The doctors had no answers for why her husband was in agony. Piling up prescriptions for more pain medication, nothing worked. They were clueless, theorizing in vain, while Tim Kim’s pain only worsened.
It started with some “minor foot pain“ in 2016 when doctors ”diagnosed him with plantar fasciitis and then metatarsalgia,” Tim’s wife, Sierra Kim, told The Epoch Times. “In 2017, his health continued to get worse.” Plantar fasciitis is caused by inflammation in the fascia of the foot.
“They were saying, ‘Get some better shoes,’” Sierra, 29, said.
By 2018, the aching had morphed into extreme pain and intense swelling. Her engineer husband, now 31, lost mobility for weeks on end. It was actually a godsend when COVID lockdowns in 2020 saw Tim working remotely from home. The year 2020 also saw Tim have his worst flare-up yet when he wasn’t able to walk for six months.
Eventually, he left his job.
An MRI revealed a torn ligament, and doctors thought that was the cause. When the painkillers they prescribed didn’t work, and the lab work showed he was otherwise “healthy,” they were “just perplexed.”
“It just felt like they were just kind of guessing, like they didn’t really know what was wrong,” Sierra said. “We ended up seeing almost 15 or more doctors because they all pretty much would say the same thing: take some ibuprofen, get some rest, and recover.”
As prescriptions piled up—painkillers, a steroid injection in his knee, the works—the couple became dubious of the doctors they were seeing.
“It was never really getting to the root of the problem,” she said. “They were just basically trying to treat the symptoms and it wasn’t really fixing the problem to begin with.”
The couple would become disillusioned with allopathic medicine—Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and their ilk.
Yet they came across a naturopathic doctor who revealed the cause of Tim’s pain: gout, and set about treating it. That offered hope.
It also set Sierra in a new direction in her career: to study naturopathy with the goal of curing her husband. They moved from their Texas home to Illinois, just outside Chicago, to make that happen.
Seeing Tim getting only worse, she swapped her day job in data analysis to pursue a master’s degree in nutrition, which would launch her endeavor. “Part of my pursuit of nutrition was hoping to learn more about the body and help my husband,” Sierra said. “He was totally disabled.
“Eventually he did have to leave his job because he couldn’t take time off of work anymore.”
Sierra came across Dr. Michael Robinson, a practitioner of naturopathic medicine. “He basically educated us on the condition that my husband was suffering with and gave us diet and lifestyle interventions that we could do, which was amazing,” Sierra said.
All the other doctors had dismissed gout as a possible cause for Tim’s excruciating pain, as it usually “happens in older people,” Sierra said. “It usually happens in people who drink a lot or eat a lot of red meat.”
Allopathic doctors look at the body reductively, as separate parts, whereas naturopathy views it as a whole.
“When the naturopathic doctor looked at all of the history and the bloodwork, he looked at everything comprehensively,” Sierra said, adding that “all of the lab work is pointing to this being gout” but only Dr. Robinson called it what it was.
Dr. Robinson prescribed a custom-formulated tincture—or highly concentrated dose of herbal medicine—to target Tim’s immediate symptoms.
The Naturopathic Method That Treated Tim’s Gout
The very foundation of naturopathy differs from that of allopathic medicine. The latter stems from wartime medicine—putting a soldier back on the battlefield, basically—and excels at treating symptoms such as a broken arm or laceration.It’s not so great for prevention. Nor looking at the body holistically.
Naturopathy, meanwhile, is holistic in nature and seeks to treat the root causes of ailments. Seeing the failings of the allopathic approach, the naturopathic founders sourced traditional medicine methodologies from various ancient cultures. Yet it is historically Western.
“A German physician by the name of Dr. Benedict Lust M.D. introduced naturopathic medicine to the U.S. in 1901.” Sierra said, adding that it “draws wisdom from many traditional forms of medicine such as ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine, as well as the modern rigors of science.”
Like these ancient practices, it acknowledges the body’s innate power to heal itself and, rather than treating the symptom, creates conditions favorable for that self-healing function.
“The main methodology [of naturopathy] was really creating the conditions for healing and removing things that could be an obstacle to healing,” Sierra said. “Part of that had to do with changing our diet, doing some lifestyle intervention, as well as taking some herbal remedies as well.”
The naturopathic “therapeutic order” combines high and low orders of intervention. Its doctors would opt for the least invasive possible treatment.
Unlike the allopathic method, lower orders of intervention such as “diet, lifestyle, fleet, mental health, spirituality” are incorporated in naturopathy, Sierra said. There are more invasive orders, too, such as synthetic hormones or pharmaceuticals, which would only be used to treat severer symptoms.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation about naturopathic doctors and some people think that naturopathic medicine is quackery, and it’s not rooted in science,” Sierra said. “I think a lot of it currently has to do with misinformation and just people not being informed that naturopathic medical doctors are, essentially, trained with the same level of rigor as traditional medical doctors.”
She believes the naturopathic approach was politicized and pushed out of mainstream practice by the American Medical Association.
Cutting Out the Culprit
Tim’s gout was caused by a combination of genetics and poor diet. The latter they could treat.First, they had to cut out the culprit.
“We were eating a lot of high-purine foods which we didn’t realize could have been contributing to the gout,” Sierra said.
All the refined sugars—the ketchup, the salad dressings, the high-fructose corn syrup—had to go, along with anything else that was inflammatory.
That would include crackers, chips, soda, cookies, and ice cream, Sierra said, plus other offenders such as gluten, dairy, or anything else highly processed.
Organic would always trump non-organic for Sierra and her husband. The latter contains pesticides that are a “huge source of toxins that people are exposed to,” she said. “We do have the natural abilities to detoxify but being exposed to such a high toxin load makes it exceedingly difficult for that detoxification to take place.”
Diet and Exercise: Conditions for Healing
Tim’s faulty diet was replaced with more whole foods—basically what our ancient ancestors were familiar with but has fallen by the wayside in the age of industrialized food. They knew that food is medicine.“Fruits and vegetables have so many different benefits,” Sierra said, adding that chicken provides the “good, quality protein” that “our liver needs to have certain amino acids to function properly and detoxify.
“B vitamins coming from things like potatoes or broccoli—a variety of B vitamins are also needed for the liver to function properly and detoxify and create certain metabolic products that our body needs.”
Breakfast: typically an egg and vegetables or oatmeal with some blueberries;
Lunch: either a big vegetable dish with chicken or a salad bowl with chicken;
Dinner: usually either potatoes or brown rice, as one of their starchy foods, with more vegetables and chicken.
In addition to diet, naturopathy incorporates exercise.Tim’s regime started with therapeutic movements and eventually progressed to walking. In 2022 he started lifting weights, exercising a different muscle group every day.
“Having more muscle mass versus fat mass, having a greater muscle mass actually can decrease your overall inflammation levels,” Sierra said.
All of the above came together. And soon, Tim’s flares decreased both in frequency and severity.
“He’s definitely improved a lot. He is able to work out every day, he’s able to take walks with me, which is incredible because that used to not be able to happen,” Sierra said. “He’s able to pretty much do most normal daily activities. He’s not having any more gout flares, so he’s been completely flare free.”
Currently, Tim is scouting the field for new career opportunities. He hopes to find one that is less stressful than his last job and won’t hamper his recovery.
Sierra’s Naturopathic Journey Continues
As for Sierra, she became a certified nutrition specialist and continues down the path of becoming a naturopathic doctor, thanks to Tim. But she credits a higher power for making the necessary arrangements.“Throughout this journey, I believe in God and I truly believe that it was God guiding me and opening a lot of doors,” she said. “I had never really heard of naturopathic medicine or anything like that.
“But it was once I got accepted into my master’s program that I met the doctor who was ultimately the one who helped my husband.”
“Being a source of encouragement for people is a big thing for me,” she said. “I also want to provide free education to people, since not everyone can afford to see a health care practitioner. And I don’t think money should be an obstacle for people.”
