Research at the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine

What matters at the National Centre is tight, robust, rigorous research. The National Centre is quite unique you know because in most of the different research areas you either have straight research and you have education as separate entities. At our Centre, it's actually grouped together - our research actually helps with the education and the education informs the research. Everybody actually works really tightly together - it's intertwined. And I've never seen anything like it before.

Obviously the big one at the moment is cannabis - it's a huge breakthrough in oncology and it is a herb, that's now being used as a drug.

A trial that we ran we did medicinal cannabis for glioblastoma, which is a really aggressive brain tumour and we looked at medicinal cannabis in conjunction with traditional treatment and we found that 45 of the patients actually had stable disease or reduction. Looking at trying to mitigate different side effects of chemotherapy, and this one was for chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy, which is basically numbness tingling and pain in their hands and feet which they get from a number of chemotherapy agents, and we found that b12 actually decreased the severity and onset of this side effect which is a big game changer for a lot of people because a lot of people survive the treatment, but then they live with the side effects. We've actually found that there's a number of different herbs and nutrients that can be used very safely in conjunction with different oncology chemotherapy agents and help mitigate a lot of the side effects and actually increase in the quality of life for the people going through treatment and that's massive. The National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine is unique and it's honestly the most inclusive, the most supportive Centre. It's all about the patients. Our studies can actually help people and that is what makes the big difference for me is actually to see the difference that we can see in people.