Today, let’s see how diet can help you optimise your medical treatment with:
- Elodie Auffray – détiéticienne/nutritioniste
Introduce yourself ?
My name is Élodie, I am a dietician-nutritionist and I am also a doctor of pharmacy. I worked for 20 years in a pharmacy before changing my focus to nutrition.
While working at the pharmacy counter during all these years, I have seen numerous treatments with impressive lists of medications, people could have up to 15, or sometimes 20 medications.
Today we are going to talk about the optimisation of a drug treatment, what does that mean?
Of course, it was my job to dispense them, but I realized that we could surely do something beforehand, give more advice, especially nutritional advice, which could avoid taking so many drugs or at least reduce their side effects.
What treatment or rather what condition are we talking about?
It is true that paying attention to the intake of lipids, sugar and salt can have an impact on hypercholesterolemia, on blood pressure, on diabetes… This is quite well known, but in fact the micro-nutritional balance is really important for a whole type of pathology and this is less known.
It could be the case for pathologies like cognitive decline, intestinal disorders, thyroid disorders…
Do you have an example/feedback? What efforts were required for what results?
For example, there is a man in his fifties that I have been seeing for a few months, he came because he had problems with hypertension, problems with gout. He had medications to treat one and then to treat the other, which themselves had side effects. On top of having other medications added, he had joint pain, reflux…
He really had a lot of symptoms from all of that and he wanted to put it all together by thinking about diet. He followed a lot of my advice and very quickly, within two months, he had very positive effects on his blood pressure, on his gout pain, on his reflux, on his transiting… And as a bonus he felt more relaxed and at peace.
If I come to see you tomorrow to optimise my treatment, how do I go about it, where do I start?
First of all, we will take stock of the situation, I will take note of your medical history, weight and medication. Then, we will take stock to see where we are starting from, note the side effects, the habits, it is of course necessary that the eating habits can be integrated into the daily life of each person so that they can be followed in the long term.
During this dietary analysis you will tell me a little bit about how your meals are going in the most reproducible way possible, depending on the results, if there are defects or habits that are not good, you will have to be ready to change them and to establish new habits on a good basis.
This information is not a substitute for medical advice.
You must seek the advice of your doctor or another qualified health professional with any questions you may have regarding your health condition.
