similar. It could be very different on how you treat that particular thing.
So the first thing that I would always do is look at your immediate surroundings. What can you do to better your situation to give your body the best possible chance of healing itself? When you do that, that means less chemicals are going into your body, less medications, which medications are good for a lot of things.
Scott Manduck
Right. And but they also have side effects, like look at all the commercials that we see on TV these days. Yes, this one pill can help you with your migraines, but there’s four minutes or three minutes or a minute of all these side effects of that one pill. Right. So we need to find a way to get back to natural wellness. And a lot of people don’t know is a lot of the medications out there in the world they all stem from Mother Nature. They all stem from an essential oil of some sort. Right.
And if people understood that, that the medications that they’re taking, the most powerful part in that drug is typically the part coming from Mother Nature of whatever form that may be. And then they’re adding these other things onto it to get it approved so they can patent it so they can make their billions of dollars. That’s what we need to get back to get back to the root of that, what that is.
Scott Manduck
And that’s Mother Nature. Right. And I’m not saying that just because is we went through it. Right? We went through all those different medications, it put a huge Band-Aid on top of an open wound and the wound just got bigger and it absorbed that Band-Aid.
And now what? Now we’re we’re six years in and we’re like, what the heck are we going to do? So once again, get rid of those chemicals in your house, because it doesn’t cost you to do that.
Scott Manduck
Right. You can find natural wellness and natural clean stuff around you. That’s very easy. And then from there, look at inflammation in your body.
That there is a simple thing you need to buy food no matter what you are, what state you’re in, wherever you are in the world. You can always look at the fuel that you’re putting in your body, which is food, and get rid of the toxins. And you can actually start your healing process with that.
Then I highly recommend going with essential oils and their supplementation, their enzymes and their probiotics, because that’s going to bring your body back to a baseline to where it can start to self heal. And when you get to that point of view. Then you can really start fine tuning what those other ailments are that are presenting themselves and understand the root cause of those ailments and start going getting after them.
Catherine Wilde
I coach moms to create a self care practices that help them to live their best life, in all of the areas of their lives. But I would love to know as a dad, how do you practice self care?
Scott Manduck
It took me a while because being a dad, being a dude, being a man is very different because most dads, most men are not into the realm with their kids. And I see this like I said, I work in my industry. Women usually have that driving force in the household. And I commend them because that’s adding on top of the job that they typically have, plus also help with the parenting.
So I’m not saying that not a lot of the dads are not doing that. I’m just saying that is the that is pretty much the standard which I’m seeing. So that being said is it took me a while to take that grace because. It took me a little while, and the question that my wife asked me, which I’ll never forget, was “How much do you spend on yourself in self care?” What the heck does that mean?
I got to go to the dentist. What are you talking about? Outside the dentist and outside the normal family doctor. “What do you spend on yourself for natural wellness?”
Scott Manduck
I have no idea. I had to think about that question. I was like, that’s a tough question. She said, “Well you spend money on the house in the sense of fixing that paint job and the trim and the floors and the new balcony, hot tub, your truck.” I said, “Yeah, those are all these things like.”
Said said, “But you’re not spending any of that money on yourself. And without you, all those things are meaningless.”
Scott Manduck
I thought, that’s a good point. So what does that mean? And I took it personally. I took a little bit of supplements, but I didn’t take the ones that it should have been taking.
So now it’s kind of a flip where. Some of the honey-do list gets slacked a little bit. And I’m doing more wellness on myself. I take supplements, I take probiotics, I take enzymes to help with digestion. And the food that I am taking is that allow us to absorb better.
I wasn’t a big person at the time. I was one hundred eighty-five hundred ninety pounds and now one hundred and seventy pounds. But I’m much healthier from the inside out and I stretch more, play more sports.
I’m an athletic person as it is, but I take more time to do that. And I eat much better wear before going to McDonald’s or whatever may be.
So now I don’t do that. I plan for it a little bit and take a little bit of a wrap, or whatever it may be, in the truck with me and the way we go if I’m in a rush.
So I am taking more time to myself to try to self-heal and self-maintenance, if you will. And that’s a big part of it that I should have asked myself that question many years ago that I didn’t.
Oh, it’s it’s a wonderful thing to start whenever you realize that. Right? And when you do find any way when I do take care of myself, I have more energy to do all the other things that I need to do. So it’s totally worth the investment in yourself.
Scott Manduck
For sure.
Catherine Wilde
Where can you tell us where we can find you online?
Scott Manduck
Absolutely. You can go to scottmanduck.com. That’s probably the easiest. That’s a little bit of the story that I was telling today. Facebook page and just go to Scott Manduck is my handle and Facebook.
Catherine Wilde
Well, thank you, Scott.
Scott Manduck
Thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for joining me, Mama. I’m over here giving you a big virtual hug. I love spending this time with you. You are amazing for showing up and carving out this space to nourish your soul.
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