Why I No Longer Outsource My Health: And What That Has to Do with Health Freedom
Health freedom means asking what truly serves you—without fear or force.
Health freedom isn’t just about access to care. It’s about agency. After years of practicing medicine and following protocols, even within functional medicine, I’ve come to believe true healing only begins when we reclaim our role in the process.
This post explores how I stopped outsourcing my body, learned to question everything, and found a new way to navigate health, family, and decision-making with trust, integrity, and sovereignty.
I wasn’t always someone who thought about health freedom.
When I started my medical career, the concept never really crossed my mind.
In medical school, we were taught that “patient-centered care” and “informed consent” were cornerstones of good practice. And maybe they were in theory.
But in the real world? It didn’t really play out that way.
We were trained in a system with very few tools, where one-size-fits-all was the norm. It went something like this: here’s the diagnosis, here’s the drug, and there’s no other way.
If a patient wanted to wait, explore lifestyle changes, or follow their gut, it was often met with resistance. Sometimes even fear tactics. “If you don’t take this, you could end up with permanent damage, or worse.”
What Health Freedom Really Means
So many people think health freedom just means access to healthcare, or free healthcare, like we have in Canada. But to me, it goes far deeper.
Health freedom means having access to all options, not just the opinion of one practitioner.
Take something like fatigue. There are a dozen ways to name and frame it, depending on who you ask:
In the conventional world: chronic fatigue syndrome, hypothyroidism, or depression
In the functional/integrative world: mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, biotoxin illness
In the quantum biology world: electron deficiency, low voltage, heteroplasmy
In Chinese medicine: maybe a Qi deficiency or spleen imbalance
In the trauma world: a nervous system that's stuck in shutdown
You can give it any label, but none of those labels alone get to your root cause.
And no prescriptive medicine, whether it's pharmaceutical or "natural," is going to be the right solution for every person.
That’s where health freedom begins:
With access to a wider lens.
With time and space to ask: why did this begin in the first place?
With information and uncoerced choice.
We don’t need pressure to make decisions on the spot. We don’t need fear.
We need the freedom to chart our own path to healing.
For me, that meant stepping away from rigid systems and toward something more grounded, sovereign, and self-led.
Bodily Autonomy Means Just That
You should get to decide what goes into your body. Full stop.
Sometimes it’s as simple as food.
If you’ve ever dealt with food sensitivities, you know how infuriating it can be when a waiter interrogates you: “Is it a preference, an allergy, or celiac?”
Why does it matter? I’ve chosen not to eat this food, so just don’t serve it to me. Thanks. End of story.
And of course, the pandemic brought this issue into full view.
Millions of people were pushed to take an experimental shot with serious gaps in long-term data. While technically a “choice,” the consequences of saying no: job loss, educational exclusion, social shaming, made it anything but free.
That wasn’t consent. That was coercion. And now the evidence is showing that maybe this wasn’t the best idea…
Protocol Over People
Here’s the hard truth: we shouldn’t be forced into treatments because of insurance systems, hospital policies, or outdated protocols.
After my son was born, I had an emergency C-section. I’d specifically requested that if antibiotics were needed, they be given after the cord was clamped and cut. A simple ask, to reduce exposure for my baby.
But as I lay on the table, before the surgery even began, I heard the anesthetist say to the OBGYN: “Antibiotics are in.”
My heart sank. That decision was taken from me in a moment where I was powerless to do anything about it. Not because of medical necessity. Because of policy.
That moment stayed with me.
And it happens every day, in big ways and small ones.
People choose what care to get based not on what will actually help them, but on what insurance will cover.
They’ll go to an RMT because it’s reimbursed, instead of the intuitive craniosacral therapist or somatic healer who might actually move the needle for them.
That’s not health freedom either.
Redefining Health Freedom
To me, health freedom means not outsourcing my body to any one expert.
It means being respected as the primary steward of my own body, my children’s health, and our family’s way of living.
It means having the right to ask: “Does this really serve me?”
It’s not about rejecting any system. It’s about learning how to discern.
I do my homework before any appointment. I come with questions. I walk away with clarity.
I don’t blindly follow every suggestion, because not every suggestion fits my life, my values, or my current capacity.
I look at what the mainstream says and then I look at what the alternatives are.
I don’t let fear lead. I let logic and intuition walk side by side.
Over the years, this shift has become the foundation of how I support others, too.
I don’t offer blanket protocols or fixed solutions.
I work with people to reconnect with their own agency, nervous system, and rhythm.
To help them get clear. Not just on what's happening in their body, but on what actually feels aligned in terms of treatment, environment, and timing.
That’s what’s important to me now:
Helping people rebuild self-trust, clarify what’s working or not, and move forward with real informed choice, without fear, force, or confusion.
What This Is Really About
This isn’t about rejecting medicine.
It’s about integration.
It’s about remembering our role in the process and refusing to hand it over again.
You don’t have to do it alone.
But it does start with you.
Health freedom begins when we stop outsourcing, and start listening in.
If this resonated, subscribe below and follow along.
I’m just getting started, and I’d love to walk this with you.
In light & rhythm,
Michelle
I love this reflection from your point of view, an MD. I feel much of the same and there’s no true freedom without health and medical freedom.
but society is sold fear and is sold that all doctors know better than their own intuition, ability to discern information for themselves and make sovereign decisions. We have been taught to hand over our power to any system that is outside of ourselves, the medical system being one.
And we need to take radical responsibility for ourselves, whatever that means for each and every one of us.
I’m in the birth world so this is where I view it the most. I had an all natural home birth, midwife, no vaccines, no interventions, holistic and spiritual lens of it all. AND I bled for 18 weeks straight, so I felt like using the medical industry was the best way for me to find reassurance in the process, and it was REALLY good at that.
Like you mention, it’s not about rejecting the medical model of care.. but I think it’s about using it with discernment and acknowledging all the other ways of healing and health, without rejecting those either.