The History of the 7 Natural Physician’s Program

The 7 Natural Physicians is a holistic health program that has been created by primary school teacher and health educator Trish Thomas.

The story told by Trish...
In 2003, after 20 years of being involved in both primary and secondary education (along with raising our three children) I left teaching and began working in partnership with my husband in our busy health clinic. I fulfilled many roles in the clinic ranging from cleaner to book keeper, receptionist to tea lady, remedial massage therapist to co-ordinator of the small group of staff we employed.

During 2003, at Rob’s request I developed a weight management course called Comfortable in my Jeans (or CIMjeans as it later became known) which was an attempt to help some of our patients address personal weight issues. CIMjeans was really designed to fill a gap in the community regarding a serious need for an academic, holistic approach to weight loss for adults. The 7 Natural Physicians was a foundational principle that was an integral part of the Cimjeans course. After several unsuccessful attempts to try and gain government support to run the program for the community we decided to run it ourselves. We did this many times over the next couple of years. This is how we advertised CIMjeans at the time:

"Comfortable in my Jeans" draws on Howard Gardner’s principles of multiple intelligences using colour, art, music, dialoguing, writing, mathematics and a kinaesthetic approach to addressing and solving weight associated problems. It is fun, inspiring, motivating and self empowering.

The interest grew and we ended up having many who participated in the course who didn’t have weight issues at all. They said it just sounded very educational and interesting. At the end of 2003 after seeing the benefits of this fairly simple holistic approach to weight loss, particularly amongst teenagers, I decided to create a children’s version of the program. I had been following the media coverage of the burgeoning obesity crisis at the time and saw that a holistic approach for obesity remediation was needed . I was lucky enough to be invited to trial the 7NP’s concept in one of the local primary schools (Mundingburra State Primary School) and ended up working with a great team of teachers. The 7NPs was adopted as the framework for their school health and physical education curriculum.

In 2005, the Townsville General Practice Network also supported the program and over the next 12 months I teamed up with a great physician from the Network  Dr Carole Reeve. Together we wrote up numerous funding proposals, went to countless meetings and were lucky to gain the interest of three principals and their staff from Garbutt, Rasmussen and Kelso State Primary Schools. They allowed us to run a pilot study in their schools which involved the implementation of the 7NP’s program into 5 classes. We discovered a significant deficit in student understanding of primary healthcare behaviours. (e.g. large percentages of children did not know how much sleep they should have each night; how much water they should drink each day and how much exercise they should do daily).

Thanks for being interested.......stay tuned as the 7NP’s unfolding story continues.

Take Care,

Trish