Integrative Medicine with Nadine Hottat
“Conventional medicine is immensely valuable for certain situations and illnesses. But it is actually not very effective for chronic illness, which is what so many people now live with.”
Nadine Hottat, as a child.
Nadine Hottat learned compassion, or what it means “to suffer together,” at a young age. She grew up in a loving, peaceful family, surrounded by nature and fueled by a passion for music. But her mother was often very sick, suffering from a difficult form of lupus, which was both mysterious and soul-stirring for Nadine.
Nadine’s mother was a very spiritually rich woman despite, or perhaps because of, her suffering. The experience of wanting to share her mother’s burden and help her heal set foundational stones on Nadine’s path, sparking a curiosity to explore both suffering and healing.
It was the births of her own children, and the experience of being cared for by midwives, that introduced Nadine to the most rich, nourishing, sane, harmonious-with-nature approach to healthcare that she had ever encountered.
Nadine was 19 years old during her first pregnancy in 1978.
“I chose to give birth at home with an extraordinary, pioneering midwife,” she said. “I learned what is deep inside feminine energy, and experienced it. That empowering, transformative experience planted a seed deeply within me.”
She became certified to teach childbirth education and infant massage during her pregnancy with her fourth child, and a couple years later, Nadine began to apprentice with the midwife who attended her birth.
However, with four young children at home, it wasn’t yet the right time to meet the demands of midwifery. So, Nadine began a three-year nursing program and finished her RN when her youngest child was five years old.
“I was drawn into nursing because I recognized what a beautifully holistic, magnificent profession it is,” Nadine reflects. “It requires depth and skills intellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually to be able to truly manifest what the art and science of nursing is all about.”
Nadine worked in many settings as a Registered Nurse (RN), from hospitals and birth centers, to home health, mental health, hospice, elementary schools, business and family practice medicine. In 2009, Nadine returned for her master’s degree in nursing, with a focus on women’s health and midwifery.
During her study, Nadine volunteered to spend a month in Haiti as an RN with a healthcare organization assisting in the camps for internally displaced persons. This was one year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which was followed by a cholera outbreak.
Nadine felt fortunate to be able to assist in the birthing tent as a student midwife, which was part of a field hospital surrounded by vast stretches of families living in incredibly meager and difficult circumstances with tarps over rough boards and no running water. Nadine supported the midwives working there, one of whom was an American woman based in Haiti who was married to a Haitian doctor.
One day, this American midwife invited Nadine to assist her with a birth and guided Nadine’s hands to help catch the baby – it was the first baby Nadine ever “caught” and a very poignant moment for her.
“That was my baptism into being a midwife,” she says.
Nadine graduated with her Master’s degree in 2012 and opened a small home birth practice in Massachusetts for a short time. But she soon transitioned to spending more time in Jamaica, where she was doing volunteer nursing work. Nadine was always interested, even from her teenage years, in living in a developing country.
“I have always been a little bit more comfortable when I get out of my comfort zone,” Nadine says.
Nadine and her partner, Nigel.
After spending a considerable amount of time in Jamaica over the past fifteen years, Nadine bought a piece of land and built a small home in a rural Jamaican seaside fishing village five years ago, where she now lives with her partner, Nigel.
“I love these people and this place deeply,” Nadine says. “I am immersed in a culture so different from my own, constantly challenging and humbling me in ways that I personally find very important.
I wanted to create a place outside of the United States for myself, but also for my family—my grown children and their children—where they could also have the expansive experiences of being outside their normal ways of life, learning from another culture.”
Continuous learning is at the heart of who Nadine is as a person and as a practitioner, and she is always adding layers of knowledge and expertise to the health care she offers.
Nadine studied deeply with Dr. Aviva Romm, graduating from her in-depth and holistic Women’s Integrative and Functional Medicine Professional Training program. She is also a student in Dr. Romm’s Herbal Medicine for Women training.
She learned about Holistic Pelvic Care through a training with Tami Lynn Kent, a women’s health Physical Therapist, which focused on the physical and energetic treatment of pelvic bowl related conditions.
Other beloved mentors and teachers of Nadine’s include Dr. Tieraona LowDog, Dr. Martin Rossman, with whom she studied Interactive Guided Imagery, and Rosita Arvigo, a naprapathic doctor and herbalist who studied for many years with a renowned Mayan healer in Belize.
Nadine has completed three levels of treatment from the Arvigo Institute: Professional Care Training, Advanced Training for Pregnancy, and Spiritual Healing (which is a beautiful, wise, natural practice that comes from Mayan tradition).
“I love this work so much!” Nadine exclaims. “It has been transformative for my practice.”
Nadine learning Cannabis medicine in clinical practice.
Most recently, Nadine added Cannabis Medicine to her proverbial medicine cabinet, which allowed her to expand her practice to share information and guidance with both women and men seeking this medicine. She trained with Dr. Dustin Sulak, an osteopathic MD from Maine who is internationally respected for his work with Cannabis Medicine.
“I have been aware of the medicinal properties of Cannabis for a long time,” Nadine says. “I also knew that as more people were accessing cannabis medicine, there were very few nurses and doctors who understood it, and could support and guide patients with its uses. It seemed important to step up to the plate.”
Nadine completed two levels of the high-level training that is available for healthcare professionals: one from the Medical Cannabis Institute with Radicle Health—created by the president of the American Cannabis Nurses Association (ACNA)—and the other with Dr. Sulak. She was also fortunate to spend time in Dr. Sulak’s clinic in Portland, Maine, witnessing and learning how Cannabis Medicine really works in clinical practice. Nadine is also a member of two primary professional organizations: the Society for Cannabis Clinicians and ACNA.
This deep and ongoing study and hands-on experience, built on the groundwork of Integrative and Functional Medicine, informs Nadine’s women’s health practice, “Enlighten Health.’
Nadine describes Integrative and Functional Medicine in this way: “Integrative Medicine recognizes the multi-faceted and individualized experiences of illness and healing, taking into account the whole person: body, mind and spirit, including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional, complementary, and alternative.
Functional Medicine describes an elegant process of exploring multi-faceted root causes of illness, and engaging in a very individualized approach to supporting our innate healing capacities. The same disease diagnosis can arise from very different roots in different people, so we don’t take a one-size-fits-all treatment approach, and we don’t stop at treatment of symptoms.
Integrative and Functional Medicine weave into conventional medical care to enhance the effectiveness of treatment and bring you insight and holistic support to rise beyond symptom and disease-management, into nourishing your healing process.”
Through Enlighten Health, Nadine works to restore feminine principles to the practice of healthcare, including nourishment, connection, relationship, holism, and natural healing allies such as plants, water, rest, even dreams and imagery. These are all part of healing wisdom often left out of conventional medicine.
Modern medicine is rooted in, and operates on, more masculine principles that are mechanistic, linear, high-tech, heroic and compartmentalized.
“Conventional medicine is immensely valuable for certain situations and illnesses,” Nadine explains. “But it is actually not very effective for chronic illness, which is what so many people now live with.”
That is because when symptoms are suppressed, so, too, is healing.
Nadine treats symptoms to bring relief, but only with the understanding that the root cause is very unique to each person, stemming from environmental exposures, nutritional deficiencies, genetic vulnerabilities, lifestyle factors and life history experiences.
“Whenever I sink into working with a patient, I reflect on the topographical maps we had in our classrooms when I was in elementary school,” Nadine says. “You could run your hands over the map and feel the elevated mountains and the valleys and rivers.”
And, so it is with clients. Nadine seeks to understand and honor the topography of illness and healing on each person’s individual map, focusing on how and why illness occurs.
Through a very thorough health history conversation with each patient, and sometimes physical exams and lab testing, Nadine tries to understand what a person’s symptoms are expressing and revealing, to explore the possible factors influencing these symptoms.
Nadine works collaboratively with each client to create a treatment plan that is as simple, nourishing and effective as possible, using evidence-based treatments that empower and resonate with the person who is healing. She wants each patient to be able to say, “Yes, this feels right to me.”
A treatment plan may include any combination of nutritional, botanical, supplements, mind-body techniques and self care practices, therapeutic bodywork and conventional medical treatments, as needed. Nadine can order labs and write prescriptions, if needed, because she is an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse in New Hampshire, in addition to her license as a Certified Nurse Midwife.
Nadine’s approach to health care is full of life and light, and also current and modern in the way true integrative medicine can be. She offers this expertise to her New Hampshire community through her office in downtown Peterborough at SHAKTI Healing Arts and to women everywhere through telehealth.
“Telehealth opens up expansive possibilities for working together from a distance, for being home if you need to be home, and for keeping costs down,” Nadine acknowledges.
The curiosity first piqued in Nadine’s childhood by her mother’s illness has led her to co-create an environment for healing to relieve countless people of their suffering. Her mother would be—as her children, grandchildren, family and friends are—very, very inspired by Nadine’s compassionate impact on this Earth.