It is said that what you can offer to others is rooted in your story.  This is certainly true for me.  Where I am today is not where I intended it to be.  But I would not change my journey because it is through adversity that I am who I am today.  I am blessed!

I worked very hard to obtain a bachelors degree in business administration with an accounting major.  After graduation I obtained a high level position as a corporate ERP software trainer and implementer.  I loved my job and it was my life.  This would quickly change.  After 4 years of being a workaholic I learned that I was pregnant.  It came as a surprise because both my husband and I had been told that our chances of having a baby were slim.  I made plans to return to work part time after the baby was born.   Sometimes your vision and reality do not meet.  Just four months after the birth of my first child, mine came crashing down.  The unimaginable happened when I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes.  I was forced to quit my job in order to receive treatment and recover.

For the next 5 years I would continue to experience the ups and downs that go with fighting cancer.  I would seek the help of 6 different “expert doctors” looking for answers.  No one had any solutions other than more cut / poison / burn treatments.  Each of the 3 times I received the radioactive iodine treatments (RAI) my doctors would tell me that this time should be the last.  But with each treatment that was meant to make me well, I would sink further and further into sickness that sucked the life out of me.  Literally….    After my last RAI treatment in 2005, I was so sick.  I did not recover my energy and continued to suffer from lingering symptoms of the “side effects”.  I vowed this was the last time I would do this to my body.  I knew deep down there had to be a better way.  Why did my cancer keep coming back?  Why were some able to heal and others were not?  This is where my quest to find answers began.  I read hundreds of books, and eventually found a holistic doctor to help me heal naturally.  I would learn about hormone balancing, detoxification, chelation from heavy metals and most importantly the importance of a healthy diet to nourish the body so that my own immune system could take over and eliminate the cancer.  I found the abundant life that should have been mine years before.

In 2007, I returned to school to become a naturopathic practitioner and graduated in 2010.  I completed the health coaching program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in July 2010.  My passion is to educate and equip others to find their abundant life.  My greatest reward is in seeing the true joy my clients achieve from living each day as it was intended to be….. in complete health.

If you are interested in reading my story, you can visit my thyroid cancer blog where I outline my time from diagnosis to healing naturally.  It can be found here – My Journey Through Thyroid Cancer

Stephanie A. Buist, ND HC

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
-Thomas Edison