After completing her PHd, Verena spent a long time as an academic, but was always interested in a more ‘whole’ way of assessing health. “I was taught to look at each grain of sand when treating patients,” she says. “But I wanted to look at the whole beach, and how each grain is interconnected.”

While in New Zealand, she was fortunate to study the ancient Indian medical system, known as Ayurveda, with a visiting practitioner, which began to open her mind to a different way of thinking about wellness. Ayurveda, a lifestyle Verena herself was living, is not just about the body. The practice promotes that for whole health to occur, the physical, mental and emotional must all be aligned.
“I saw this while treating patients in clinic,” says Verena. “I was just practicing the nutritional sciences that I was taught, but I was seeing the benefits on my own health by living the Ayurvedic lifestyle, and addressing my emotional stressors and triggers.”

But the real shift began for Dr Verena after sadly losing one of her twin sons in-utero. She went on to give birth to a healthy baby boy, but was faced with another challenge, when her son wasn’t sleeping and started having anxiety attacks through the night. “It’s distressing when you’re a mum a can’t settle your child,” says Dr Verena. “Every one-to-two hours, he’d wake up screaming. After struggling for a year and consulting many doctors, who all said everything was fine, I decided to consult with a kinesiologist that I had seen during my pregnancy. I took my son to her and straightway she said, ‘Verena he is in shock because of the loss of his twin; his nervous system is completely distressed’. He was basically in a fight-flight free state.”

From there, the kinesiologist was able to help Verena’s son resolve the trauma and balance out his nervous system. Within two sessions, he was calm and sleeping through the night. “I was so intrigued that I thought, ‘I’m going to study this myself’,” says Dr Verena, who after training in neuro-training kinesiology for three years, started incorporating it into her own practice.

During this time, Verena also stopped working as a full-time academic at the university. As a mum, she admits she was wearing too many hats, and instead decided to follow her passion – helping people.

“For me, it was never enough to just prescribe people a dietary plan and supplements,” says Dr Verena. “I wanted to know the root cause of why these symptoms presented. It all starts, 99 per cent of the time from childhood. It’s your experiences that shape your health. I’m really interested in seeing what experiences you’ve had from conception until now that may have compromised your health. That’s what neuro-training is all about – you look at the unresolved physical, emotional and mental stress to identify imbalances, and how the mental/emotional balances affect the physical. It’s all intertwined.”

This is also where the gut-brain connection comes in. Neuro-training is response testing where practitioners use muscle monitoring, and the subconscious mind provides feedback that can identify and correct imbalances within the body. “It’s an incredible testing tool where you can identify stresses that you’re not even aware of,” says Dr Verena.

So, if you present with digestive issues to Dr Verena, what does a session actually look like? “It stems from chiropractic work,” says Dr Verena. “I work with one of the major muscles in the arm for stress testing. Using references – both written references and the body – I muscle test within the landscape of symptoms, and work to find the missing puzzle piece to identify undefined stresses.”

Clients describe it as, “like a psychology appointment where you talk about the issues, and raise awareness of how the issues are interconnected to physical symptoms, and then we resolve them through muscle testing,” says Dr Verena. “For example, someone comes in who struggles with emotional eating, I will identify the underlying stresses – basically the narrative that’s running subconsciously in your body and what experiences you had in childhood that compromised your stress regulation now affecting your gut. When I understand the emotional stresses affecting your physical body, we do corrections of all sorts – it can be an eye tracking or tapping. We then attach a correction to the concept you identified.”

As well as kinesiology, Verena uses food, lifestyle changes, supplements, and natural medicines as a support. Testing is always number one – bloods, tissue analysis, breath tests, for example, to understand what’s going on in a person’s physiology. “Then once you really know what’s going on physiologically you can use kinesiology, neuro-training to dive deeper into the emotional space,” she says. “We do a session on that, and then a session to resolve – we look at what is in your diet that is detrimental to you, what are the aggravators in your life, and then assess what you need more of to retain balance.”

This treatment is not ongoing, as results are usually seen between one to three sessions, depending on how much baggage a patient has. “A child, with not as much trauma as an adult, for example, could come in with chronic constipation and be fine after one session,” says Dr Verena.

To accompany Dr Verena’s solution-orientated philosophy and incorporate her love of fresh food, she is releasing a cookbook this winter, which she hopes will be easily accessible and one day used by integrative doctors as a practical solution to dietary issues. With over 100 recipes that promote brain health, gut health and vitality, the book, called Dr Verena’s Kitchen, aims to help individualise healing. The recipes, which mostly come from Verena’s life – from her grandmother’s fish soup to her mother-in-law’s Indian cooking – are all sugar-free, gluten-free and dairy-free, and most have a low FODmap and paleo version.

“I love cooking, I’m a total foodie,” says Dr Verena. “This is a cookbook for everybody, every day. The food can help a family or individual to sustain a very easy, quick, delicious way of eating for optimal health. I used to run cooking workshops and I saw how beneficial it was for people to learn in the kitchen when trying to change food habits. I’m so grateful that I can empower people by changing their health from a root-cause point of view, making it sustainable. It brings me the most joy.”