1. Oh, Holiday! Apothecary

Rene Rosa Rodrigo is an internationally-licensed herbalist, and one of our favorite people to chat with about all things botika ni lola! She is a graduate Western Herbal Medicine in the UK, as well as Integrative Holistic Nutrition from IIN in New York State and is registered with the Association of Naturopathic Practitioners (ANP) in the UK. Her specialities include hormonal imbalances (endometriosis, PCOS, thyroid problems, etc.), autoimmune disease management, general support for organ systems, children’s health and herbs, as well as vaccine protocol. Browse her online store for Restorative Tea Blends and find blends that would suit the loved one you have in mind – they come in 100 grams, 200 grams, or 100 grams in a pretty glass jar.

2. Pure Culture Beauty Products

We may be a little obsessed with Pure Culture’s biome-friendly skincare, which are made with superior calming, hydrating, and brightening actives.They are the first Philippine brand to be Safe Cosmetics Australia certified, which means they meet the standards for Australian Certified Toxic-Free and its formulations essentially free-from the top-offending chemicals associated with potentially contaminated carcinogenic chemicals that are commonly found in cosmetics, personal care and household products. Their Holiday Gift Boxes are cruelty-free certified, allergy-certified, and vegan friendly certified.

3 . Oh So Healthy! Poppers and Crisps

One you pop, you really can’t stop! Whether it be their Baked Crisps made with 100% fruits and vegetables or their baked Osh Pops (we cannot get enough of the sour cream flavor!), there’s no denying how addicting these snacks are! The perfect alternative for the salt and MSG-laden snacks. We highly recommend the Choco Mango Dipped Crisps, OSH! Pops! White Cheddar Pops and OSH! Pops! Sour Cream! You can buy them online on their website, Shopee, or Lazada.

4. Kimi Lu’s Manifest Oracle Daily Motivation Oracle Deck

Manifest your best life with he first manifestation deck in the Philippines with 38 cards co-created by life coach Kimi Lu and her Manifest Cheerleaders. If you look through the deck, you’ll see a manifest card from our very own Dr. Candy Drilon-Dalman there, too! Buy your own deck bundled with a matching Love & Light tote bag on Lazada.

5. Young Living Starter Kit

While kids get to believe in Santa and the magic of Christmas, we get to believe in essential oils, because there’s research that backs up its effectivity! Aromatherapy has been a fantastic holistic approach in which these highly concentrated, aromatic plant oils are used in small amounts either diffused, added topically, or even just inhaled from the bottle, to assist with shifting your mood, helping you focus, or alleviating congestion or stress, and Young Living has the purest oils in the business. Sign your loved one up for a Young Living start kit at https://bit.ly/YLcentroholistico.

6. Kangen Water Machine

A fantastic investment for the entire family, Kangen water machines have completely revolutionized how we think of drinking water and that not all drinking water is created equal. Certified as a medical device in Japan, this machine produces six different types of water – everything from super alkaline drinking water, to pure clean water, beauty toner water (similar to the pH of rain water), cleaning water, and even acidic water akin to bleach (think Kurin). Invest in your health and send Kangen Philippines a message – mention Centro Holistico and get up to P30,000 worth of freebies as well as free installation!

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1. Ask for referrals
Start by asking people you know and trust, such as family, friends, your primary care doctor, and other healthcare providers for recommendations. What did they like about them? What concern where they getting addressed? How did they feel about their treatment afterwards? Why would they recommend them? As you narrow down your list, call each acupuncturist’s clinic and ask for an appointment to meet and interview the acupuncturist or ask if it is included in the initial acupuncture fee.

2. Research the acupuncturists training
Certification is one of the most important factors to consider when you are choosing an acupuncturist. It tells you that the acupuncturist has the necessary training, skills and experience to perform acupuncture. It also confirm that the acupuncturist has no history of malpractice claims or disciplinary actions. The Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care (PITAHC) is a good government resource to check.

3. Consider the acupuncturist style
There are many styles of acupuncture practice. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is the most common term encountered, and represents a modern and somewhat Westernized approach to Chinese medicine. Classical Chinese Medicine is an older style of treatment that is more reflective of Chinese medicine’s origins. There are many terms such as Traditional Acupuncture, Five Element Acupuncture, Japanese Acupuncture, Korean Acupuncture, Vietnamese Acupuncture, etc. It is best to discuss this when you are interviewing acupuncturists and asking about why they chose a particular style.

4. Consider the acupuncturist’s specialty
Experience matters when you’re facing pain, fatigue, and other chronic symptoms. The more experience an acupuncturist has with a condition or procedure, the better your results are likely to be. Ask how many patients with your specific condition the acupuncturist has treated. Do they have a specialty or focus or are they more of a generalist?

5. Consider personal connection
Choose an acupuncturist with whom you are comfortable talking to and who supports your information needs. When you first meet the acupuncturist, ask a question and notice how he or she responds. Do they welcome your questions and answer them in ways that you can understand? How well does the acupuncturist explain the practice of acupuncture, or are you left to research it yourself? Find an acupuncturist who shows an interest in getting to know you, who will consider your treatment preferences, and who will respect your decision-making process.

6. Consider where you’re getting treated
At the present time, almost all of the treatment settings for acupuncture occur in clinics or wellness centers. Are you comfortable with the place? Do you feel that you have enough privacy when getting treated? Is the clinic easy to find and does it have ample parking? How near or far is it from your home?

Choosing a practitioner that is right for you can make all the difference in the outcome of your treatment. At Centro Holistico, all our doctors are also certified medical acupuncturists, all with different approaches and different personalities. We recommend working with one with whom you are comfortable with, who you feel understands where it is you want to go in your healing journey, and who has experience and success treating your particular problem.

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We believe in the mind, body, spirit connection, and we believe that by God’s divine, intricate design, our beautiful bodies need a little more TLC than we’re often willing to give. The more we push, push, push past whatever the issue(s) might be on the front-end, the more we compound the work on the backend to unwind what’s broken in order to fully heal. Most often, a chronic health issue didn’t pop up overnight so the amount of time to heal likely won’t either.

Frustrating? Sure. Catastrophic? Nah.

At the risk of sounding trite and altruistic, we encourage you to be patient with yourself. Like an onion, our bodies are layered, and our healing is too. One day you might feel great (and yay for improvement!), but don’t be discouraged if the next week pulls you back down. Sometimes our bodies are simply crying out for rest, but other times, this means you’ve healed one layer and another painful root pulls through. You’re not going backwards! It’s all part of the process. The name of the game at Centro Holistico is root-cause therapy, and we’re here to walk alongside you through our mind, body and spirit therapies as you peel back the layers to your best self.

If you’re currently feeling great and this really doesn’t apply to you, fantastic! At Centro Holistico we advocate preventative care and self-care. While the following services are beautiful additions to a gentle detox, IV nutrition therapy, acupuncture, and colon cleanses also serve as valuable tools in preventative care to keep both acute illness and chronic conditions at bay. Start your journey with a Holistic Medical Consultation with Live Blood Analysis so you can understand your body, mind, and spirit better as your Centro doctor helps you get to the root cause. They will then put you on a program with suggested services that will help you function at optimal levels to keep you feeling your best and to ease the healing process if and when a health struggle pops up.  Be patient with yourself and focus on how far you’ve come in the healing process. And remember, when frustration starts to creep in, look at the situation with kindness and compassion and know that it too shall pass, because healing is not linear!

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Acupuncture detoxification, also known as “acudetox” or the “NADA protocol,” is a type of ear acupuncture that involves stimulating external points on the ear. This eases symptoms associated with trauma, addiction, stress, and sleep. It also promotes healing in other areas of the body which makes it highly effective as an additional therapy to standard acupuncture treatments. If you’ve been curious as to how acudetox can help you, here are eight reasons for you to give it a go:

1. Eases insomnia. A study published in 2003 entitled Complementary Therapies in Medicine proves that acudetox can ease insomnia. In the study, 15 elderly individuals suffering from insomnia were treated with ear acupuncture consecutively for three weeks. The results disclose that the partakers experienced an increase in both the quantity and quality of their sleep, which lasts up to six months after the acudetox treatment ended.
2. Treats migraines. Acudetox is also useful in treating migraines and other types of headaches, based on research conducted in 2012. The Acupuncture & Electro-Therapeutics Research reveals that 35 patients with migraine have experienced significant improvements in pain and mood after undergoing two months of weekly ear acupuncture treatments.
3. Reduces allergic reactions. The ear acupuncture treatment also has an anti-inflammatory effect. As such, it can prevent allergic reactions such as asthma, allergic sinusitis, colitis, purpura, or rheumatoid fever among many other diseases from happening. This particular acudetox benefit ultimately stimulates the patient’s immune system in order to reduce allergic responses.
4. Helps smokers quit the habit. Numerous studies and publications also show acupuncture’s effectiveness as a smoking cessation aid. The Swiss Journal of Research in Complementary and Natural Classical Medicine conducted a one-year research study about 126 smokers who used acudetox treatment. Researchers found out that more than 40% of the total number of subjects who have undergone ear acupuncture refused to smoke at the one year mark. But aside from smoking, acudetox treatment can also help reduce the cravings for drugs and alcohol. This just proves that undergoing ear acupuncture can lead individuals to a healthier lifestyle.
5. Reduces stress. Since ear acupuncture is mainly utilized to improve the body’s flow of vital energy, it can effectively reduce stress, anxiety, and depression an individual might be experiencing. When a needle is inserted in the acu-point Shenmen (also known as the “spirit gate”), it can stimulate the release of endorphins and other neurotransmitters. This opens up the nervous system and makes it more responsive to the acupuncture needles, ultimately leading to the immediate effect in relaxing the patient.
6. Alleviates pain. If you’re also suffering from pain (whether physical or mental), an acudetox treatment can help relieve you from such agony. It can effectively treat chronic diseases such as low back pain, leg pain, frozen shoulder, and numbness of the extremities. Ear acupuncture also has the ability to reduce swelling, allowing it to treat infectious diseases like ear infection, tonsillitis, or rheumatoid arthritis among many others. It has been proven, though, in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, that acudetox is most effective in alleviating postoperative pain.
7. Stimulates bowel movement. Apart from treating numerous diseases, an ear acupuncture treatment can also treat constipation, according to the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The study found that 29 individuals (suffering from constipation) who used acudetox experienced better bowel movements after the treatment.
8. Improves heart health. Lastly, ear acupuncture is proven to improve heart health by having a positive impact on heart rate variability or HRV. HRV simply refers to the body’s ability to regulate the rate and time interval between heartbeats. As such, low HRV in individuals is usually associated with congestive heart failure, diabetic neuropathy, and myocardial infarction. It is also found in patients suffering from high blood pressure and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fortunately, using acudetox can increase a patient’s heart rate variability (HRV) which ultimately helps treat these conditions. Acupuncture detoxification, or acudetox, is a type of acupuncture that helps ease the symptoms associated with trauma, addiction, stress, and sleep. This is done through careful and precise stimulation of the external points on the ear.

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Think of your adrenals as the producers and regulators of your hormones and neurotransmitters. These hormones and neurotransmitters then regulate your metabolism – we’re talking reproductive health, brain health, weight management, energy and even your mood. Since the adrenals regulate all these systems, you can see why it’s so important to keep them in check! If you’re feeling off in any of the following areas, chances are adrenal fatigue might be the culprit:

• Hair loss
• Blurred vision
• Severe allergies
• Unexplained weight gain or loss
• Muscle aches and pains
• Dizziness when you stand up
• Low libido
• Infertility
• Chronic fatigue
• Feeling tired but can’t sleep a.k.a. “tired but wired”

Most of us have some degree of adrenal fatigue, and it comes with no surprise that stress holds court as the leading suppressor of adrenal glands leading to their fatigue. A lot of the times, we attribute our weight gain, fatigue, and hair loss to getting on in age, but look at JLo, Madonna, and Keanu Reeves proving that age is just a number. If you have a sneaking suspicion adrenal fatigue is to blame, here are 5 practical tips you can do to combat it right away.

1. Eat clean. This means avoiding inflammatory foods like gluten, dairy, refined sugar, and too much caffeine.
2. Help blood and energy flow with acupuncture. The Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnosis differs with each patient, but when it comes to adrenal fatigue the most common culprit is a yang and/or qi deficiency.
3. MITO IV Nutrient Therapy. Our Mitochondrial Enhancement IV Therapy is made to target our mitochondria – the powerhouse of the cell.
4. Take the time and effort to heal emotional trauma. The emotions that we hold onto that are connected to adrenal fatigue is fear – our life coach would be happy to help you unpack the emotion, understand the lesson, and help you move forward.
5. Schedule a Holistic Medical Consultation. The fastest way to solve adrenal fatigue is to get to the root cause of the matter and that would be by scheduling a holistic medical consultation with our Centro doctors.
The beautiful thing about our bodies is they’re able to heal when we let them. Through dietary, lifestyle and supplemental adjustments, adrenal fatigue does not have to stick around for long.

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While functional medicine focuses on creating individualized therapies tailored to treat underlying causes of illness, integrative medicine seeks to understand the individual as a whole and applies many forms of therapy to improve wellness. Both functional and integrative medicine are similar in nature, but they also have differences that can help you on your journey towards healthier living.

The Functional Medicine Approach

One of the more popular approaches to improving health in the 21^st century involves functional medicine, which focuses on underlying causes of illness that are influenced by genetic predispositions and the environment in which one lives in. Functional medicine typically utilizes individualized therapies to identify what exactly is causing your problem and can sometimes implement special testing to assess whether imbalances developed prior to the disease or were a result of treating chronic illness. The functional medicine approach centers around the idea that one condition can have many causes or conversely, that one cause can have many conditions.

For example, you could be suffering from one condition, like depression, that may be caused by a Vitamin D deficiency, low thyroid and antibiotic use, or you could be experiencing depression, heart disease, arthritis and diabetes that all stem from some form of inflammation.

How Integrative Medicine Differs

On the same hand as functional medicine, integrative medicine functions in a similar, albeit different, way as it seeks to evaluate the patient as a whole and not just as a disease. Integrative medicine views the patient as a combination of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs that are interdependent on each other and affect the entire well-being of the person. Since there are so many different parts to address, integrative medicine physicians often use a combination of multiple therapies such as acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractic care, behavioral therapy, homeopathy and energy work to provide thorough treatment in all areas. Some of the principles of integrative medicine include:

• The patient and practitioner are equal partners in the healing process
• Natural and less invasive interventions are preferred
• All factors that affect one’s health are considered, including mind, body, spirit and community
• Treatment is tailored to the individual’s unique needs, condition and circumstances
• All healing sciences are implemented to encourage the body’s natural, innate healing responses

A good way to describe integrative medicine is taking the traditional approach to health and combining it with less conventional therapies. Natural therapies are preferred over traditional methods – like Traditional Chinese Medicine – but traditional treatments are still implemented when natural options have been exhausted or aren’t working. Integrative medicine also encourages healthy behaviors and skills that will be necessary for the patient as they follow through with the self-care techniques needed to remain disease-free for the rest of their lives.

Improve Your Health With Our Help

At Centro Holistico, all our doctors are either General Practitioners and Internists who have also taken up Functional Medicine and integrated Traditional Chinese Medicine practices when diagnosing a patient and incorporating treatments such as acupuncture and ventosa. We also work with your conventional doctor and offer complementary practices to assist you on your healing journey. So whether you’ve been dealing with a physical, mental or emotional problem, we are here to provide you with services and treatments that help you physically, mentally, and spiritually, because healing is holistic.

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