Medical Freedom is not saying we do not need our doctors or medicine. We personally love our pediatrician, and am very grateful for the many benefits and advances medicines have provided for our family and others we know. But what it is to our family is just simply having the ability to have open conversations with our health care providers, being able to ask them questions regarding our bodies, our health and our options. It's about being empowered to read books and articles written by a wide range of experts with wide range of perspectives on different topics, so that we can be informed when having discussions with our health care providers. Each person is uniquely created and different which is why what works for one family may not look the same for another. Most decisions in life are not a one size fits all.
I am going to share a few ways our family has made decisions to be a little more empowered, but like all things, we need to understand we each have to evaluate our individual needs and take steps that work best for us and at a pace that works best for us.
You may want to consider if you would prefer to look at what products you use most or work on options room by room. We pretty much started going room by room, with that first stop being in our kitchen.
That looked like....
- switching fruits & veggies to organic (less pesticides sprayed)
- switching fruits & veggies to organic (less pesticides sprayed)
- reading ingredients on everything (sometimes that meant while shopping kid free & sometimes that meant after we already purchased it but keeping in mind which brands / items we would not get next time.)
As far as which ingredients to eliminate or reduce in our diet we broke it up into 1 ingredient each week.
week 1: no high fructose corn syrup
week 2: no soy
week 3: cut hydrogenated oils
week 4: cut dyes
week 5: cut nitrates from meat
week 6: eliminated sugary drinks
week 7: cut GMO's
This is just where we started and worked for us.
Did you know the top 10 most dangerous chemicals in our home include air fresheners (candles, plug-ins, wax burners) + cleaning supplies (includes soap)+ beauty / personal care supplies?! The average woman applies 300 chemicals to her body a day - 80 before breakfast. As a girl mama I find this alarming. Who would've ever realized that 26 seconds after exposure to a toxic ingredients (many that fill our homes), that those chemicals would be found in measurable amounts throughout our body! It's stats like that that caught my attention and made me want to take small actions in our home.
Our next step was household cleaners kept in our kitchen because daily we are wiping down counters, high chairs, the table we eat from, the toilets we use multiple times a day, to the tubs we shower / bathe in. Before we were using products we lock up from our children yet expose them to, not realizing they eat off those surfaces, bathe in those tubs, walk / crawl on those floors and even breathe those things in.
After the cleaners we swapped out our air fresheners like Glade plug-ins, FreBreeze sprays, dryer sheets & candles for a few diffusers & grade A therapeutic essential oils from Young Living. As for the air sprays there are great DIYs that just include a glass spray bottle, a few drops of essential oils & water.
In the kitchen we also swapped out plastics for stainless steal, glass and food grade silicone. We haven't swapped out our water yet, but eagerly waiting for the day we get a Berkey water filter. This is a process and takes small accumulative actions to make an overall big impact.
If you are reading this and think... Okay great Brittany but this sounds like a lot! You're right it is. But you know what else is a lot... The fact that the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health found 884 toxic ingredients in the home out of the 2,983 ingredients they looked at.
You know what else is a lot.... The fact that from those 314 of them caused biological mutations, 218 cause reproductive issues (think it's a coincidence we probably can each name at least 1 person who have face this struggle), 778 were toxic to the human body, and 146 were known to cause cancer tumors but were allows in the U.S. even though were banned in other countries. Knowing all of this do you feel like your home is still a safe space? Yeah, I didn't either and as a parent I wanted it to be a safe place for our babies. Again this doesn't mean we are perfect and have no exposure to toxins in our lives. That seems pretty impossible in this time, but it does mean that I am doing what I can to lessen the toxic load for our family... and so can you!
The last main room we focused on was the bathroom, where we swapped out our laundry detergent, fabric softener, dryer sheets, soap (hand soap, shampoo, body wash, face wash), beauty care, deodorant, toothpaste, mouthwash, tampons and birth control to name a few.
Because we decided to focus more on well care versus only sick care that meant looking at other options than just our family doctors. You can have a good relationship with your family doctor and still have other resources like a chiropractor, nutritionist and/or naturopathic doctor to refer to for your family's needs. I first discovered naturopathic and chiropractic care while we lived in Canada when our second daughter was 2 months old and would scream for hours on end due to her silent reflux. I was desperate to get her some relief. While that option did provide her with relief, I did not quiet understand how helpful those type of health care providers could be and the importance of routinely referring to them. Kind of like how our car needs an oil change every so often, right? We schedule our oil changes before our car is on it's last straw and completely out of oil. Okay. Okay. Not sure that's the best analogy but you catch my drift.
Not only are our minds open to a variety of health care providers but we also have other things we turn to first when we aren't feeling our best instead of just throwing some Tylenol at our bodies at the first sign of our body not being at it's peak performance.
Here a small list of some items that we always turn to first....
Not only are our minds open to a variety of health care providers but we also have other things we turn to first when we aren't feeling our best instead of just throwing some Tylenol at our bodies at the first sign of our body not being at it's peak performance.
Here a small list of some items that we always turn to first....
- food. Yep, sounds easy enough but real food. Real, not in a package, not sold on the inside isle of a grocery store kinda food. Basically if you can grow it or hunt it than it's what I consider real- as long as it's in the fresh section of the store.
water. We increase our water intake when we start feeling down. - sleep. Another no brainer, but it's easier said than done to get those 8+ hours of sleep.
- Silver (immune system support) supplement drops. I get ours locally from Doctor's Nutrition & believe you can order online.
- Probiotics. Gut health is huge & should be the 1st thing we are always supporting. We use Young Living's Life 9 Probiotics because of how much more effective the supplement is being infused with top quality essential oils.
- Supplements- our go-to's include Zinc + Young Living's Super C, Vitamin D, Super B, MultiGreens and if we really need a boost then Inner Defense supplement as well. We top it off with increases our antioxidant drink of Ningxia Red. Read more about antioxidants here.
- Garlic oil- we use garlic ear drops from Doctor's Nutrition as our first defense for ear aches.
- Coconut oil- has helped us for rashes or other irritations
- Essential oils- our top favs for wellness are not limited to, but include Marjoram, Lemon, Lavender, Tea Tree, Frankincense, Thieves, DiGize, Basil, Mountain Savory, R.C.
I have some good news friend that goes hand in hand to being more aware of our toxic exposure and ingredients. The American Cancer society says only 5-10% of all cancer cases are from gene defects. Only 5%!!! That means that 95% of cancer cases are under our control. It's what we put our money towards, it is what we allow in our homes. This can be a huge win friend! When I began looking into all this stuff when I had high grade cells on my cervix while pregnant and talking to a bunch of girlfriends I was shocked at how many of them stated that they too had to have cells removed from their cervix. It was all sooo common. Too common. And I do not want that to be common for our girls. But it will take generational changes to really show improvement (look into bioaccumulation), but the changes in time will be worth it. I know it!
