Local Woman Practices Alternative Forms of Medicine
DULUTH, Minn. — Most healthcare systems utilize western (conventional) medicine with pharmaceutical drugs, radiation and surgery treatments. However, holistic medicine, which takes a more natural, whole-body approach is gaining recent momentum, according to the National Institutes of Health. A local Holistic Practitioner, who is also a retired Occupational Therapist, explained how the contrasting forms of medicine can co-exist successfully.
“I trust the herbs and the energy world so much and I’ve seen it cure so many people,” said Stacey Quade is an Herbalist in Duluth and Healing Touch Practitioner.
“Healing Touch Therapy is energy-based. It’s noninvasive and it works with the human biofield and the environmental, universal biofield.”
Quade went on to explain how this therapy treats the whole body of a person. “Physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional,” at the hands of energy, herbs and plants.
We work together with the plants. The plants are our elders. We ask permission from them before we harvest. They’re literally giving their lives for us to be able to sustain ours.”
Herbal medicine is all around us. According to Quade, it literally grows like weeds.
“Half the things that are medicine in the remedies that I make, like for gut health, are weeds.”
So, how does she know the use of each plant?
“There are clues. Like how they look, where they’re growing, the color that they are, the shape of them. It all tells us information about how it might be useful and helpful for us in our bodies.”
Next, she looks at the elements. “Is it drying is it moisturizing, is it estranging, is it relaxing?”
Then – she sees what the person needs. “Does that person need drying, do they need moistening, do they need to relax?”
Finally, she makes an individual treatment plan based on natural remedies.
“So, it’s not about symptom removal, as much as it is about balancing the foundation and equalizing the parts so there is harmony there,” Quade stated.
Living in the northland, we know the summers are short and the winters are long. This makes harvesting of great importance.
“Things get preserved, dried to make teas, tinctures to make small dropper dose bottles of things, fermented, and infused. Many different ways to get through the winter months.”
Whilst Quade works in the world of herbal medicine today, her career began over 20 years ago at Essentia Health.
“I am retired from 33 years of being an OT, Occupational Therapist, down on the Physical Disabilities Rehab Unit at Miller-Dwan.”
Amid her time spent inside the hospital, Quade said, “it was a very comprehensive place to work, but I always felt like there was a layer missing.”
And that layer, Quade explained, is of holistic-nature.
“That’s when the healing touch comes into play. That energy-based therapy is the foundation. Our frequencies and our biofield are an electromagnetic part of us. That’s the template that our physical body is built on. I feel it could be addressed more fully in that western situation.”
In fact, Quade said, she and others from the hospital have been studying the ways holistic and modern medicine work together.
“We did research down there, which is on its way to being published with the journal of holistic nursing.”
She went on to say, energy-based therapy has an important place in healing — both in and out of the hospital.
“It can be done and utilized by everybody to have more balance in their lives.”
Healing, in the mind of Quade, goes far beyond physicality’s and coincides with the inside of a person.
“I’m just the jumper cables. I can connect in a way that helps me to raise the vibrations to share with that person to help them boost their vibrations so that they can get into that place of balance and then that happens — and healing happens.”