Explore every episode of the podcast Tend The Terrain Podcast with Dr. Nasha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More From Dr. Nasha Winters

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

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

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

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James Barry spent more than two decades as a private chef to the famous — Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand — feeding people who could have anything they wanted. For years, he was a vegan. Then his young daughter nearly died of a rare bacterial infection, and the ground beneath everything he believed about food gave way. He came back not with a stricter diet, but with an older question we've been trained to look past: what happens when the most nourishing thing on the plate is the part we've been taught to throw out?

In this conversation, James — founder of Pluck, an organ-based seasoning built from the parts most kitchens discard — sits down with Dr. Nasha to explore organ meats as concentrated life, the ideologies we quietly build our plates on, and why the things we're quickest to reject (in our food, in our grief, in ourselves) may be exactly what we most need to reclaim. This isn't a conversation about liver. It's about what we discard, why we discard it, and what it costs us to keep looking away.

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We live in a culture that promises we can hack our way to health — more data, more inputs, more control. Nathalie Niddam has spent years inside that world and has become one of its most trusted voices, going deeper into peptides and bioregulators than almost anyone. But underneath the language of optimization sits a quieter idea: these molecules don’t override the body — they remind it. They hand back signals the body already knows how to use.

In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Nathalie sit in the tension between hacking and tending — between forcing a system and restoring the conditions it’s been missing. They talk about what the longevity movement gets right, where it quietly betrays people, and what it might mean to optimize for capacity instead of control. A conversation for anyone who’s ever wondered whether the goal is to do more to the body — or to finally listen to it.

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Dr. Beth DuPree has held a scalpel for more than thirty-five years — a breast cancer surgeon, board-certified in general surgery, the kind of physician who led a cancer center to national accreditation and served as a hospital vice president. Every credential the system can hand a person, she earned. And then she did the thing the system rarely forgives: she started listening to her patients in a way that changed what she believed medicine was for. 

Somewhere between the diagnoses and the margins and the survival curves, she came to a conviction she now says out loud on any stage that will have her — healing is not something we do to a person, it's something we awaken within them. That's a quiet bomb to drop inside a profession built on intervention, and she's spent the second half of her career living it out loud: master-level Reiki practitioner, board-certified in integrative and holistic medicine, trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy, author of The Healing Consciousness and Shifting Gears. She is not a fringe figure who stumbled onto the woo. She's an establishment surgeon who walked straight toward the soul and never once apologized for it. 

That's why I wanted her — because it's the same both/and I've spent my own life refusing to resolve. We talk about the moment the surgery couldn't reach what she was seeing in her patients, about what it actually looks like to awaken something in a frightened, newly diagnosed woman rather than just act upon her, about what it cost her to hold precision and presence in the same set of hands inside a system that wanted her to pick a lane, about meeting pain as information instead of an enemy to numb away, and about survivorship — the loneliest stretch of the whole journey, the after that no one prepares you for, when treatment ends and everyone else exhales and the person is left standing in a body they don't recognize with no map. 

Full disclosure: she's the physician behind a pain patch that got me through a torn rib cartilage I wouldn't wish on anyone, so I'm not a neutral party here. I'm a patient who was helped, sitting down with the surgeon who learned to ask a different question. Her terrain is the operating room and everything that begins where the cutting ends. Mine is the cell. Same refusal to choose.”

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Dr. Arwen Podesta is an addiction psychiatrist in New Orleans who has spent her whole career sitting across from the people our culture has decided are the most broken among us — the addicted, the relapsed, the ones who keep reaching for the thing that’s hurting them. And here is what undid me about her: she doesn’t see broken people. She sees terrain. She sees a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive. She’s board-certified in psychiatry, addiction medicine, forensic psychiatry, and integrative medicine, and she built her practice on the many hands — psychiatry alongside nutrition, acupuncture, somatic work, story, and the natural world. 

She wrote a whole book, HOOKED, making the mechanics of addiction make sense, and then she spends her days reminding everyone that mechanics were never the whole story. We talk about addiction as intelligence rather than defect, about what real repair asks for that the fight narrative completely misses, about place as terrain in a city that knows something about collapse and something about coming back, and about the hunger underneath the substance — what people are actually starving for. She’s doing in the field of the mind almost exactly what I’ve tried to do in the field of the body. Her terrain is the nervous system. Mine is the cell. Same gospel, different soil.

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Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro on industrial food, glyphosate, and what four decades at the bedside taught her about why kids are sick.

For most of a career spanning emergency rooms and children's hospitals, Dr. Michelle Perro watched the patterns in front of her shift—more allergies, more gut trouble, more neurological and chronic conditions in children who, a generation earlier, would have been rare. Rather than treat each symptom as its own broken part, she did what good clinicians do: she stepped back and asked what had changed in the soil these kids were growing in. The answer led her into the tangled relationship between industrial food, glyphosate, the gut, and the developing body.

In this conversation, Nasha and Michelle move past the noise and the absolutes to sit with the harder questions. What does it mean when a child's body is responding intelligently to an environment that no longer supports it? What gets lost when we medicate the response instead of tending the conditions? And what does it take for a physician to let her own observations—not just the literature—reshape how she practices? This is a conversation about children, yes, but also about food as terrain, about the courage to swim against the current, and about what becomes possible when we stop asking what's wrong with the child and start asking what's shaping them.

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Evie Fatz is the founder of Cōpow Foods — a word she made up, colorful and powerful, which is about as honest a description of Evie herself as I could offer. She spent fifteen years coaching people on how to eat and ran into the thing that breaks a lot of us: she could hand someone the truth and they still couldn't reach the food. 

So she stopped teaching about real food and started growing the conditions for it — sourced regeneratively, cooked without the junk, and then, for every meal she sells, she gives one away. Twenty-seven thousand and counting. With her husband Dr. Casey Fatz, a vascular interventional radiologist who came out of twenty years in medicine calling it what it is — sick care, not health care — they've got one foot in the operating room and one in the kitchen, betting everything on the kitchen. We talk about the soil and the soul of it: how the vision arrived, what it cost, and how she figured out you can't tend the terrain for some of us. It has to be all of us.

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Dr. Isabella Cooper is a biochemist and pathology scientist out of the University of Westminster, and she runs one of the only labs in this field that takes no money from the food industry — so when she tells you something, it's the data talking and nothing else. Most researchers study ketosis by asking what it does when you switch it on. 

Isabella walked in through the back door: she took women who'd been in ketosis for years and had them stop, then watched what the body did when the thing was taken away — and what it did when ketosis returned. The body remembered. 

This conversation moves from the mitochondria as a kind of terrain to the wisdom buried in scarcity, the female body the literature keeps overlooking, and the woman behind the rigor. It's terrain thinking in a lab coat, and a reminder that your body is not a machine running down. It's a living system, waiting for the right conditions to return.

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In this conversation, Dr. Nasha Winters sits down with Sophie Trew, cancer survivor, breathwork practitioner, and holistic health advocate, for a deeply personal discussion about life, healing, and the extraordinary intelligence of the human body. Drawing from her own journey through cancer and recovery, Sophie shares how one of the most powerful tools available to us has been with us all along: the breath. What began as a path toward healing became a profound exploration of resilience, self-awareness, and the body's innate capacity to restore balance.

Together, they explore the often-overlooked connection between breath, stress, nervous system regulation, and overall well-being. This episode invites us to slow down, reconnect with ourselves, and consider how something as simple and accessible as breathing may influence the way we experience health, recovery, and life itself. It is a thoughtful conversation about presence, possibility, and the healing that can begin when we learn to breathe with intention.

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While studying at Cambridge University, Ashok developed a debilitating chronic illness that left him searching for answers beyond conventional explanations. What followed was not only a personal journey of recovery but a decades-long exploration into the remarkable relationship between the brain, the body, adaptation, and healing. His experience would eventually lead to the creation of the Gupta Program, a neuroplasticity-based approach now used by individuals around the world facing complex chronic conditions.

Together, Ashok and Dr. Nasha examine the evolving science of neuroplasticity, the role of the nervous system in chronic illness, and why understanding the body's adaptive responses may be one of the most important conversations in modern health care. This episode invites us to look beyond symptoms alone and consider a deeper question: what becomes possible when we begin to understand the body's intelligence and its innate capacity to move toward healing?

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In this deeply meaningful conversation, Dr. Nasha Winters sits down with Dr. Cathleen King to explore Primal Trust, nervous system regulation, trauma patterns, brain retraining, and the profound relationship between the body, the mind, and the environment we create within ourselves each day. Together, they uncover how unresolved stress, trauma, fear, and disconnection can quietly shape physiology over time, influencing everything from energy production and immune resilience to inflammation, chronic illness, and our capacity to heal.

This conversation is not about chasing symptoms. It is about understanding why the body adapts the way it does, how healing often begins with safety and connection, and why restoring resilience within the nervous system may be one of the most overlooked pieces of the healing journey.

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On the very first episode of the Tend The Terrain podcast, Dr. Nasha Winters welcomes Dr. Katie Deming into a deeply personal conversation exploring water fasting, the importance of tending the terrain, and the shared death experience that forever changed the way she understands medicine, healing, and what it means to truly care for another human being. Together, they explore how illness is often shaped by far more than symptoms alone, and why restoring resilience, adaptability, and connection may be some of the most overlooked pieces of the healing journey.

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