Functional Medicine with Magic Barclay | S5E1

Welcome to Season 5 of Living Well with MS, where we are pleased to welcome holistic health practitioner and expert Magic Barclay as our guest! 

Keep reading for the key episode takeaways and Magic's bio.

Make sure you sign up to our newsletter to hear our latest tips and news about living a full and happy life with MS. And if you’re new to Overcoming MS, visit our introductory page to find out more about how we support people with MS.

Bio:

Magic Barclay is the lead practitioner and founder of ‘Wholistic Natural Health Australia’, a holistic health practice. She also is a host of the podcast “A Magical Life: Health, Wealth and Weight Loss”.

Magic’s life changed when she faced multiple life-threatening conditions and at the same time, found herself divorced and raising her two children alone. She decided to find the root cause of her health issues and that set her on a path of life-changing learning that affected her whole family.

Magic is a Master Practitioner in immune health, mould toxicity recovery and Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immunology (the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body) of trauma.

She tells us that she is a “mum of two amazing humans and two gorgeous furbabies, a grower of organic food for her family and a passionate native gardener”.

Magic’s mission is to help people heal naturally, reconnect to the environment and reach their own potential. She mainly works with women aged 45-65 who feel unheard or misled by mainstream medicine and anyone who wants to bring their health back to basics.

Selected Key Takeaways:

The purpose of functional medicine

Functional medicine involves looking at the systems of the body. It looks at what each system does and how it works with the other systems. We often say, "no system works alone." We particularly look at the root cause because if you don't look at that, then other issues keep arising.

Belief in yourself is a powerful part of healing

If people don't believe in themselves, they're not going to get well. We see a lot of people just given diagnosis after diagnosis, label after label, and they start believing that's who they are. Magic believes that this is a really awful way to live because you're a person, you are not the label that was given to you by your doctor. You are still a person. So, what they do in functional medicine is uncover: Who is that person? And who do [they] want to be?

Reduce stress by acknowledging the stressor isn’t forever

If you find yourself around people that increase your stress, don't be around them or decide to be around them for five or 10 minutes. Give yourself a time cap and tell yourself after 10 minutes “I'm out of this situation and I'll be okay”. If you find you are stressed by work, a doctor's appointment or driving, either take yourself out of the situation, find an alternative, or give yourself a time limit so that you know internally it's not forever. And don't sit there thinking, “I'm so stressed,” as your body hears that and guess what? It replies, "Really? This is a low level of stress, you want to be stressed? I'll raise the bar."

Related Links:

• Magic’s Wholistic Natural Health
• Find out more about PNEI and Dr. Gabor Maté https://drgabormate.com/
• Make natural laundry detergent from horse chestnuts/ conkers/ buckeyes https://wastelandrebel.com/make-laundry-detergent-out-of-chestnuts/
• Parkinson’s protein from gut to brain https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/tracking-spread-parkinsons-proteins-gut-brain
• The Blood Brain Barrier in MS https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395058/
• Th1 and Th17 response in MS https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5491887/

Don’t miss out:

Subscribe to this podcast and never miss an episode. You can catch any episode of Living Well with MS here or on your favourite podcast listening app. If you like Living Well with MS, please leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you tune into the show. Feel free to share your comments and suggestions for future guests and episode topics by emailing podcast@overcomingms.org.

Make sure you also sign up to our newsletter to hear our latest tips and news about living a full and happy life with MS.

If you enjoy this podcast and want to support the ongoing work of Overcoming MS, you can leave a donation here.