About Bal Pawa:

Dr. Pawa has 30-plus years in the health field as a physician with a focus on Integrative Medicine and Women’s Health. She obtained certification in Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also a Certified Menopause Clinician and has completed additional studies on Functional Medicine: Neuroplasticity, Gut, Brain, and Autoimmune disease. 

Bal is a passionate advocate for bringing evidence-based medicine to the masses and empowering them with knowledge. She has been an invited speaker on radio, television, community events, and presented health lectures to corporations across Canada, the USA, and the UK. Her TEDx talk about the role of stress and anxiety on your health has nearly 1 million views. Dr. Pawa’s, international best-selling book The Mind-Body Cure provides tools for self-care, as people struggle to reclaim their health. A Clinical Instructor at UBC Faculty of Medicine, Bal continues to inspire and mentor younger physicians.

Episode Notes:

Dr. Laura talks with Dr. Bal Pawa about her book, “The Mind-Body Cure”, and her journey through the health field into her focus on integrative medicine. Dr. Pawa shares her story of being a physician and a patient on the same day after a car accident, and how that opened her eyes to an entirely new experience and perspective on medicine. 

Dr. Pawa discusses the science and medical background that informs her book but stresses that she made it very digestible to anyone without that background. She talks about personal healing and learning to regulate our own nervous systems, a preventative model of medicine that she says is missing from our current healthcare system. Dr. Pawa teaches Dr. Laura a breathing exercise from her book, one that helps improve oxygen saturation in the lungs and calm the nervous system. Dr. Pawa’s knowledge and experience inform her message about the impacts of chronic stress and the importance of the mind-body connection. She shares her insight with as many people as possible in order to change lives.

“If 75% of our physical symptoms are attributed to chronic stress and anxiety – because of the hormones I talked about, cortisol and adrenaline – and if that’s the case and the other 25% are viral, infectious, injury, well, then it behooves us to make sure we pay attention to what causes stress hormones.” Dr. Bal Pawa

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