The Doctor Will See You Now - Dr. Lindsay Chimileski's Naturopathic Medicine Practice

Late this summer, I found myself seated in a doctor’s office. Nothing was wrong with me per se (at least nothing above baseline); I was there to talk with Dr. Lindsay Chimileski about her naturopathic medicine practice, Hawthorn Holistic Health, in Hamden, CT. Lindsay is a doctor who prescribes mushrooms (not those kinds) to help patients treat lifestyle and health ailments.

Lindsay first popped up on my radar when we would run into each other on the mushroom festival circuit. I distinctly remember at Luke Sarrantonio’s For the Love of Fungi Festival in 2023 when I presented on lesser known medicinal mushrooms of the northeast, and she followed with her own presentation on medicinal mushrooms. Let’s just say I was very happy to open for her rather than follow her.

Despite the difference in our powerpoint prowess, she was more than willing to sit down with me and discuss how she got interested in mushrooms while on her journey to becoming a doctor of naturopathic medicine.

Now, for the disclaimer: the point of this article is to highlight Lindsay, and how she incorporates her passion for mushrooms and botanic medicine into her everyday life. This is not medical advice. You have the ability to make your own informed decisions when it comes to your health and wellness, and perhaps Lindsay’s work will give you some added insight.

Lindsay in her office. Photo courtesy of Lindsay.

The Path to Naturopathy

Lindsay grew up in Newtown, CT as the youngest of four siblings — three older brothers. She developed a natural curiosity in plants as she played in the woods around her house. “We were always outside”, she said. In high school she worked at a nature center, but she hoped to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a social worker.

She got an internship at a mental health hospital where she worked for two summers before getting fatigued. Long hours, low morale, antiquated practices, the works. There had to be a better way to help people.

Her mom eventually found a newspaper clipping for a naturopathic medicine program that she wanted to give to Lindsay’s older brother, but Lindsay saw it and thought “I can be a doctor that talks about plants all day long?” She was sold.

Your point of view when you walk into Hawthorn Holistic Health, Lindsay’s practice in Hamden, Connecticut.

Naturopathic Medicine

Lindsay turned an advert in the newspaper into a Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine and a Master’s in acupuncture from the University of Bridgeport. You need a four-year degree with the typical pre-med prerequisites to enroll in an ND program, and Lindsay earned her Bachelor’s in Human Development and Family Studies from UConn (go Huskies). Naturopathic doctors are licensed doctors in about half the states in the country, and Connecticut has one of the oldest licensing programs.

Naturopathic medicine differs from conventional, allopathic medicine (that of your typical primary care physician) in that the latter usually addresses the symptoms of illness with pharmaceutical treatment or surgery, while the former focuses on treating the cause of the symptoms through holistic (whole-body), natural treatments. These treatments range from plant and fungal medicine to acupuncture, sauna, and meditation.

There are similarities and differences in ND and traditional MD programs. The first couple of years will focus on physiology, anatomy, and other constants of the human condition, but the programs diverge in treatment modalities with NDs focusing on botanical medicine, nutrition, and other non-pharmaceutical remedies.

A lot of naturopaths will treat the same case entirely differently, the same algorithms and “best practices” don’t exist as they do in the world of allopathic medicine. Instead, each naturopath relies on their specific skill set — ranging from nutrition and botanical medicine to chiropractic manipulation and lifestyle practices.

“Greenallopathy” is also a thing, however. An example would be an ND prescribing a St. John’s-wort pill to treat depression compared to an MD prescribing an SSRI. Both address the symptoms of the depression, but not the cause.

The majority of the room in her office is open space for meditation, yoga, and other modalities that reconnect you to your body. Photo courtesy of Lindsay.

In some states like Vermont and Washington, NDs can have full scope of practice and act as primary care providers. This means these NDs can prescribe conventional pharmaceuticals in addition to their naturopathic medicines. In Connecticut, however, NDs can’t prescribe pharmaceuticals. Lindsay prefers this as it lets her work exclusively with her teas, tinctures, and other botanical or fungal products.

Unfortunately, the program at the University of Bridgeport has been shuttered due to declining enrollment, and that leaves only six accredited schools of naturopathic medicine in the country (there is a program in Toronto, but the closest American program is now in Chicago with the other five all on the west coast).

After graduating from UB, she worked for a couple of naturopathic doctors in Connecticut, Dr. Jody Noe and Dr. Jim Sensenig, before she opened up her own practice, Hawthorn Holistic Health, in 2017.

The workspace where Lindsay crafts her medicines.

Her Practice

Nutrition, acupuncture, and botanic medicine are Lindsay’s core disciplines. She strives to help patients enact their lifestyle changes through empowered education (the patient understands the treatment and why they’re being prescribed a certain tea, tincture, or lifestyle modification).

The first visit covers everything from eating habits and bowel movements to past traumas and family life. She’ll listen to a patient’s chief complaint, but then spends a lot of time on their lifestyle. Digestion, bowel movements, reproductive health review, sleep, energy, happiness are all accessed. “Do you have creative outlets? Do you have community?”, she’ll ask.

At times she’ll take more of a therapist’s approach to meet the patient where they’re at, and see how they can incorporate botanic medicine or lifestyle alterations to address their current ailments. She finds that the patient often knows what they need to do, and her job is to just help them. A patient might say “I know I have to quit drinking”, and her job is to figure out and help address the lifestyle habits that lead the patient to drink.

The healing modality is patient specific. “Is a tincture the best?” Well, are you someone who will take multiple tinctures a day, or do you prefer tea. Are you averse to medicine that tastes bad? She finds whatever the patient will be able to take regularly, or whatever lifestyle modification they’ll be able to easily adapt to their life, is the best. She does try to avoid pill capsules as they’re not a natural way to ingest medicine (consuming the mushroom or plant in their actual form as a food or tea would be more natural).

She provides the patient with a summary at the end of the visit that could include a few herbal prescriptions or nutritional changes, and sometimes even referrals to a therapist or personal trainer.

Incorporating Mushrooms

During her naturopathic education, she received a basic introduction to mushrooms that highlighted the medicinal benefits of oysters, shiitakes, and other common mushrooms. She started to ramp up her own self-education when she would forage plants for her own medicine, and this quickly progressed to mushrooms as well. After learning and working with these wild mushrooms, she began to teach about them.

She was already teaching botanical medicine classes at the University of Bridgeport, so she began to incorporate mushrooms into her classes as well. This progressed to lecturing on medicinal mushrooms at local herbal medicine and naturopathic conferences, and she also teamed up with Will Crosby from Fungi Ally in the Berkshires to offer medicinal mushroom classes.

Lindsay talking about what appears to be Queen Anne’s lace or wild carrot (Daucus carota) on a mushroom walk we hosted after our conversation.

Mushroom Products

Everyone’s drinking mushroom coffee these days, a byproduct of the recent health and wellness zeitgeist that is, hopefully, going to spawn a healthier population. These products aren’t without their concerns, of course. Sprinkling a little bit of ten different mushrooms into a morning beverage sounds good, but then you end up taking such a small fraction of each that the amounts, and purported benefits, are negligible.

A hot button issue in the field of medicinal mushrooms is whether a product is more effective if it contains mycelium (the body of the fungus), or the fruiting bodies (the mushroom itself). Paul Stamets, whose Fungi Perfecti products you can find stocked at your local CVS/Walgreens, will adamantly defend his company’s use of mycelium (which is both cheaper and easier to incorporate into tinctures and extracts). The fungus needs time and energy to produce the mushroom, but the mycelium can grow rather quickly on grain which is then dried and powdered (grain included) into a medicinal “mushroom” product.

Lindsay lands on the mushroom side of the mushroom vs mycelium debate, and she falls back on how mushrooms have been used for millenia. People eat, tincture, and make teas out of mushrooms, ingesting the active polysaccharides and beta-glucans that convey a variety of health benefits, they don’t peel bark and collect tiny strands of mycelium for consumption.

While she does forage for medicinal mushrooms, she isn’t able to forage enough to reliably prescribe these wild mushrooms to patients, so she mostly uses those for herself. The powdered mushrooms she prescribes to patients are from Nammex. Organic, outdoor-grown mushrooms from China, where large-scale mushroom cultivation has been practiced for centuries (and is cheaper, that too). She sources her mushroom tinctures from Herbal Vitality and her dried mushrooms from Mountain Rose Herbs as well.

The medicinal mushroom display in Lindsay’s office. Photo by Lindsay, art by her patient coordinator and office artist, Sarah Houde.

Different mushrooms possess different compounds which act on the body differently, but in general, mushrooms are a good source of minerals and antioxidants like Selenium, Zinc, Vitamin B, and Vitamin D2. They’re an easy way to introduce more antioxidants to your diet, boost your immune system, stabilize an over-reactive immune system, and balance your lipids to boost cardiovascular health.

Lion’s Mane (Hericium) and Reishi (Ganoderma) are the two mushrooms she prescribes the most. She’ll give patients Lion’s Mane for brain health and longevity, as it has compounds that stimulate Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in your brain, but it can also be used for bone health and mood stabilization as well. Reishi has a “balancing, gentle but powerful impact on vitality”, and can be used to treat anxiety and brain fog, as well as support cardiovascular health and the immune system. Maitake (Grifola frondosa) can be effective for patients with fertility issues, and Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) is used as an immune booster for patients that are getting sick too often.

The duration of these prescriptions is both mushroom and patient specific, but can range from a few months to a few years. She encourages patients to take days off, but some (like those with Lyme Disease) immediately notice when they stop using the mushroom. Regardless, there are check-ins every three to six months, and a lot of prescriptions correlate with seasonal and constitutional changes in the patient (some people may be prescribed Cordyceps for the active, yang energy of the summer).

Even if you don’t have access to these medicinal mushrooms, which do grow quite commonly in our woods, she said even eating button mushrooms from the store (cooked, not raw) will be beneficial for our overall health.

The in-office sauna is also a prescribed treatment for some patients. This and acupuncture are physical treatments that help patients reconnect with their bodies.

Healthspan vs Lifespan

Two concepts that are becoming more prominent in today’s health and wellness discussions are lifespan versus healthspan. Lifespan is simply the number of years an individual lives, whereas healthspan is the number of healthy years lived.

Modern medicine tends to focus on extending lifespan while often disregarding the quality of those years added, particularly those at the end of one’s life. It might behoove us to start incorporating practices and medicines that focus on healthspan, as well.

Figure 3 from a study out of the Mayo Clinic (Garmany, 2024) that depicts the US with the highest discrepancy in lifespan (years lived) and healthspan (healthy years lived).

A Concern With Allopathic Medicine

Some of Lindsay’s new patients are people that come to her after experiencing frustrations with the care they’ve received from allopathic practitioners. She also gets frustrated herself with the treatment patients have been prescribed, particularly when it comes to women’s health.

One of the most questionable aspects of the contemporary medical system that Lindsay encounters is the normalization of prescriptions that are prescribed for a large part, if not the entirety, of one’s life.

She used the example of women who are prescribed birth control in middle school for acne, but then are on it until their mid-thirties and only come off the medication when they want to get pregnant. Then these women seek a fertility specialist if they’re unable to get pregnant within three to six months, but Lindsay notes it can take up to a year or two for one’s hormones to regulate after getting off medication.

This is more an indictment on the lack of health and hormone education in our society than anything else. These medications can have a tangible, necessary application at a certain time or place in life, but where is the off ramp? A lot of people don’t realize there are different options to these prescriptions, and end up on hormone-altering medications for a large percentage of their life. Part of Lindsay’s job is to discuss the options.

She’ll ask “What are your goals with this medication?”, “Do your medications work well?”, and “Do you know why you are taking them?” to gauge her patients’ understanding of their own medications — questions that aren’t always prompted by the traditional doctors who originally prescribed them. She won’t outright tell someone to taper off their prescription (only the prescribing doctor can do that), but she can give them tools and natural alternative approaches if that’s the path they want to pursue.

Featuring books from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gabor Maté, and Ramm Das, her waiting room entertainment is a far cry from the random issues of Golf Digest characteristic of so many physicians’ offices. Mushroom ID books, coloring books, stamps, and community art books encourage folks to put down their phones and engage their creativity while they wait.

Our Prescription

At the end of our conversation, I asked her if she had one piece of health advice that could be applicable for all of us (after we spent the past hour talking about how health is so specific to the individual).

She said, “Do something that brings you awe everyday.”

She emphasized the importance of introducing novelty to each day and to keep learning. Don’t get too stuck in your ways.

The easiest way she finds awe is by going outside. Nature is dynamic and changing. It’s the best teacher. Whether it’s something as broad as the seasons changing, or something very immediate like a bird flying overhead or ants scuttling at your feet. It’s easy to be inspired by, and to learn from, the natural world.

She encourages folks to find a few trails that they can walk frequently. You will see how the habitat changes right before your eyes at different times of day, in different weather, and throughout different seasons. Woodland magic in realtime. It’s the best way to connect with nature, and the best way to connect with plant and fungal medicines.

As we navigate our own personal health and wellness, and the barrage of different products, foods, and treatments intended to maximize them, it’s nice to have people like Lindsay who can take a step back and look at the whole picture. In the same way different species intimately interact and depend on each other in an environment, different systems in the body and our lives rely on, and influence, one another. You pull one string and it pulls on ten.

If you want to know more about Lindsay, or even look into a consultation, you can do so through her website. In a world of information overload and confusing directives about our health and wellness, it can be comforting to have a doctor distill it down to “eat more mushrooms and go outside”.

References:

1. Garmany A, Terzic A. Global Healthspan-Lifespan Gaps Among 183 World Health Organization Member States. JAMA Netw Open. 2024 Dec 2;7(12):e2450241. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.50241. PMID: 39661386; PMCID: PMC11635540.

2. Neustadt, John. (Host). 2021, November 5. Medicinal Mushrooms with Dr. Lindsay Chimileski (No.83). Delivering Health. NBI Health.