About Me

I’m a New Zealand community-based clinical pharmacist who firmly believes in using the lowest dose of the least number of medications to treat disease. After 20 years of practice I feel more like a “disease management specialist” than a health professional.

These days I seem to be telling younger and younger people that they will be on medication for the rest of their lives for metabolic conditions like high blood pressure, gout, cholesterol or diabetes. No-one ever likes taking the pills, but the alternative is worse.

If you have metabolic disease, especially diabetes, you are more likely to die early for heart disease or develop other conditions like cancer or dementia. As a health professional, I see disease prevention being at least as important as disease management.

I’m currently researching high levels of insulin as being a potential cause for all types of metabolic diseases and what we can do to both prevent and manage the conditions.

My PhD (AUT, 2015)  showed that up to 75% of people with a normal blood glucose level, may have high insulin levels, and these high insulin levels may be a bigger risk factor for heart disease, rather than high blood glucose levels.

There is so much more that we need to learn, this is just the beginning of my journey.

I’d like to you give you tools to help you reduce your need for medication.    Read on and feel free to ask me questions