Aholistic approach to health is available at the fingertips of the Limestone Coast community, including mothers and women, at Journey to Naturopath.


Journey to Naturopath owner Ebony Ballintyne finished a bachelor’s degree in health science, specialising in naturopathy in 2022 and decided to bring her specialised service and personalised clinic to her home town of Mount Gambier.


Miss Ballintyne said while she works with both genders on health treatment and prevention, her journey of interest is working with women, especially on hormonal issues.


“Mothers are always the most stressed out and on the go and they think of everyone else but themselves so I am really excited to be able to help them support their own health journeys,” she said.


“I think 90% of the people who I have seen through the whole degree and outside of it are women.


“I think naturopathy really aligns with a lot of women’s thoughts and processes. We tend to be a little bit more aware of what’s happening with our health so we are more likely to go to alternative directions.


“I love working with women from girls going through periods for the first time and teaching them about their cycles and women going through fertility journeys and pregnancy and postpartum then all the way through to menopause.


“If it is them really wanting to be mums and having a fertility issue and not having the money to spend on fertility treatments, it is helping them fall pregnant and have that really beautiful journey with kids.”


Miss Ballintyne said she enjoys educating and empowering women on their health journeys, regardless of what stage they are at.


“I have gone through my own set of women’s hormones struggles through the course of my life so I think as women we all understand at least on some level what we all go through,” she said.


“I love getting women in and being able to educate and empower them on what their lives could look like if they changed a few things.


“I have the whole spectrum of women’s hormone issues coming to see me so it is really great.”


Miss Ballintyne said it was through her own health challenges that she discovered naturopathy and its benefits.


“It was not until I moved up to Adelaide to start studying a completely different degree that I found naturopathy through my own health journey,” she said.


“I was living out of home for the first time and I was getting sick all the time and going to doctors and not really getting an answer as to what I can do and why it was happening.


“At the same time as that I was wanting to come off the oral contraceptive pill just because it was a bad time for me, I was having some symptoms that I did not want.


“I really just started looking into my health and found naturopathy and as soon as I started reading about it everything sort of clicked into place.


“I think about a week after I started looking into naturopathy, I was signed up and doing the degree so it was a really quick process but I have never looked back.”


Miss Ballintyne offers an alternative medical service in Mount Gambier that is complimentary to western medicine.


“My business model is always to empower and educate the community as much as I can so it is not about taking over from the conventional system,” she said.


“It is about working together and working with doctors and nurses and any other practitioner to really help people lead the best lives they can and have that quality of life that I think sometimes people miss.


“There is no one who sort of pushes the boundaries and gets people talking about naturopathy in Mount Gambier, you really have to go searching for it.


“I was always going to come back down here at same point and start my own thing and so I was really excited to have the opportunity at the end of last year to move back and come home and it has gone from there.


“I am wanting to show the rest of the community what we can do as naturopaths, how it is so beneficial to your health and there’s another option to just taking your medication or going and seeing a doctor every six months or whatever it might be.


Miss Ballintyne said it is about looking at the wider approach rather than narrowing down on just symptoms.


“We look at everything from your diet to your symptoms to your hormone patterns and look at everything that could ever be somewhat related to your health and see how it’s all intertwining and working together,” she said.


“It is a lot about trying to find the root cause of what is happening and planning our treatments around that but also planning the treatments around the individual client themselves and their set of symptoms and their lifestyle.


“We are all very different in how we live our lives and so it is about finding ways to implement a treatment plan that is going to work for them but also give them a better quality of life then what they have been leading.


“I meet people in their journey wherever that may be so it’s about meeting their goals they have.


“It is about giving them the tools themselves to go along their health journey and feel better in their own bodies.”


For more information visit Journey to Naturopath on Facebook and Instagram.