#232 Lesley Braun is a well-respected integrative medicine leader who is passionate about improving public health, ensuring health professionals understand the therapeutic power of herbs and nutritional supplements and their patients have access to sound information and a variety of safe treatment options.

Dr Braun is the Blackmores Institute Director. Dr Braun is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the National Institute of Complementary Medicine (Western Sydney University) and has held research positions at The Alfred Hospital, Monash University. She was Vice President of the National Herbalists Association of Australia, an Academic Board Member of Endeavour College, and former member of key industry groups including the Australian Therapeutic Goods Advisory Council, Advisory Committee for Complementary Medicine (TGA), the Advisory Committee for the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association, and the National E Health Transition Authority (NeHTA) medicines terminology group.

Lesley is a current member of the Clinical Oncology Society of Australia's Complementary and Integrative Therapies Group Executive, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Australian Institute of Company Directors, Australia-China Business Council Health, and Medical Research working group, plus on the course advisory committees for nutrition courses at Endeavour College and the Think Group.

She is the main author of four best-selling textbooks including Herbs and Natural Supplements – an evidence based guide, founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Advances in Integrative Medicine, and was a regular columnist for the Australian Journal of Pharmacy for 20 years. In 2018 she was named The CEO Magazine's Health & Pharmaceutical Executive of the Year.

In this episode we cover

• What is mental well- being
• The mental well-being spiral
• What the allostatic load model of stress is
• How we can measure and individuals stress
• Some impacts that stress can have on the body
• What the biggest stressors to date are
• How CAM be effectively used, in the different stages of the stress response
• The link between sleep and mental health