Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Dr Amy Carmichael on how trauma can lead to transformation

Episode Date: October 26, 2019

Today’s guest specialises in holistic preventative health through nutrition and lifestyle. As a highly skilled traditional medical doctor who was forced to overcome her own personal health and lifestyle obstacles following a sudden horrific accident, Dr Amy Carmichael has completely turned her life around and is now on a mission to help you do the same.  As she quotes so well from Hippocrates, “it is more important to know what sort of person has a disease - than what sort of disease a person has”. Dr Amy is a leading lifestyle doctor and an expert on health, happiness and harmony – she’s a nutritional medical doctor, personal trainer, life coach, speaker blogger, yoga instructor and Reiki practitioner. She leads with her heart and is here to help you on your journey to live your best life. She’s leading the way in disrupting traditional medical responses by adopting a unique proactive holistic approach that recognises that everyone has unique health needs - by embracing conventional and complimentary therapies she puts you in the driver’s seat.     And Dr Amy is a product of her product, she not only has a vast knowledge on lifestyle medicine but she practices what she preaches – as you’re about to discover, she’s a vibrant energetic healthy and happy walking advert for her passionate love of life, enjoying a fantastic fulfilled lifestyle as a result of her preventative health approach but also what I like to call her preventative wealth approach. As you enjoy her journey, you’ll also learn that she no longer trades time for money, she has set herself up financially so that money works for her so she has the time and the freedom to pursue her passions. Adopting what I call a ‘healthy wealth by stealth’ taking regular doses of wealth vitamin supplements that accumulate over time to sustain her great lifestyle. Dr Amy is another of the world class speakers that will be joining me to help you reflect, refresh and reset your life and work at the upcoming Wake Up Adelaide conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre on November 21 and 22, 2019. There are only a few tickets left so jump on www.wakeupadelaide.com now to grab yours or email me at [e-mail] and I may still be able to organise a discount if you’re quick enough – I’ll even throw in a complimentary copy of my second book ‘Get Invested’ for the first five listeners who secure a remaining ticket. Amy's book recommendation: Anastasia (The Ringing Cedar series) by V Megre Get Invested is the podcast dedicated to time poor professionals who want to work less and live more. Join Bushy Martin, one of Australia’s top 10 property specialists, as he and his influential guests share know-how on the ways investing in property can unlock the life you always dreamed about and secure your financial future. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I know, I know. And, you know, it's so funny, isn't it? Because what seems like the worst thing in your life, actually, that accident was actually my gift, 100%. It changed everything for me after that. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to

make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more work less and leave a living legacy by investing now listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream not someone else's more episodes can be found on iTunes or at bussymartin.com.au forward slash GetInvested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested. Hi, Proud and Fighters. Now, the opening statement that you just heard for today's episode by our special guest took me straight back to a great quote from one of my favorite books by Ryan Halliday called The Obstacle is the Way.

And the quote goes like this, there is no good or bad without us. There is only perception. There is the event itself and then there's a story we tell ourselves about what it means. So how do you find yourself reacting to problems, challenges or unexpected accidents? How do you overcome obstacles, big or small, be they mental, physical, emotional, or just perceived obstacles? Do you cave in and then use the obstacle as an excuse as to why you couldn't do something? Or do you hang your head and just give in and give up?

or do we embrace it as an opportunity to learn and grow to reflect on what you've learnt from it and then proactively move forward for every perceived failure shows us the way by showing us what isn't the way let's take time as a perceived obstacle because I often hear people say yeah I'd love to do this or I'd love to do that

but I just don't have the time I'm too busy, e.g. I'd love to invest in property but I'm just too busy and I just don't have time, maybe later. To all of that I call bullshit. When we say we're too busy what we're really saying is that it's not important enough. Now I hate to break it to you but as I quote in my book The Freedom Formula, H. Jackson Brown Jr. famously once said, don't say you don't have enough time. You'll have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Bill Gates, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein. The bad news is that time flies. The good

news is that you're the pilot. On this I strongly suggest you adopt Jerry Rice's advice where says, today I will do what others won't, so tomorrow I can do what others can't. But I digress, back to obstacles and how we manage them. For me, the really smart ones learn to avoid or reduce obstacles by taking preventative action well in advance, adopting daily disciplines and happy habits that completely eliminate the potential for the obstacles to even arise. Let's take your health as an example. The best way to treat cancer or any debilitating disease or illness

is not waiting for it to occur and then reactively and catastrophically trying to do something about it, but to manage your lifestyle in advance over the long term. By managing your thinking patterns, your responses and behaviours, your stress levels, your diet, exercise, rest and sleep patterns, not waiting for health issues to occur and then reacting with band-aid treatments to attack the symptom but removing the cause by getting invested in proactively managing your health by adopting a long-term preventative health approach

and today's guest is uniquely positioned to help you with this as she specialises in holistic preventative health through nutrition and lifestyle. As a highly skilled traditional medical doctor who was forced to overcome her own personal health and lifestyle obstacles following a sudden and horrific accident she's completely turned her life around and now is on a mission to help you do the same

As she quotes so well from Hippocrates it's more important to know what sort of person has a disease than what sort of disease a person has Dr Amy Carmichael, or Dr Amy for short is a leading lifestyle doctor and an expert on health, happiness and harmony She's a nutritional medical doctor, a personal trainer, a life coach, a speaker, a blogger a yoga instructor, a personal trainer and a Reiki practitioner Quite a mouthful and clearly got a lot of skills across a massive number of health related areas

but she leads with a heart and is here to help you on your journey to live your best life she's leading the way in disrupting traditional medical responses by adopting a unique proactive holistic approach that recognises that everyone has unique health needs there's no one size fits all here by embracing conventional and complementary therapies

she puts you in the driver's seat and Dr Amy is a product of her product she not only has a vast knowledge on lifestyle medicine but she practices what she preaches as you're about to discover she's a vibrant, energetic, healthy and happy walking advert for her passionate love of life enjoying a fantastic fulfilled life soul

as a result of her preventative health approach but also what I like to call her preventative wealth approach As you enjoy her journey, you'll also learn that she no longer trades time for money. She's set herself up financially so that money works for her, so she has the time and freedom to pursue her passions. Adopting what I call a healthy wealth by stealth approach, taking regular doses of wealth vitamin supplements that accumulate over time to sustain and fund her great lifestyle. And her life testimony is to the ancient Stoic Marcus Aurelius saying

that the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Her early traumatic accident has created her transformation. But you don't have to wait for trauma to occur to make the change. As we've discussed on a number of occasions, history proves that long-term sustainable success in any area of life is built at the intersection of self, health, and wealth. So if you're serious about going the distance to live your best life,

I challenge you to start investing in your health today. Now, I know we all say that we want to be healthy, right? But what does that really mean? Because unfortunately, there's so much information around right now, a lot of it confusing. Sometimes it's really difficult to know what's right for you, your body and your situation. As a doctor with over a decade's worth of medical experience, Dr Amy's definition of health extends far beyond just being the right weight and being free from disease. Good health means being energised, loving life and feeling great in

your body. It's about living your best life. And if you want to find out more about how you can follow her lead after listening to today's episode, Dr. Amy is another of the world-class speakers that will be joining me and a brilliant cast of others on stage to help you reflect, refresh and reset your life and work at the upcoming two-day fun-filled Wake Up Adelaide Conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Thursday the 21st and Friday the 22nd of November. Make sure you get there. Now there's only a few tickets left so jump on www.wakeupadelaide.com now to grab your tickets or email me at bushy at khgroup.com.au that's bushy at khgroup.com.au and I may still be able to organise a discount if you're quick

enough. I'll even throw in a complimentary copy of my second book Get Invested for the first five listeners who secure a remaining ticket. In the meantime, relax and enjoy this energizing and eye-opening chat with Dr. Amy Carmichael. Welcome, Freedom Fighters. Now, if you've been listening to Get Invested for a while, you'll know that history repeatedly demonstrates that sustainable lifestyle success, however you personally want to define it, is very much a holistic journey that builds on the integration of self-development, health development, and wealth development. And in my book, The Freedom Formula, I talk about the concept of preventative wealth,

which is built around eight critical vitamins that build over time by creating daily disciplines and happy habits, mirroring the concept of preventative health. So today, we're going to expand on the integration and independence of the first two foundational elements of self and health by doing a really deep dive with a lifestyle leader in health, happiness, and harmony, Dr. Amy Carmichael. Dr. Amy will be joining me on stage at the upcoming Wake Up Adelaide conference, and we're both going to share a vision of helping you on your journey to live your best life. So welcome, and let's get invested, Dr. Amy. Hello.

How are you doing? I'm very good, thank you. Awesome. Now, you've just returned from the beautiful country in South America. I'm as jealous as hell. I have, yes. It was beautiful. You spent a month over there? We did, yes. We're very lucky just to have created, I suppose, as you were saying, a lifestyle that you can live by.

And so, yeah, we just had a month in Peru and Bolivia, so it was beautiful. So yes, my chapped nose and my chapped lips aren't going to get seen. I love it. Nothing like a bit of vitamin D to improve the outlook, Amy, no doubt. Now, Amy, for those of the listeners that don't know who you are, can I get you to kick off by just telling us a bit about yourself, what you do and where you're currently heading? Yeah, sure. um so i'm a functional or lifestyle medical doctor um i generally work online and i'm a speaker

and also an influencer and i'm soon to be a author um yeah so quite a lot a lot of people don't really completely understand what functional medicine and lifestyle medicine is and they're quite interchangeable um but really it's about preventative medicine which is um allowing us to see things before they're going to happen and really look at optimising health and wellness. Awesome. Now, I'm going to dig deep into some of that later in the discussion, but I guess just to kick things off so that the listeners have got a feeling for the journey that you've been on so far, can you take us through right from as early as you'd like to go back and talk us through where you've invested your time, your energy and your money and what you've learnt along that journey

and how it's got you to where you are now yeah sure um well i suppose if you say go as far back um i've just as a as a young child i've just been so intrigued with the body and the miraculous way in which we are you know i'm so fascinated every day i like you know when you look in the mirror i look at the iris of our eyes i look at the fingerprints on us and i'm just i believe that we're also unique and unnumbered. We're also very different, but at the same time, we're all so much the same. And I've always been inquisitive.

I've always asked questions. And I've been that annoying person even now where I'm always asking why. Like, why is it this way? And, you know, I was a child at school who'd always have her hand up and everyone would be like, oh, she's asking another question. That was always me. So I'm definitely the A-plus personality type

that have always you know strived and tried to achieve for a lot of things and I came I grew up in a family where my granddad was the family doctor in the rural village that we lived in England and very well respected and so I knew all of that growing up and then my brother couldn't get into medicine and my dad did medicine but failed and so had to leave during university so there was quite a lot of pressure I would say to become a doctor um because I was very gifted in like academic studies um and I personally wanted to be a marine biologist because I'm obsessed with the dolphins but because I love people it was just became so easy when I went through university and I got honours and um you know I just always believed in having you know getting really

really far I wanted to be a neuroscience professor and I wanted to make sure that I was at the top of the hospital game um but many things happened in that journey which yeah well just digging in a little bit there if we can Amy um that that sort of you called it the annoying why syndrome yeah which which is still there and often you know it starts in children it gets thrashed out of us you've clearly continued that inquisitive curiosity for life in general where did that come from do you think is that just something that's inherent or was it part of the environment of the family can you talk to us a bit about that um i think i don't know i actually think it's probably just a trait um i just have always had that very very um yeah inquisitive mind i grew

up in a family where my mom was very spiritual and my dad was very scientific so there was always this disparity between the two of them um and so i always got to see the angle of different things from different perspectives growing up through my parents yeah um yeah so i think that's what definitely gave me um a further insight into things and not always thinking in the black and white always trying to think slightly outside of the box love it and what about the you talked about the that you're gifted and and the drive to really uh succeed and where did that come from again is that something inherent or that come out of him i'm always interested in in where that that drive to do that has come from can you sort of reflect on that at all for us yeah i think

having two older brothers that um that beat you up when you're a little kid and you're you know I think they'll listen to this and they'll be like whatever but I you know I literally I literally you know being brought up with two older brothers and being a very determined very focused young little girl um and my parents really wanting um I think them really wanting us to have financial stability you know my my dad was always the breadwinner and my mom my mum um just had a job at the airport doing the ticket desks and so we were a comfortable family but but we still watched money a lot and they they both wanted to drive into all three of us that we needed to have a vocation and anything that we did like sport you know i used to play

basketball in through the county so i was a county um county basketballer and i was also a county swimmer so any anything that we did was always first and when it wasn't first it wasn't good enough so you know it was very much drilled into us and you know through good and bad reflection of that you know it has definitely made us who we are and now I'm you know now I'm accepting of not having to come first not always being that competitive but 100% we will be we will definitely all born in a very competitive family um so yeah that's where i think that drive comes from yeah it's interesting because i came on a similar path and and there's uh it's a two-edged sword that one because that drive for perfectionism uh can have its uh challenges uh 100 percent

burnout being one of them uh in my case uh how did that how did that transcribe for you then because the self-expectation of living up to your own reputation can become quite a challenge. How did you deal with that on the journey? I think I'm a recovering perfectionist, definitely. I think if anyone has seen my CV, they would know that I don't stop. and um and people often say to me you know just by listening to what I've done that I get tired that like let alone going along the journey with me so um yeah I I definitely I can definitely see

its detriments and that and that 100% has contributed to burnout in my in my um career um but at the same time I think that as I've become as I've learned so many different modalities those tools in the toolbox have allowed me to then you know rest upon them and pull them out when I need to so um so yeah there's so many different factors you know growing up and my genetics and I could even go into the biochemistry of what I have you know I actually don't um break down adrenaline as easily as other people so i am naturally a person that has a lot more energy energy um so yeah there's so many factors love it i love the fact that you even know that a lot of people i wouldn't have a clue i've i've always been very driven and high in energy which

is certainly at its cost but i wouldn't be able to say oh yep i've uh naturally got high adrenaline So I guess with your medical background, that would be part of the course. But let's go back there then, and I'll come back to that later because perfectionism is, in my own case, it's a form of addiction that I've constantly got to work hard on keeping at bay because my tendency is to just go down rabbit holes and never come up for air. And that can be fantastic to get things achieved,

but it is a cost when it comes to relationships and other things if it's not managed well. But getting back to it then, so obviously sort of soaking up that medical background and the high expectation the family had of you and you of yourself in relation to achieving, obviously the road into medicine was probably a logical and an expected one, wasn't it? Yeah, it was really – I remember having school, they said,

you know you need to go for your shadowing and see what kind of jobs you wanted and and you know i wanted to be a marine biologist and my dad was like well you're not going to go on a boat you know so so um you know we can yeah we can we can get you well because i lived in the middle of england so i was like three hours on a boat um so he was like you know just go and shadow a a medical you know a medical doctor and it was actually the you know i actually remember this just like yesterday for sure it was actually hilarious i remember i remember being like okay i'll just go and shadow a doctor and i had a week with this surgeon and surgeon surgery was not necessarily what i wanted to do but i was anyway seeing the surgeon and and it was in the old times and when

you know you'd have a white coat on and it was always the step around the neck and yeah and there was a parade of medical students so there was about 10 or 12 medical students following this you know old white haired mustache beard guy overweight and but you you know knew his stuff so well so well respected and I remember I remember the first person we went in to see him and it was to go and see an inguinal hernia which is a hernia right near the um the in the pelvis and you have to basically get the young boy who was 18 to drop his drop the trousers and his pants and I remember doing so well and i remember like oh this is the work i'm gonna have to do journey to the center of the earth yep beautiful

and then that proceeded by going into theater where i just remember that i remember the surgeon so well i could i swear i could make a film about this and this guy's just putting this iodine all over the guy's pelvis and you know his scrotum area and everything and the poor boy got an erection but he was fast asleep and I just remember like all of the all of the people laughing and me being like oh my goodness is this what I'm getting myself into and I just found like there's just such a such a great community in the hospital really teamwork and and you know like even though there's difficult work um strenuous work there was still an element of play which was quite funny you know not at it not at the expense of him

because he was asleep, but, you know, it was just quite funny. So that was my first experience. Well, this is an interesting experience in itself, and I'm sure it doesn't happen anymore, but when I was at uni studying architecture, I was boarding with a guy who was studying med, and he told me some interesting stories about cadavers being used as dartboards in the thing, which there was certainly,

I think you had to have a slight edge of crazy to get through the workload that you needed to do to survive medicine anyway it's pretty intense oh no i remember doing cadaver we we there was only a few schools in in the uk that did um did dissection with real cadavers and i did go to one and and yes there was many things my friend got a vertebrae stuck on her thumb um and you know like the top of top of the top of the school heads and things would drop off crack and you'd be like you know there would be a part where you'd want to laugh but also cry and be like wow we really need to respect it was so respectful but it was it was you do you have a lot of play in it and yeah you've got to people have uh you know they want to dedicate their

their bodies and their vessel to to science and we certainly gained a lot of understanding from doing that so yeah yeah and I guess the um and I again having seen my flatmate uh burn as much midnight as I was uh just just coping with the the study load that would have put immense pressure on you at the time did you have any challenges with that um given your perfectionist tendencies yeah I actually suffered from quite a lot of anxiety and depression at university um it was not diagnosed by a doctor because being a doctor or being a medical student as i was it there's a very um you can easily mask and get away with um mental health problems because you you know the insides of it so so and and then there's this fear of how you're going to be perceived if you

were to see a doctor and then what that would you know what then would follow um so so yeah i i i think with the with the amount of work pressure that we had i very much led myself to alcoholism um it was a big part of medical training work hard play hard and we certainly did do that i 100% would have been an alcoholic if you um had written down what I drank in a day um but you know it's it's crazy when I look back now because now I don't drink and and I can't think of anything worse um but yeah I think that addictive personality definitely played a role going through when I when it came to alcohol so yeah it had a detrimental effect 100% but I still came out with an honor is i would work hard and then i'd play hard and but what led to it was that

stress and anxiety um and low mood yeah i guess that the the social aspect of of drinking is as well as the escapism that you get to relieve the pressure uh yeah by drinking would almost again i'm going back a fair while my own journey but it was uh very similar and and almost an expected part of the uni lifestyle was to do exactly what you said and that's work really hard but play really hard so yeah okay so how did you then so you you hit the drink but what impacts if any did I mean you you made on us so clearly had no impact academically at what point did you then wake up to think that hold on gee I don't know whether I can continue to do this or was there any point that you suddenly had a realization that perhaps things

need to change yeah i well it really only came after medical school i suppose because being in in that environment it was quite difficult to say no um you know my friends were really understanding but we were all in the same position right and i and i went to university in cardiff been wet with the welsh and the culture there is very much about drinking and rugby and and that's what we did yeah um so it wasn't really until i finished medical school and i was very much like okay i need to get back to the ocean um and i think i just i needed to remove myself from kind of the the situation or who i was at that point and start afresh so i moved as soon as i finished medical school I actually moved down to the south coast of England where I didn't know

anyone and just started afresh really. You mentioned the ocean you've talked about dolphins and the marine biology obviously a big value set for you is to be near the water. Yes. I'm hearing that pretty clearly through everything you're talking about is that again is that is that sort of peace and serenity and harmony that you get from being close to the ocean always been there where does that come from it's always been there and I don't know where it comes from apart from if I was to go into kind of energetics and more of a spiritual thing about past lives but I mean I grew up in the middle of England so you know I was nowhere near the ocean the only place we got to go to was Blackpool where it's muddy and not somewhere you want to go into the ocean

um so I I think it was I think it was just seeing lots and lots of David Attenborough as a child and and you know memories of falling asleep on the couch after working hard and hearing David Attenborough's voice um just yeah I'm obsessed with the ocean and and ever since I've been able to physically move from my parents since 18 I've always lived by the in the coast by the coast so um love it so yeah do you surf do you dive uh you is there any activity that you just love doing that's that's part of that lifestyle yeah um i do surf a little bit i would love to say i'm a surfer but i think that's probably an overstretch um i do have three surfboards so you look the part yeah but um but i just i think even just be you know as most people i

think even just hearing the sound of ocean of the ocean or running water there's just something calming to it and we we make a habit of going in the ocean every day we live here in Queensland and when we travel we're often just you know somewhere by the coast so yeah I do dive I do swim I do surf I used to windsurf um so yeah anything by the ocean but honestly I could even sitting on the top of a mountain looking at an ocean would even be good enough just just seeing it is is enough there's just something about i 100 agree and uh you also mention your fascination for dolphins and dolphins are my favorite mammal mammal they just they fascinate me they are absolutely fascinating i think and the the intelligence yet the playfulness that uh we

could learn a lot from dolphins i think in the way that that they live versus the way we live what's the fascination for you yeah the same bushy um just um they're just so interactive they work as a team they're really playful um I've actually I've got a bit a bit of a spiritual background and and I um I've gone and swam with dolphins in the wild many times and um it's just the most miraculous experience that anyone could ever have by being with dolphins in in the wild and just there's just literally no words for it um they they sing and they dance with you and it's an experience where I just burst out crying underwater. I love it.

So, yeah, there's just something so special about them. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to put into words, isn't it? I've done the same and I find the sort of joy, unbridled joy that you feel just being in their presence. I can't actually describe it very well, but the elation that you walk away from is, I don't think I've, the only other time I've felt like that is at the birth of my son so there's something pretty special about that which

I can't define and I guess there is a spiritual connection there that would probably explain that a lot more but yeah love it absolutely love that so okay so I'm just going off on tangents here but sort of coming back to exercise you got through uni and you sort of ended up in acute medicine is that how I understand it And perhaps describe for the listeners what acute medicine is so that they can sort of get a grasp of the pressure and I guess the performance side of the equation

that you would have to deal with in pretty intense situations with that. Yeah, so acute medicine is, you know, if you were to get chest pain or shortness of breath or tummy pain, anything like that, anything that's acute and you're at home and you think, and not wait wait on this you know an acute medical consultant or senior registrar and that was that was my my training was in acute medicine and then also in intensive care so when you're super sick um and as you can imagine there are many hospital admissions in a day even in an hour and i would have to be seeing them and

delegating work and prioritizing people and and so you know people who were super sick were people that took up more of my time and the people that were less sick sadly were slightly overlooked because if you didn't have red flags um you know and things didn't pop up on your bloods or the investigations and radiology then it didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything wrong with you but if i had to categorize you you know you were able to go home words yeah just just jumping in there to put some color around that from a personal situation amy you know i guess it it talks to how much pressure the whole uh health and medical system is under when you're forced to have to do that because i know this is quite some years ago now my good

father suffered a stroke and the ambulance were there in a flash they were sensational we got him to emergency and he then sat in emergency for about eight hours before anyone had a look at him and yet there were drug crazed nutters coming in screaming shouting hurling things around smashing things that and they would get attended to immediately yeah the old squeaky squeaky wheel exercise so working in that sort of situation where you're pretty much prioritizing who's going to live and who potentially could die be amazing pressure yeah i think i think you get trained really well or i was trained really well and and it definitely you know people fall into the specialty in which the personality fits the best and as we talked about before like you know

I was competitive and and work hard and and at through training I work really I can focus really well under pressure um and in fact I do better under pressure um much to my annoyance um and so I can so I can keep really calm and I think the more and more you know it sounds really it sounds really strange when you talk to people that aren't medically trained but you know the more and more life difficult life events and and difficult scenarios it actually gets easier um and that doesn't mean to say that the the empathy is lost but but the actually when if someone is if someone is actually dying right in front of you so they've lost you know their heart rate is gone and they're you know you're gonna have to start doing cpr it's actually much easier to treat that

person than it is to treat the person that you know you're still investigating so it sounds strange but but in some ways practice and and you know constantly um being surrounded by these people you you end up you end up really being able to do it a bit like the back of your hand like driving home and that sounds really really strange but and and that's not to be complacent in it but it just it is something that you're very well trained for um and and so it doesn't it's not it doesn't phase me um ill people it's actually something that i like thoroughly enjoy doing that type of work um so yeah it's it's it the training sets you up for it yeah okay and you're and you mentioned earlier that you've you've got high adrenaline and high energy anyway

So you would probably end up seeking out those situations because of the – thrill's not the right word – but being calm, cool and collected in those very – what would otherwise be stressful situations for the average person would be quite satisfying, I think, to be able to save lives as a result. but I could also see that leading to a massive caseload and massive hours to get good at it. Yeah, was that the case? Can you talk to us a bit about where that went to? Yeah, 100%. I mean, obviously I learned and did a lot of my work in the UK and the UK compared to Australia is very different

but the caseload is high in both countries and i suspect globally i also worked in new zealand and samoa um and yeah 100 the caseload is massive and it's not just you know when you treat a patient it's not just the patient you're treating you're treating the family you're treating um you know the logistics of all the paperwork and the investigations and then you're you know the the case isn't just done once it's repeated you know to then your senior and then it's repeated again to like on a third ward round so there's so much repetition as well um which obviously is there for a reason but it is very very time consuming and I remember working as a senior cardiology reg in Perth actually and

and I remember it really well because I remember being so tired and having a phone on me so in england we used to have bleeps but in australia we would have a have a mobile phone and i would be i would be on call for the whole of wa the whole of western australia because it was a tertiary center yeah so we would get all the helicopters who would fly in from north north australia and and i was rang about every single case obviously going on in wa pretty much that day that needed to come to a tertiary center and also all the cases that were coming through ed in which they wanted people assessed to see if they had an acute coronary syndrome like a heart attack and i remember literally this phone never ending and being to a point where i

remember going to the toilet to go for a pee and i remember the toy i remember this phone going and i just i remember bursting out crying in the toilet being like wow i cannot even go to the toilet without being rang like constantly you know if you didn't pick it up it was rang again and again and again and it was yeah it was you know and talk and that's you know that's not even trying to get

your own food like it's yeah it is horrendous really when you look back at when I look back at the workload that's entailed and what happens then of course is every time the phone rings whether you're at work or not it has that same stress trigger and your body

will be reacting to it so you'd be living in a constant state of uh high agitation i would have thought oh 100 and and then that's where your patients can you know really be tested because you're trying to multitask in which you know you know you actually can't multitask um but you would be trying to do three or four cases at the time and yet these aren't things that you want to be multitasking these are things that you want to be singly focusing on um and and yet yet the structure and the system doesn't allow allow it so yeah it is very very difficult so that's obviously going to hit a wall at some point in time you can't physically mentally or otherwise sustain that that sort of pressure forever but

what what ended up happening can you talk us through um yeah i mean i as being a perfectionist would just cope um but i but definitely a detriment to my health so i became slightly overweight for me um so probably put on a good five to ten kilos extra um my my food intake was horrendous when i look at it now because it was just what was available in the hospital you know and the fact that there's you know chains of mcdonald's and different things like that in the hospital just you know just really like irritates me so much but how does that even happen to be honest i mean there you are trying to get healthy and i i again i i'll learn to shut up in a minute but i i'm actually scared of going to a hospital because the whole environment is

is so unhealthy you've got people that are trying trying their best but they're overworked overloaded you're surrounded by vending machines and and and just rubbish food from start to finish it's not the sort of environment you're going to uh you might surgically be improved but any other element of health you're actually going to go backwards i think but uh yeah so yeah so yeah sorry i interrupted go on there amy no no so yeah no but i'm in complete agreement it's um it's something that i'm really interested in trying to trying to change um which I think is a difficult one but um but yeah I mean it definitely led to a lot of stress weight gain acne um and just yeah losing losing my sense of self I think was the biggest

factor I lost everything that I was as an individual as Amy I became a doctor and that you know even so much that I write I write about this a little bit in my book is that you know people would introduce me as oh this is my friend she's a doctor and you know you do lose yourself um you know being a doctor is a part of me but it doesn't make a all of amy right and and i think that's really important is is i definitely started to have that realization i lost all you know christmases and easters and everything working um to the bone and then at the detriment to myself i think the only thing that that really was the biggest slap in the face for me was that i had an accident and that accident kind of propelled my life into a different tangent and a different

trajectory i should say let's talk about that what what was the excellent i mean yeah so i was living in perth i was doing acute med and i was decided to do my bronze medallion because obviously the ocean and everything and and i was um i was at swanbourne beach and i was in the water doing a life-saving exercise and all of a sudden i don't know if you know swanbourne but basically it's a beach break and it was really really beautifully peaceful and then um the free the free mental doctor came which is the wind and literally within a split second i've never seen the water change so quickly and you know all of a sudden it was five meter high waves hitting a beach shore and I was in the ocean and you know we're taught to kind of get back to land and ride on the back of the waves

but I was like tread watering and I was thinking hey like these waves are massive like to actually get into the safety zone to get back up I'm gonna you know it's not just putting plunking your feet on the sands you actually have to run halfway up the beach to avoid it and I remember just treadmilling and tread watering and thinking like I'm actually more comfortable at the back here than trying to get on land but everyone else sort of managed to get on and they were whistling me in and so I decided to take this one one wave in and ride on the back and I got onto the land with probably the water about I don't know four or five inches up from my feet but I was still in like the break zone so it is literally like a tsunami the size of a house coming towards me

and and me being like okay my education is either run up the beach and then I would 100% get hit by the wave and then fall over or I run back towards the wave which is a base and dive underneath and i just felt way more comfortable running back towards the wave and which i did so i ran back towards the wave i jumped under i grabbed the sand in at the bottom of the ocean to hold on to i got swirled around like being in a washing machine and then by the time i came back up because of the interval between the two waves the second wave hit me directly on my head and my whole body just was straight in the water and then my left my leg my left leg just hit the ocean floor bed and snapped

oh you're lucky you didn't drown yeah so and then i have i don't really know how i then got back to the um got back to the land but I did and um yeah and I broke my broke my leg basically um so it doesn't sound like too much but when you're a really active athletic young person and then you break your leg it's it's like you become a 90 year old like I remember you know having a chair in the shower and I remember having to have a wheelie chair like a desk chair in the apartment and you know and a camel backpack so I could have water because I couldn't reach anything and that dramatically affected my mental health and really made me reflect on my purpose in life and like how much I was giving rather than getting um yeah and just to top it

all off not only that but because of the amount of stress of the accident I came out in first time herpes all over my mouth so cold sores and I was actually seeing a dermatologist at the time because I had really bad acne and he said to me you're gonna have to go and get admitted to hospital because your lips I mean you know women that have like fillers in their lips it was like it was like i've got a picture but it's terrible it was like having 10 times the amount of filler that you should have and having all these ulcers all around my mouth and i literally couldn't i couldn't speak i couldn't drink i couldn't i was just like crying if i was to move my mouth like my friends would try and make me laugh and i'd be like crying because of the pain from from moving

my mouth so the dermatologist said you know you're gonna have to go into hospital to get IV fluids and I said there's no way I'm not I'm not going into hospital so I basically had liquid nutrition through a straw for like a week um and yeah I was told I couldn't go to work for eight weeks so universe was sending you a massive message here Amy I know I know and you know it's so funny isn't it because what seems like the worst thing in your life actually that accident was actually my gift, 100%. It changed everything for me after that. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's talk us through that because they would have been pretty dark times when you sort of already mentioned that you lost yourself to becoming a doctor and so, you know, that occupational tag becomes your reputation but it also becomes the thing that can hamstring you mentally in terms of being able to let that go. Because I'd imagine moving away from that into the area that you have done would be massively challenging and a lot of peer pressure to say,

what the hell are you doing, Amy? Yeah. Am I right in saying that? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. So I remember, so after I'd broken my leg and I was told I couldn't go back to work I mean I mean now it seems silly but at the time I was

like I actually was in shock like I thought to myself what am I going to do like what do I actually do because my whole life was around working and being in the hospital and I was beside myself I was you know when people are like demanding to have holidays and stuff I was a person that you know i've never had those so i just didn't know my brain was like so upset that i couldn't go to work it wasn't the financial it wasn't a financial strain no it was it was what am i gonna do for eight weeks um and i just i begged my supervisor to go to work with my cast on and work at a desk and it told me no i was occupational risk you know i tried everything and and so what happened instead was i convinced them i convinced the orthopedic surgeon guy

to put me in a cam boot which is one way you can kind of take it off it's like the foam yes and and so that i could fly to bali and fly my mom to bali who lives and lives in the uk so i i did that and i i sat in bali for for seven weeks with my mum and read books which i haven't done in such a long time and i read the book the four-hour working week and that book changed my life because i remember reading the stories about the guy who i think he was either a lawyer or something and he decided to do a parachute jump and then had this near fatal accident and then decided to go and build a um build a surfing hostel or something in Portugal and I remember being on the beach again this is like yesterday I remember being on the beach and I just threw

myself up and I turned around to my mum and I said I'm not going to do this anymore mum I'm not going to do medicine as as we know it anymore and my my mum my mum I will not repeat what she said um but but she she was not happy she she she basically thought i was stupid and you know how could i throw everything that i've achieved and done and you know and throw it all away that's what she thought right and i and i you know i still now have to somewhat convince her that this is a better path because, you know, it's the old school thinking that, you know, you have a job and you have a good income,

that's the right way and that's the right route. And, yeah, I'm always testing those boundaries and I'm always pushing them much to the annoyance of my mother and father. But it takes a fair bit of courage to break those bonds because I've known myself when I threw architecture away for exactly the same reasons that you've just spoken about. It was the family pressure because young Bush,

he's going to change the world, be a ward leading architect, blah, blah. And then within your own fraternity, architects, a bit like doctors, they wear their profession on their sleeve. And if you walk away from that, you're a pariah. you've suddenly got leprosy and very much so and yet I catch up with those guys now

most of them are divorced they're still working 100 120 hours a week they've got no life and I'm thinking and you reckon I'm crazy yeah 100% that courage where did that

courage come from to really say well no I don't care what you think i'm just not doing this anymore talk to me about that um i think it was just i don't know whether i don't i don't necessarily see it as courage i think i just see it as like i was saying i lost everything of who amy was and i think seeing i think being in the privileged position of seeing life and death happens so quickly so you know millisecond it's a millisecond all the time I think that I really started to understand the gift of life and that that privilege is what allowed me to say no I need to I need to go back to Amy and I need to invest in Amy not just the

doctor title so i don't necessarily think it was courage for me i think it was more i think it was more just that i had seen so much in my training and and i realized that you know that accident like people people have had exactly that same accident and been paraplegic and and so for me it was very much like okay i see life and death so so often but like what do people say and it's just like the amazing book about you know the regrets of dying um you know it's if the fact is is that people don't talk about their accolades they talk about like their family and their friends and the places that they've been and and you know potentially a legacy but they don't talk about their accolades and i think that for me was a very very very quick

realization that life had to change yeah love it love it that sort of uh appreciation of what True Life's about because you're seeing how fleeting and how sudden it can end. Yes. Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's a recognition that a lot of people don't get to until they're on their deathbed.

So I love it. So you had that almost lightbulb moment reading Tim Ferriss for our work week and then listening to your mum's expletives on the beach in Bali where did they go to from there what was the next step um well as I said my mum was quite spiritual always has been and actually in order to get um to get healthy before I went to Bali I was in a lot of pain with the with the leg and my lips and everything and very very stressed so um actually a friend came over and did reiki on me and i'd never like heard of like i knew i kind of knew what it was but i didn't and i'd never experienced it

and a friend came over and did reiki and put some like kind of sound bowl type music on and used essential oils on me for every day came every single day for 10 days awesome and And I've never felt so much, like, bliss and peace, like, in my life, in such a difficult time of my life. Like, I just couldn't work out how that occurred. And it really intrigued me when I was away. I was like, wow, like, there's so much more to our physical selves. There's, you know, the spiritual and energetic, the subtle realms. and um and so during all of this I really had to mentally think about how I was gonna

cope with the way that I was feeling and so I started looking into like life coaching and NLP and Reiki and I basically just decided to go back to Perth and do locum work so just pick and choose contractual work to get the money to then invest in learning different modalities in health and wellness and that's what i did so i first became a reiki um i became a reiki did my reiki one and reiki two then i did um neurolinguistic programming to try and understand you know our framework and that conditioning of us when we're a child and how that affects our thinking now um i then learned personal training because i wanted to learn how to get my muscle strength back into my leg when the when the cast in the can boot came off yeah and so it just sent me

on this trajectory of of learning so many different modalities and as i did that i kept getting i i kept hearing this word of functional or integrative medicine all the time everywhere where that I went, everything that I learned about. If people said, hey, what do you do? I said, hey, I'm a doctor. And they said, oh, so do you do functional integrated medicine? And I was like, I've got no idea what that is. But every time that it got spoke about, I was like, okay,

I really need to start actually looking into this because it's like now the 10th time that someone has said it. And I did. And what is it for those of us that aren't across what it really means? How would you define it? um so i suppose functional slash lifestyle slash integrative medicine they're all synonymous they're all the same um but it's essentially it's looking at preventative medicine so it's seeing you as a whole being and it's seeing everything that would affect your health and well-being so that's your

spiritual self that's your thinking self that's also all the different parts of your body so not just your physical body but also the biochemistry going down to your micronutrients so things like your zinc and your magnesium and your b vitamins and it's looking at your gut so it's looking at your gut microbiome it's looking at all your neurotransmitters it's looking at your genetics and how they may affect your functional self and and so it's really taking everything in and then saying okay how can we optimize it and how can we prevent it or how can we even reverse certain chronic diseases because 80 percent of chronic disease is preventable and reversible and so and so you know the work that i did in acute medicine you know it can't be replaced by

this type of medicine if you're having a heart attack you know i'm not going to say hey just like smelt some lavender and like you know think great like it's just that you know like maybe in 10-15 years time like when we have a bit more like of our conscious or super conscious maybe but right at this moment like that's not going to happen and so acute medicine still holds its place and I think there's this big disparity of people saying oh you know you do integrative medicine or some people think that it's a load of jargon it's like it's so evidence based you know there's so much evidence on looking at nutrition now and how that plays a huge dramatic effect in in what we what diseases occur and also how we can prevent those diseases and I

just I just find it so negligible that there are still doctors that think that you know you can eat what you like and it doesn't affect you it just it i just find it so strange that i still tell you what never ceases to amaze me and it it's and i i guess it's because we're so time poor and we live in this instant everything iphone world but uh if you go back through eastern cultures and you know far as far back as you want to go they've always adopted a really holistic uh system-based approach to you know if there's a symptom there then let's not put a band-aid on it let's look at what what's the cause and all of those things you've talked about your spiritual your thinking biochemistry the gut the the the neuro uh i can't remember the word

they use the genetic side of it all of that's got to impact on it you what you put into your brain and what are you putting it into your mouth? It's just got to over time. And as a student of any form of sustainable success, things to get to a healthy condition normally takes 10 to 15 years. So I'm with you. I find it amazing that people can't see the accumulative impacts, either positive or negative of of saturating yourself in a in a negative lifestyle makes no

sense and i think i think it's really not i mean functional medicine is is based on evidence but i think it's also super important that people understand that that actually there's a review paper that suggests it takes 17 years before research evidence reaches clinical practice wow so so it's not it's like it for me i feel like i am truly at the cutting edge of medicine and how we will have it in the future you know if we have this conversation again in five years time this like this will be everyone's type of work um you know and i think not only that but also changing the doctor patient relationship is so important because what we have done as a society including like myself is we've become passengers we've become passive in everything to do with our

health and we go to the doctor for a quick fix we go to the doctor I mean my dad is a perfect example and I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying this but you know like you know my dad my dad has high cholesterol and and he is he has quoted to me and said to me you know as he's eating his like butternut like butter scone you know like you know i take cholesterol tablets it's like no that doesn't work like that doesn't happen and i think i think it's really important that we start changing that doctor patient relationship and i always say to all the people that come to see me all my clients i always say to them like i i can't i can't change you all i can do is i can guide you and I can make amazing suggestions but the responsibility lies on you and this isn't like

you know and I think it's really important that people know that because they know their body better than I do like I know the science and I can give them statistics and I can guide them but they know how they feel they know what feels good for them and what doesn't feel good for them And I think it's really about making sure that people start taking responsibility and start being active in their health. That's the biggest thing I want people to drive forward with is your health. It's not mine. Absolutely. And it's not reliant on someone in a white coat telling you what you should and shouldn't do.

No. We do know it. Our intuition and our body tells us when we're in trouble. And often, I believe, we actually know more than the person that we're seeing for 10 minutes who's seeing 30 other people that day is taking a stab in the dark, really. Probably an educated stab in the dark, but it's still a stab in the dark. I was going to say, it's definitely educated, Bushy. Yeah, but I'm being facetious. It's definitely educated.

I'm not wanting to offend doctors out there by any stretch of the motion because they're doing a marvellous job. But given the system that they're working in, it's very difficult to be able to take the time. And therefore, it's understandable that the easy suggestion is, well, let's take the easier road, throw a pill or some sort of concoction at it. That's probably, it's the old Pareto thing. There's an 80% chance it's probably going to kill it. And if it doesn't, then we'll try something else. in a very, very reactive exercise, whereas what you're talking about is taking a lifelong preventative approach

where those symptoms won't occur if you've done everything else right. Yeah, and I think it's important to also see that not one modality is cure or complete in itself. And that, you know, you and me could have the same condition, but you know i may take a completely different approach to you and that is not right or wrong and i think that's where the personalized you know another interchangeable word for functional and integrated lifestyle medicine is personalized medicine so it's personalizing it for you what is your likes what is your dislikes what is your belief what is your culture and you know like

That is such an important aspect that people overlook. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, massive. I love the approach, and it is really pioneering in my experience. I mean, I've ended up pursuing ways of getting my health right because what I was being given, let's take the thyroid example. They threw thyroxine at me, and I was having all sorts of issues with it cramping up and it was affecting my sport and a whole bunch of other stuff so i ended up showing

my own course and found a compounding pharmacist who'd make up desiccated thyroid for me and it's made a massive difference but i've been forced to go down that road whereas that wasn't even an option with the the normal treatment that i was subject to so what i'm hearing i'm loving about what you're talking about is well let's really get in touch with the person that's in front of I mean, let's empower them to really start looking at and hearing the signs of what they're doing and then adopting a really customised approach to what's going to work for them,

whether it be through diet, through exercise, through what they're putting into their head and what their thinking is through the whole broad-spectrum regime. That, excuse me, that holistic approach is very rare. Yes, okay. Well, I know that a lot of the listeners' ears are going to really be pricked up to what you're talking about here because there's a lot of people that are suffering and they might be getting partial results, but at the end of it, there's still a lot of people who are time poor and suffering anxiety and stress,

stress in particular. Yeah. what's your suggestion to them in terms of what they should be doing about that, Amy? About stress? Yes. I mean, again, it's a difficult one because it depends on the person in front of me, right?

Like, you know, a general manager or CEO is very different to a single mum. Yeah. But ultimately, I think it falls under the different categories which I write about in my book. And that's firstly about kind of purpose. So what is your purpose? What gives you life?

What fans your fire? Then it's kind of looking at the way that you think and how you control or cope with your emotions. So the subconscious and the conscious. And then it's looking at the food that you eat, the way that you move it's looking about the community that you hold it's looking at the way that you can relax so how can you put yourself into a parasympathetic nervous system that doesn't mean just going to sleep or watching tv that means like yoga or tai chi or i don't know like

mindful walking there can be so many different things um and then it's really looking at like your biochemistry and like your genetics and who you are and your makeup and all of these things have this interplay and when you can have a look at them i think that and and you can do that at home right like you can sit and you can write down all of these things and you can find so many easy tools that are free and available and that don't cost a lot of money like there's so many apps now for mindfulness and for yoga and there's so many great resources on food and ways to move and so i think i think a lot of people think the thing but the thing is it's not expensive it's just that it's time and patience and most

people don't have that nowadays and so the the quickest way is for them to see to see someone else um but it's a it's a lifelong thing right like i'm i'm still doing it for myself like it's it's constantly investing in yourself and it's constantly reviewing and reflecting on where you're at and like so for me right now after like flying home from South America it's like okay like I have no food in the house what great food you know it's easier for me to just go and get a takeaway but actually the best thing for me to do is to go shopping and buy really great organic fruit and veg right and then it would be to rest and maybe to have a bath and then to maybe like plan out the rest of my day but the reality is is that most people will just think quick and

reactive and think like what's the easiest quickest thing to do and that's not necessarily the best thing for your health for those that are caught on that treadmill where under a lot of pressure at work the minute they finish work they've got family responsibilities who's kids to look after and kids to ferry around the place, extremely time poor. And, you know, I guess I've learned that time is either your biggest friend or your biggest foe, depending on how you approach that. And the importance of taking time out and slowing things down,

I've found as a major, has had the biggest impact on reducing stress and the enjoyment of life. how how can those people uh start to take steps that that allow them to get that space to be able to do that what's your thoughts around that um i think it's a matter of prioritization um and you know potentially stacking like you you've got like you say time for but every single person every single human being has the same amount of hours right so you know yes people are and I completely understand like and you know I'm sure there'll be people to be like she clearly doesn't have children or whatever but the reality is is that is that there are people that have

children and still have like you know can get a yoga session in or can get 10 minutes meditating like honestly like i i'm quite blunt sometimes with with people and and i think sometimes people are quite happy to talk about their excuses yeah um and i think the reality is is yes we all have the same amount of time so you know studies show that meditating and you know going into that parasympathetic nervous system even just for like 10 minutes can be so helpful so you know if you can tell me that you can't take 10 minutes if you can't give your children over to your to your partner or to your you know to your mom or you to your dad or whatever or get a babysitter like even if that's just once a week it's it's honestly I feel that there are certain excuses that come up

for people and I don't hide behind excuses I think that's where my kind of determination and stuff comes in is is if you really want things to change you have to start prioritizing it and and I think when for me when I look at clients that are like that you know where is their time taken up sometimes their time's taken up by scrolling on Facebook or like looking or watching TV or you know and I think you really have to prioritize things and I have gone out with clients and I've literally got a piece of paper a free piece of paper and written down like what are things that are non-negotiable like that is driving the kids to school or to football or whatever and making food and you know it's then like how can you could you food prep like on a Sunday and that

saves you time throughout the week there are so many little tips and tricks and I think technology is something that we depend upon a lot and I think people one like I mean a whole different conversation would be about like 5G but like you know I think we have become so dependent on technology that i think that if people just stop using their phone so much and put it turned it off and put it away i think they would find that they actually had more time than they realized yeah um so i think it's about being present and that's where technology sometimes really takes us away from that yeah 100 agree hey something that i i wanted to drill into that i've sort of picked up on on sort of reading some of the stuff you've done you talk about

health at the cellular level can you expand on that a bit for us talk about what sorry yeah health at the cellular level cellular level yeah yeah i mean cellular level just means that we're looking kind of at molecular type level as well so it's it's looking at your nutrients so i mean for me like nutritional medicine is is really like my passion it's it's saying you know when people come to me for anxiety or depression or stress it's like okay so what's going on with their hormones what's going on with their nutritional values like what what's happening in their gut microbiome and so that's at a cellular level rather than just being like okay they've got anxiety and depression but not understanding completely why and I told you

before about my um the fact that I can't process adrenaline is easy that's a genetic snip that I health and so genetics also play a huge part so when i talk about cellular or molecular health it's like it's really looking at the into the intricacies of what are occurring that you don't necessarily see or can feel yeah and and people people generally don't know about that or even hear about that in normal medicine because we don't generally teach a lot of that to our patients and we also don't go into it in massive amounts of depth in in some respects especially on a nutritional level it's so limited in in the education that we have and so when I have patients for example that have let's say an anxiety element then I would be looking then at

like what's going on with their zinc what's going on with their b6 like and then what's going on with their gut microbiome have they got a leaky gut is that then affecting their their brain There's so many different aspects that I can then look at on a cellular level that aren't necessarily discussed normally in your normal GP office. So that's what I mean. Love it. I just love the in-depth and broad spectrum approach that you're taking right across the board. It's just really refreshing. Is that what you expand on that in your upcoming book, Unnumbered?

Is that what we're going to get to see? yeah a little bit i think the book's mainly about the books it's called beyond numbered health is more than medicine and so the chapters really go i suppose allow the reader to see the things that i talked about like purpose of movement uh food community all of these different things and it does explain a bit about um nutritional medicine and there's definitely pointers towards that and tips and things but it's kind of like a guide for the individual that if they were to come to me it's kind of like the template before they would see me or if someone couldn't afford to see me it's something that I they would be able to do on their own if they had the time and the patience

and they'd be able to sit and get a greater understanding of what health truly is yeah on a personalized level and so the aim is to educate people love it absolutely love it and how how long before we're going to see that on the shelves i did a dive i tried to download it on my kindle it's like i'm not finding it so maybe it hasn't hit the deck yet how far away yeah oh honestly bushy it's like it's like i haven't given birth yet but i swear it's like giving birth yeah i know the feeling it it is actually probably one of the hardest things that i've ever done um i started this journey a year and a year almost a year and a half ago and it was like i'm gonna to write a book and then you know some people come to the table knowing exactly what they're

going to do and and i just didn't and so it's really evolved as like i've evolved and actually it's been great so i is finished it's going through editing and all of those different things and so the aim was to get it out before christmas but i i suspect with lots of things happening it's probably not going to be so when when it's meant to be out it will be out but i would say it's going to be out in the next six months it'll be better for it mine mine took uh 18 months to get to the stage you are and it took it took over two years before it actually hit the deck but what a what a fantastic cathartic i i learned more about myself and what i really think by forcing myself to actually sit down and put on paper and actually communicate the message far better now than we

ever did so yeah i commend you for climbing that mountain that's it's one that not many people do So I can't wait for the book. So we'll keep our ears out and our eyes out for that then. Amy, one quick granular thing that I just want to drill into because I know you're probably going to slap me around the head for this. I'm good on – I'm not consistent enough, but I'm pretty good on a lot of those health factors you talk about. But one of the things that I, having a slightly addictive perfectionism

trait myself i absolutely love coffee and i know i drink way too much of it what uh just just to to really bash me around the head with it what are the ill effects of drinking too much coffee yeah i mean i'm probably not the best person to ask because i'm biased because i don't drink coffee so um so i'm already always telling people not to drink as much coffee um i think the main thing is is that the clientele that i see and the issues that i see globally is 100 is stress and so stress means that you're going to have an increase in your sympathetic nervous system that i.e your adrenaline your cortisol and as you know coffee is going to increase your sympathetic nervous system okay so for me the primary problem being stress and then

people having coffee it just doesn't kind of make sense right i mean there are many health benefits to coffee um you know there are certain things in that there's been studies about lowering kind of alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes and things like that but that for me it's more that the habitual use of coffee isn't a luxury it's become addictive and and i think that's the difference so generally if you're telling me that you have like one coffee on a saturday because you go out and it's enjoyable and it's the experience and you're going out and you're with friends after you've played your hockey like that's awesome but if you're the person that has like two lots of coffee before you can like leave the front door that's that's telling me the habitual addiction that you

have um yeah well i'll be i would be drinking two to four cups of coffee a day or all before lunchtime i don't drink it after lunch because i i won't sleep but uh i would have uh because as a comfort thing for me yeah reward thing I would have between two to four from from morning through until lunch time yeah so I think that's where I would be really looking at like you you just said about a comfort thing right so that's what I would like you know I would ask you to explore you know like and and many people for me it's like chocolate right like so many of us have something that we relate that comfort to but you know could you explore that more because that's just a that's just a habit that's actually not necessarily a truth and you know you then have

to look at for me most people that I find that have too much coffee is as they're coming off on it they realize how many headaches they've had and they also realize how dehydrated they've been so I think it's really important that you know it seems normal for you but what's normal for you now may not be normal for you in three months time if you've type rated it down and then you're like oh my god i actually have more clarity i actually have less headaches actually feel more hydrated and i actually can listen to the way that my body feels rather than like it being masked by the amount of caffeine that i've had yeah so i think it's yeah i think that's the difference yeah and i love it love it no it's and i need to i'm going to listen to this part of the podcast a few times

Thank you, Amy. And I'll replace it. Ingraining. Yeah, I'll replace it with something else that doesn't have that. It might be peppermint tea or something that I can sort of subtly wean myself by chocolate. Chocolate. If you make your own chocolate, then that is actually really,

really healthy for you. Okay. So chocolate. Okay. Yeah, great. I've written that one down. Awesome. Now, coming back to the lifestyle thing,

And I'd love you to talk to us about what does your ideal lifestyle look like? And I'm talking to you personally. What's your perfect day, week, month, year? Put some color around that for us. Oh, okay. My perfect lifestyle is, well, it's pretty much what I do now in all honesty. So it's not having an alarm. So I don't actually have an alarm anymore.

I wake, we don't have curtains, we have like boil, so the light can come through. So I wake up when naturally, when the sun rises and usually it involves going straight to the ocean so we can walk to the ocean. So five minute walk to the ocean, go either walk on the beach or go in the ocean. Then we come home, we have a smoothie, so really nutritious food and then I basically start on whatever work that I have so generally I don't make any appointments before 10 a.m and um and then it's either seeing clients which I still love to do but I would say my biggest joy is actually doing things like this is actually speaking so it's usually replying to emails and

finding people that like I can you know connect with and interact with um so I would usually be doing that and then it would involve usually speaking on stage or speaking on a podcast or anything anything that involves educating the masses that is like my passion um and then really i would love love love to like have my own tv show in the future I'd love to be like a Dr. Oz in Oz, but be Dr. Amy. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what we should do, because I've got similar ambitions, is do a self-help wealth program at some point in time

that covers that holistic approach right across the board. We've said it out loud now, Amy. So once we've said it out loud, we're going to manifest that. it's yeah it's coming so yeah and i love that because as i've realized that the more that i get into media like the more that actually this is really selfish but i love it is that someone does my hair and makeup and they make you look like 10 times better than normal there's hope for me yet then there's hope for me yet i've got a voice for radio amy so so so the main part of me is i absolutely loves the fact that you know someone can make you look

completely different so um so yeah so i would love to do that and then yeah and then just the same as normal i would love to um usually we watch the sunset and again have really good food and be surrounded by family and friends and my family lives in the uk but generally having really good close friends that's like my perfect day like i just yeah educating eating healthy probably also trying to fit in some form of exercise so yoga and usually i pull my pull my tarot cards and things like that so all of those spiritual um rituals are in there too awesome there's a very balanced approach to to life there and in tune with nature is what i'm hearing yeah how are How are you funding that?

Because the big shift from pretty much being paid for your time as a traditional doctor to what you're doing now, getting the time back to really and slow things down the way you have to do that, what are you investing in that's allowing you to do that? Yeah, so that's a good question. So I suppose going from doing acute medicine, having lots of money, but having no time, I really had to flip that. So after my accident, as I said, I went doing locum work. And as soon as that finished, I actually started looking at ways to diversify my income. So I met my partner not long after, and we've got a large doTERRA business, which is a network marketing business, which is separate to my normal medical work, but it's actually very in a line with it.

So we have over 5,500 customers. We have a huge network marketing business, and we absolutely love using essential oils from a medicinal point of view as well. so we gain residual or passive income through that and then I also invested in cryptocurrency and also in gold and silver so we completely diversified our income but I also in order to get to that step like the initial thing I had to do was I really had to know my numbers I had to sit down and with a excel sheet which I still have now on google sheets like I literally write down like how much does rent cost how much does phone cost how much does xyz cost and i had to go from earning lots and lots of money to earning little amount the money that i needed for for what i had

to do and then it was like i'd rather have two days off i'd rather work three days and have two days off and and be able to have more time on my hands so it was really scaling things and knowing numbers that started started that journey love it and and i what i'm honing in on there is knowing your numbers i often talk about the first thing that we do with people is okay let's work out your freedom numbers yes and they're different for everyone because it's the question is how much enough to sustain the lifestyle that you really want to lead is the question and once once you've got there once once you've invested in things that are giving you that lifestyle income that's job done you can you can enjoy life and get the freedom fulfillment and joy that

you've always aspired to just by setting yourself up that way so i love the fact that you've thought that through and that you've got that passive income flooding through from the networking business and growing your assets through crypto and gold and silver to something like that i'm building i'm building a brand like i would probably say that that's my biggest thing is that after the accident I built my built my Instagram like a like a journal and so that people could just follow follow me and I think building a brand no matter what direction wherever you pivot whatever you do if you are liked and trusted and people understand who you are and can you know connect with you then it doesn't matter what you do you can you can change your your decisions and you can go on a

different path and so there's so many different ways that you can build and create income just by being on stage or doing courses and all these different you know ebooks and books and so many different things so I think building a brand nowadays is so important and everyone has a unique and individual story you don't have to look at me and think oh well she's okay she's a doctor like that's why she's able to do that like every single person has a story and that might be that you're a single mom and the journey that that's taking you on or you know you may be like a small business and the trials and tribulations of it i just i find people's stories are so unique and no one should ever think that they're not you know able to achieve the same same things that i can

because you certainly can if not better i agree and it's with the global reach that we now have It's a matter of people who believe what you believe creating that community by building that brand and then leveraging off that to help them but also to be able to sustain your own lifestyle as part of that process. I think we're living in a fantastic time of great opportunity in that regard, no doubt about it, Amy. Amy, I'm going to jump into what I call the ambush round if I can. Yeah, yeah. And the couple of the sort of… I love that it's called the ambush round. Yeah.

Well, it's playing off the old bushy, bushy tag. I've got a really bad sense of humor, Amy, but you'll have to take it in for that. So I'm going to kick it off with, and I'll get you to do the machine gun dance here, but what's your favorite quote and why? Okay. So my favorite quote is, as above, so below. um it it really talks about the interrelationship of all things um it's kind of like you cannot achieve your purpose without achieving harmony between the physical and the spiritual um and

there's some sacred geometry type stuff in there too so i just believe that everything that you do is is reflected everything is karma and and what do you do here right now will affect everything in your future so yeah that's a really important important thing for me as above so below love it love it sort of captures the the whole exercise there yeah uh you've mentioned the four-hour work week already what's another top book that you'd recommend people read and why yeah so i don't know if you've heard of this one it's called anesthesia um yeah so i was gonna say the secret it because that's one of my favorite that's my first book that i ever bought but um but anastasia is um about a russian russian girl that lives in the deep forest in russia and it's a series and

it's actually a very very famous series that's been um that's been put into many different languages and it's really got a lot of things about like the future and values and the way that we should live our life and if you read that book it's a bit like it's a bit like reading the alchemist which is another one of my favorite books um you'll read it it's a story but that but there will be so many snippets of wow that's how i should be living my life um so yeah it's called anastasia which is the first one the ring of cedars and it's very hard to get hold of and sometimes they're quite expensive and i think there's now eight there's eight of them and it goes through like love and personality and purpose and community and home and everything great how

you should live your life basically love it love it i've got a kindle that's that's overflowing with i'm an absolutely massive reader and i haven't read that that or the series so i'm you've got me excited now amy that's i doubt it's on there oh okay i think you might have to actually purchase the book for sure right well i love love having real books in my hand as well as something yeah the real book there's no doubt about it all right now this next one's a little bit left field but it's a question that a lot of aussies always ask about what's the the top legal thing that you've done to minimize the tax that you pay amy um one i became self-employed so getting self-employed 100% changes that and we're in we're in the kind of discussions of

structures at the moment so to create some safety netting in you know in what we do um so i would say that it's definitely that um being self-employed and then looking at structures so that you're not necessarily the person getting the money or having the money. Yes, that's what they used to call straw man and man of substance where you separate the risk from the income so that if something happens with one or the other, then there's no ability for anyone to come after you basically.

Yeah, wow. You know more about it than I do. I don't know much. Having a really good accountant is a massive part of getting that structuring right, and it can have a massive impact on the tax you pay as well as the risk that you expose yourself moving forward. So, yep, that's really good advice.

Coming back on the investment subject then, what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received so far? Oh, this is a hard one. I don't really feel like I've had lots of bad advice. I think the best advice, some has come from my partner, which was pay off credit cards, which at the time when I was working as a doctor, I just really didn't know my numbers and I put lots of things on credit cards. And anyway, so paying off debt sounds really simple,

but it's the first thing you have to do before you can invest in anything. um so I definitely did that and then um again it came from my partner I've been investing in cryptocurrency and gold and silver I think the way that our world is going and again I might have to eat my words but I think the way that the world is going we are developing really really quickly quickly with technology and to think that we pay for things on a piece of paper like that's that's our like money like just our printed piece of paper which they can print more of and you know take take take it away etc i think we really have to start understanding that it's going to go digital and that may involve cryptocurrency um so and and therefore the gold and gold and silver

obviously you know resources that are limited and so understanding that i think not not too Recently, it happened in Venezuela where they were buying milk and things with silver. So I think it's not too far away, and I think that we may happen to have a collapse with the bank system. So, yeah, I'm a bit of a doomsday proper in all honesty. Yeah, no, well, you've got a hedge there with the real resources in gold and silver.

And what interests me around crypto is not crypto itself, but the blockchain technology behind it, I think, is where the real opportunity lies because it's got not only implications from a currency perspective but for back-ending and protecting all forms of transactions in all sorts of businesses. I think there's a marvellous growth opportunity in blockchain. So very interesting times we're living in that regard

and we'll, at some future point, I'll get you back on and we'll talk more in depth about your journey with crypto because I'd love to share that with the listeners as another thing to consider. Brilliant. Okay, final question of the quick five. A personal habit that you believe has contributed most to your success today?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I would say that my personal habit is that I talk to everyone and anyone. um and i think that the benefit of that is that you learn through life experience um not through necessarily book um not through intelligence but through the the knowledge that you can that you can seek out and that you can gain from understanding other people's perspectives um so yeah it's always talking and always connecting with people i find that it opens doors it closes certain doors and it allows you to understand more about yourself when you can reflect and listen to someone else um and it gives you lots of interpersonal skills so i would say my

daily habit is i generally speak to multiple people in a day um and and there are lots of people are new i connect with people all the time through instagram and different social media outlets um and and want to know about their personal story and and learn about them and it's That want to learn that I think is a key driver behind what you're talking about there. If every day we're learning something new, then we're growing. And in this connected world that we live in, that habit of enjoying and loving the experience of talking to others

and connecting with others can only improve your life and their life as part of that exercise, Amy. That's sensational. Awesome. Okay, well, last question then. If you were to talk to someone who, picture yourself, you're just leaving school, what would you advise them to invest their time, their energy and their money

in to achieve their version of freedom? I actually get asked this all the time. I'm always getting like medical wannabes or medical students asking me and um i actually tell them to just invest in themselves so invest in in the things that make them truly truly happy and as i said so many medical potential medical people have messaged or emailed me and i usually say to them like you don't actually need to be a doctor to to do the things that you really want to do the mission that you really really want and i think people forget what they're or they don't know they've never sat down and actually

read or wrote what their mission statement is and i think that people as you said before they want that badge of being a doctor but when they invest in themselves when they invest time into personal development when they invest into like you know learning more about the things that really light them on fire and then they brand themselves and create that story i think that nowadays like you can earn more money and have the lifestyle that you want and have the biggest impact and legacy by doing just those simple things and i don't necessarily think you have to go to university like i did um to achieve what you want so i think investing in yourself branding yourself listening to what your story is and who you are that's so unique and so important

and like there's nothing better than that totally 100 great way to bring it to a conclusion it's been an awesome chat Amy and I feel like we could talk for another couple of hours and I think we will do so when we get that TV show going Yes, exactly Really appreciate your time for those that do want to reach out

to you who can really see the merits in taking a broad personal approach to getting you to help them put themselves in the driver seat to look after their own health and therefore enjoy their lifestyle better, how can they do that?

yeah so you can either go to my website which is just www.dr for doctor amy amy carmichael.com um or like i'm really like sociable and and i i'm i mainly like i'm on instagram i have a facebook as well but lots of people connect with me through instagram um but if they want to see me as a client then 100 they email me and go through go through the website and stuff but yeah like i'm usually often speaking in different places and i can't wait to come to adelaide i'm super excited about it so if you live anywhere close to adelaide in adelaide or melbourne then definitely come to the wake of adelaide because that's going to be really exciting too it's going to be awesome fun there's going to be a lot of like-minded people who are really looking to reset and refresh and

and recharge so it's going to be a great collection of mine so i can't wait so look again really appreciate your time i know you've you've must be suffering from jet lag after getting home from south america 2 a.m last night so uh given that i can see your energy and the adrenaline really does pump pretty well so uh it's been awesome and really enjoyable chat and i'm looking forward to staying in touch amy thanks very much well freedom fighters how good was that to get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au that's h-e-l-l-o at khgroup.com.au or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash get invested i look forward to joining you next week

for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.