Tend The Terrain Podcast with Dr. Nasha

Nicole Masters gets called out to look at damaged ground. Compacted, crusted, lifeless dirt on ranches and farms across New Zealand, Australia, US, S. Africa, the UK. She is an agroecologist, she has been doing this for more than twenty years, and she is very good at reading what soil is telling her. But somewhere in those two decades she noticed something that changed the whole shape of her work: the people calling her about their soil almost never had a soil problem.

They had a mindset problem. An overwhelm problem. A debt problem. A grief problem. A generations-of-being-told-the-land-is-an-adversary problem. Nicole points out that the products lining the shed wall are named things like Guillotine and Rifle — that a farmer can get up in the morning and, without ever hearing themself do it, ask who am I going to kill today. Decades of that language does something to a person. It also does something to the ground underneath them. So she began troubleshooting the human standing in the field, and the field started to change.

In this conversation Dr. Nasha and Nicole Masters talk about the language of dominance we use on land and on bodies, about grown adults on their knees in dirt laughing for the first time since childhood, about why more information is often more damaging than none at all, and about what it takes to see a landscape — or a life — that you long ago stopped actually looking at.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has spent more than thirty years asking the question most of medicine steps around: why do some people recover from illnesses that are supposed to be incurable? He is a Harvard psychiatrist with a Master of Divinity, a man raised close to the land in a deeply religious Midwestern world who went on to study both the soul and the body — and in his book Cured, he did the unglamorous work of tracking down the documented cases of “spontaneous” remission and asking what those survivors actually had in common. What he found kept pointing past the biology alone, toward something quieter and harder to measure: whether a person had come home to their own life.

His new book, Relationsick, co-authored with Dr. Lissa Rankin, MD (bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine), names the pattern out loud. Relationsickness is what happens when a lifetime of over-giving — being the good one, the one who anticipates everyone’s needs and buries their own — stops being a story about character and becomes a story about physiology. A nervous system kept in chronic self-abandonment never fully stands down; the body stays inflamed, the immune system frays, and disease finds its opening. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Dr. Jeff sit with the reframe at the center of it all: that being endlessly, selflessly good — the giving tree who ends the story as a stump — can be an express lane to illness, and that self-protection is not selfishness but medicine.

This is a conversation about what heals when the diet and the supplements aren’t enough — about fawning mistaken for kindness, about the difference between martyrdom and love, and about the strange grace of an illness that finally gives a person permission to matter to themselves. For anyone who has done everything right, given everything they had, and quietly wondered why their body still broke.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Petra Davelaar came on Tend the Terrain to talk about deuterium — the heavy hydrogen she's chased for the better part of a decade — and within minutes made it clear she'd walked through that door into something far larger. Recorded, almost too fittingly, during a solar eclipse, this is a conversation about how light governs life, and about a frontier that quietly upends the textbook: the idea that the body is not a machine assembled from parts, but a field of living processes. Petra has been building this thinking alongside a small, unlikely circle of collaborators — the ninety-year-old theoretical physicist Barry Ninham, the farmer and synthesist Logan Duvall of Sowing Prosperity, and the microbiome citizen-scientist Martha Carlin — sparked by their preprint tracing the gut, the brain, and the glycocalyx.

At the center of it is a reimagining of the mitochondria — not the powerhouse of the cell but its field governor, an emitter of heat and charge and light and metabolic water. We are, by weight, some ten percent mitochondria, Petra points out; we are a mitochondrial colony. From there the terrain gets a physical address: the glycocalyx, the fuzzy sensing-layer at the edge of every cell and every vessel, where the body's inner state meets the outer world and the two try to stay in tune. The pancreas is recast as a terrain organ, an unguarded gatekeeper at the center of the body. And cancer is seen in a wholly different light — not a cell gone broken but a reverted one, cloaking its own surface until the immune system is, in their collaborator's phrase, asked to stand down: immune illegibility.

What Dr. Nasha and Petra keep circling back to is the sobering clinical truth underneath all of it — there is no one node. Ketogenic diet, high-dose vitamin C, mistletoe, even a blockbuster immunotherapy: each addresses a single signal in a system that governs from the whole, which is why so many responses run their course and stall. The only way through, they agree, is restoring coherence — matching the body's inner signals to a life lived in closer alignment with nature, and light, and rhythm. There is no shortcut. And there's a quiet grace threaded through it all: that some of the most establishment-shaking thinking in this field is coming from far outside the establishment — from a researcher who left the city, got back into the green and the light, and let her own terrain teach her what no laboratory ever could.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Some people spend a career inside a field. Dr. Lise Alschuler helped build one. When she began practicing naturopathic oncology, there was no board to certify it and no association to hold it — so she helped create them. She co-wrote The Definitive Guide to Cancer, a book that became something close to scripture for a generation of integrative practitioners, and for years she and Dr. Tina Kaczor have stood up at the OncANP conference to translate the newest research for the rest of the field. She’s past-president of both the AANP and OncANP, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Center, and today she’s president and CEO of Sonoran University of Health Sciences — the school where Dr. Nasha herself trained.

But this isn’t a conversation about a résumé. It’s a conversation between two women who both spent their lives mapping the cancer terrain for other people — and then were handed the diagnosis themselves. Lise is a breast cancer thriver, someone who walked the exact ground she’d spent decades charting for everyone else. In this episode, Dr. Nasha sits down with the mentor and quiet force who helped pave the way for her own path. They talk about what it takes to keep walking against the current when the establishment has no name for what you’re doing, how being the patient rearranges the physician, and why the future of this medicine depends on holding rigor and reverence in the same set of hands — data and soul, refusing to be separated. A homecoming of a conversation, and a tribute to the kind of person who builds the road and rarely stops to say so.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Kelly McCann has the kind of credentials that open any door in conventional medicine — an MD and a Master's in public health and tropical medicine from Tulane, one of only about 3000 physicians worldwide to complete Andrew Weil's integrative medicine fellowship. And then she did something that tells you everything about her: she went back to school for a Master's in Spiritual Psychology. Not because the science failed her, but because it kept running out before her patients did.

Because her patients are the ones nobody else can figure out. The people who react to everything — a candle, a meal, a damp room, a new couch. The mold-sick, the mast-cell-activated, the ones carrying Lyme and a dozen labels and a quiet suspicion that they're being dismissed as anxious. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Kelly sit with a radical reframe: that a body reacting to everything isn't malfunctioning — it's an intelligent system that has stopped trusting its ground. They go into the invisible terrain most of medicine can't see, or won't: the mold in the walls, the load in the air, the built world we've decided not to feel. And they follow it all the way down to the part Kelly refuses to skip — that no binder, no protocol, no perfect elimination diet heals a nervous system that doesn't feel safe.

This is a conversation about the sensitive being right, not weak. About safety as biochemistry. About what happens when a physician stops treating the reaction and starts asking what the body is trying to protect. For anyone who's ever been told their symptoms were in their head — and suspected, correctly, that their body knew something the tests couldn't name.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Raoul Goldberg carried his trauma for fifty years without knowing it was there. He knew something wasn’t right — the anxiety that arrived whenever he was in the spotlight, the need to prepare before every encounter, the careful management of exposure. But it felt so ordinary that he had long since stopped questioning it. He called it his personality. He called it who he was. And underneath it, unmet since the age of four, was a small boy who had been hurt at nursery school, sent back the next day with his head still in bandages, and met with laughter instead of comfort. The event was two minutes long. The adaptation lasted half a century.

Raoul is an integrative physician and psychotherapist in Cape Town who has spent five decades sitting with people carrying cancer, autoimmune disease, chronic pain, addiction, and exhaustion — and who kept noticing something the biochemistry could not account for. Behind most chronic illness, he found, there was a psychosocial story: unspoken grief, chronic over-responsibility, the quiet depletion of a person who had spent decades being strong for everyone else. In this conversation, he and Dr. Nasha sit with the reframe at the center of his new book, The Trauma You Call Normal: that our coping is not pathology. It is adaptive intelligence — a brilliant, coherent reorganization of a self that had to find a way to survive. The child who became a healer was searching for the healing he himself desperately needed. And that same intelligence, unrecognized, later becomes vocation, talent, and gift.

This is a conversation about what it costs to carry a protective pattern that was never allowed to rest — and about the strange grace of discovering that the wound and the gift were never two things. They talk about the terrain a child is born into, the atmosphere absorbed before there was any language for it, the way a body organizes around vigilance instead of restoration, and why abstinence, discipline, and doing everything right so rarely reach the place that actually hurts. For anyone who has built a competent, admired life on top of something they have never quite turned around to face.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

When Dean Hall waded into Oregon's Willamette River in the summer of 2014, he wasn't trying to beat cancer. He was a marriage-and-family therapist of more than thirty years who had already buried his first wife — she died of a brain tumor — and had since been handed two of his own diagnoses: chronic lymphocytic leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. What he was looking for was not a treatment. It was a reason to keep going. He had read Viktor Frankl, and he had decided he needed a purpose so large he'd be willing to die trying to reach it. That purpose became 187 miles of cold water.

Twenty-two days later he became the first active cancer patient to swim the length of the Willamette. And when the blood work came back, the leukemia his doctors had been tracking was, to their astonishment, undetectable. Dean has spent the years since being careful about what that does and doesn't mean — he is a story of one, not a protocol, and he says so firmly. But in this conversation he and Dr. Nasha go underneath the miracle-story version to the parts that actually changed him: the 40-degree water that put him into a meditative state where his grief could finally move; the ancient, almost forgotten intuition that nature itself is a healing agent; the way a body given radically different conditions began to do something no one prescribed.

This is a conversation about purpose as physiology, about cold as a doorway rather than a dare, about nature as the nurturer, and about what a therapist learns when he becomes his own hardest client. It's about grief that needed somewhere to go, a river that offered itself, and the quiet, unsettling possibility that the terrain we live inside — its temperature, its wildness, its meaning — is doing more of the healing than we've ever given it credit for. For anyone who has been told the trajectory of their illness is already written, and suspected their body might still have a say.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Catherine Clinton was in her second year of naturopathic medical school when her own body came apart — two autoimmune conditions and Lyme disease, arriving at once. The medicine she was being trained to practice could name the pieces but couldn't reach the whole, and the long road back handed her a different map entirely. On it, the body wasn't a machine of separate parts to be managed, but a responsive, intelligent system in constant conversation with light, water, temperature, sound, and the unseen fields around it. That map has a name most people find intimidating — quantum biology — and Catherine has spent the years since making it something you can actually feel rather than something you have to understand.

In this conversation, Dr. Nasha sits down with the woman whose gift is exactly that --approachability. They talk about why quantum biology should be second nature to naturopathic medicine and somehow isn't; about the body's relationship with the sun, the water within us, and the electromagnetic weather we live inside; and about her book, Optimize, which walks all of it back down to the ground of an ordinary day. They follow the thread out of the clinic and into a Kansas field, where this fall Catherine keynotes Gail Fuller and Lynnette Miller’s regenerative Field School under the banner “Optimize Life: Nurturing Our Symbiotic Landscape” — soil to cell to culture, the same physics all the way down.

And they sit with the moment we’re in: MD Anderson studying biofields in cancer, Scientific American calling quantum the frontier of biology, the institutions that once filed this under woo now building around it. This is a conversation about what it means to watch a dismissed idea become legitimate without letting it get optimized straight past its soul. About a physician who got sick, went looking, and came back with the oldest news there is — that we don’t end at the barriers of our skin, and our power has always been in connection.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

Vanessa Morgan is a colleague from my Durango years — fifty-four years in clinical practice, an acupuncturist, homeopath, and biological medicine practitioner trained on three continents, with more than ten thousand patients behind her. 

She started at seventeen, living for nine months in the attic of a Mohawk herbalist on Vancouver Island, and she has spent a lifetime working in the corners of medicine the rest of medicine wasn’t looking at. But that’s not why I asked her on. I asked her because in early 2020, just before the injections rolled out, a three-and-a-half-foot bull snake walked into her casita in Taos — and she followed it. 

What came out of two years of study has been a life raft for an enormous number of long-haulers, and a window into something the rest of medicine has been quietly using for forty years without remembering where it came from. Because the snake was never only in her yard. It’s on the wall of every doctor’s office in this country — the Rod of Asclepius, the Bowl of Hygieia at every pharmacy, the word “virus” itself coming straight from the Latin for venom. Captopril, the drug that launched the entire class of ACE inhibitors, is derived from pit viper venom. We have been using this medicine for decades. We just forgot what we were using.

This conversation lives where two of our seasonal inquiries meet — rhythm over force, listening as instruction; and capacity, not compliance — and it moves through the loneliness of clear sight, the reluctant teacher who thought she was ready to retire, and what medicine forgot that the snake in her yard was asking her to remember. Bring your skepticism. Just bring it after you’ve actually listened.

Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

For as long as most of us have been alive, we’ve been told a story about who we are: accidents of chemistry, driven by selfish genes, thrown into a world that runs on survival of the fittest. Fight. Compete. Dominate. Win. It’s the story underneath our medicine, our economy, and the way we wage war on our own bodies when they frighten us.

Cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton has spent fifty years quietly dismantling that story from inside the petri dish. In Beyond Darwin, he lays out the science for a different origin: we are not separate from Nature; we are of it — evolved to tend the Garden, not to conquer it. Genes don’t hold the pen. The environment does. And life, as his hero Lynn Margulis put it, “did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

In this conversation, Dr. Nasha sits down with the man whose work gave language to so much of what she has experienced and witnessed at the bedside. His influence arrived at a time when her own survival wasn’t promised — and it became part of the foundation of her turn from surviving to thriving, and of the way she has practiced, taught, and explored ever since. Here she finds him living his own theory in the most unflinching way possible: with a cancer diagnosis of his own. This is a conversation about cooperation as biology, chaos as chrysalis, and what it asks of a person to trade the story of the battlefield for the work of the gardener.

More From Dr. Nasha Winters