WOMEN of all shapes and sizes, all with different health concerns, plus a handful of men packed into the Karguru Conference Centre two weeks’ ago to listen to Australian health guru Dr Sandra Cabot.
And they didn’t leave disappointed.
This slim, vibrant lady and best-selling author on women’s health entertained her audience with a two-hour, information-packed health seminar.
“We get so busy, we keep putting our health on the backburner,” she said in a chat before the seminar in Tennant Creek.
“We think we’re bullet proof, but we’re not. We need a few essential tools to help us through.”
As this pioneer in women’s health stressed, prevention is always better than cure. “People don’t miss their health until it is gone,” she said.
Dr Cabot has had a varied and exciting career.
Graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1975, she began her medical career in 1980 practicing obstetrics and general medicine in Sydney, NSW.
As part of her extra-curricular medical studies she also studied herbal medicine, naturopathy, acupuncture and homeopathy.
Four years after setting up practice, Dr Cabot travelled to India spending considerable time as a missionary doctor at the Leyman Missionary Hospital in the Himalayan foothills where she studied tropical medicine and infectious diseases.
She also tended to Indigenous women in the Himalayas with obstetric emergencies.
Then in 1986, she returned to Australia to resume her practice and wrote her first book Women’s Health, quickly followed by other titles including Menopause, HRT and Its Natural Alternatives, Don’t Let Hormones Ruin Your Life, The Body-Shaping Diet and the Handbag Health Diet.
“In the early days I started off by giving patients information sheets, which over time turned into mini-brochures but as I gathered more and more information I started writing books. I love doing research,” said Dr Cabot, who has raised charity funds for women’s refuges and remains a protagonist of women’s rights.
She was always keen to help people with chronic, difficult and mysterious health problems.
“Patients flocked from faraway places and I was often called `the last resort doctor’,” said Dr Cabot.
These challenges led her into the groundbreaking discovery that the liver is the key to helping many chronically ill patients. Indeed, her research and books on the liver were the first to explain the critical role that liver function plays in fat metabolism and immune function.
“People who had struggled for years with excessive weight and/or chronic health problems found that the liver was the missing part in the jigsaw puzzle to achieve good health,” she said.
Dr Cabot became a household name in Australia when her book, The Liver Cleansing Diet, was published in 1996.
Selling over 1.5 million copies worldwide, this bestseller won the Australian People’s Choice Award the following year and has enabled many people to lose weight successfully.
A later book, The Healthy Liver and Bowel Book, also gave people vital information on how to keep the liver healthy in this chemically toxic age.
Having conducted health seminars all over the world, Dr Cabot is also renowned for her research into natural hormone replacement therapy, the treatment of mental and emotional illness, weight and sleeping problems, diabetes, brain health, cholesterol and eating for longevity.
She believes doctors and naturopaths should work together using evidence-based holistic medicine to obtain the best results for patients.
She is not against antibiotics or anti-depressants either, but feels a healthier lifestyle and diet can lead to lowering the doses of such prescription drugs.
Indeed, her books exemplify the fine-line balance between allopathic medicine and natural alternatives – probably the reason they have been so widely received by an audience intent on taking control of their own health.
“Knowing how your body works and what’s good for it gives the power back to the patient,” said Dr Cabot.
“Sometimes, just a change in diet can mean all the difference between feeling low and lethargic and feeling full of energy and life.”
While this was Dr Cabot’s first visit to Tennant Creek, she was in the Barkly region about 10 years ago.
On her way to Darwin for a seminar she pulled into Threeways, about 23km north of Tennant Creek, for a toilet break.
“It was about five in the morning and this lady came up to me, enthusiastically telling me how much weight she had lost after reading one of my books,” recalled Dr Cabot.
“One of the benefits of being a successful author is that one has a ready-made network of friends all over the world.”
There has, however, been the occasional person who does not agree with Sandra’s theories, in particular, one reader who thought it was impossible to cleanse the liver, believing that it was unscientific.
Then there was an academic from La Trobe University, Melbourne, who earlier this year lodged a complaint against Dr Cabot’s website saying it makes “misleading, unbalanced and unsupported claims”.
When I mentioned this to Dr Cabot, she looked me straight in the eye and with a wry smile said, “Oh yes, him.”
“I was away and didn’t get the chance to reply to that story,” she recalls.
“He complains - a lot. He likes to make trouble for a lot of doctors.
“Australia doesn’t appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit, nearly enough.”
And Dr Cabot, who has her own range of supplements, should know.
A tireless advocator of women’s health and men’s too, particularly prostate cancer, Dr Cabot is also an experienced commercial pilot who uses her own plane to do work for Angel Flight, a charity which transports medical patients from remote areas of the country.
“There are some people who like to put you down in this country but I’m too busy helping others to care.”
At the seminar in Tennant Creek this lively lady with long, red hair touched on a wide range of health issues such as weight control, preventing and reversing diabetes, how to reverse a fatty liver, slow down ageing, and diseases of the immune system, and much more.
The audience learned how the brain is a giant bag of fat, with 100 billion brain cells (the world’s population is only 6.5 billion).
She spoke of how we can make ourselves smarter by what we eat and that if the brain is low in cholesterol it functions more like dial up internet as opposed to broadband.
Other topics Dr Cabot covered were the importance of a healthy gut, the benefits of magnesium supplements and how one in three Aussies have a fatty liver.
“This is not caused by alcohol excess but by too much carbohydrate and too much sugar,” she explained.
The following day Dr Cabot saw dozens of ladies for a free 10-minute, and on some occasions 20-minutes, private consultation.
“I had heard about how difficult it can be for people to access good quality health products and information so I was happy to offer this service.”
Most 40-year-olds would have been tired from such a gruelling schedule, but Dr Cabot, who’s in her late 50s, was full of beans and didn’t look close to flagging once.
Nibbling on chopped up apple and celery throughout the day and making sure she had plenty of water at hand, she listened to concerns, offered advice, suggested supplements and generally was an inspiration to us all.
For further information on Dr Sandra Cabot, visit her websites www.sandracabot.com and www.liverdoctor.com