Postpartum University® Podcast

Sacred Meets Science: The Real Reason Providers Enter Postpartum Care EP 232

• Maranda Bower, Postpartum Nutrition Specialist

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For so many postpartum care providers—from doulas and lactation consultants to doctors and therapists—the journey into this field is less of a convenient career path and often, more of a spiritual calling based on deeply personal experiences.  

Maranda's getting right to the heart of the matter. She reveals the shocking truth about the gaps in women's healthcare and shares why so many new moms are forced to seek answers from online influencers instead of their own medical providers. She's also opening sharing her 15-year journey of creating a comprehensive resource that bridges ancient wisdom with modern, evidence-based science. This isn't just about a career path; it's about a revolution in postpartum care driven by personal experience and a passionate mission to ensure no mother is left to struggle alone.

Check out the episode on the blog HERE:  https://postpartumu.com/podcast/sacred-meets-science-the-real-reason-providers-enter-postpartum-care-ep-232/


Key time stamps: 

  • 0:02: The common origin story of postpartum care providers.
  • 3:34: The uncomfortable truths about women's healthcare and why it's failing new mothers.
  • 5:02: Why desperate mothers turn to influencers for answers instead of their own doctors.
  • 6:55: The 15-year journey of creating a comprehensive postpartum nutrition manual.
  • 13:50: Blending ancient wisdom with modern science to reclaim postpartum care.
  • 17:00: The importance of integrating traditional practices into our modern, fast-paced world.
  • 19:19: How experienced providers, after becoming mothers, realize the gaps in their own training.
  • 23:57: Information on how to access the manual and the Postpartum Nutrition Certification Program.

NEXT STEPS:

🎒Download the free Postpartum Restoration Method™ Assessment Tool & Guide for Providers
🔔Sign up for the Postpartum Nutrition Certification Waitlist

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📱Connect on Instagram!
📚Get a Copy of the BOOK: Reclaiming Postpartum Wellness
🧠Perinatal Mental Health Certificate Training & Additional Courses for Providers & Postpartum Professionals

Speaker 1:

The postpartum care system is failing, leaving countless mothers struggling with depression, anxiety and autoimmune conditions. I'm Miranda Bauer and I've helped thousands of providers use holistic care practices to heal their clients at the root. Subscribe now and join us in addressing what modern medicine overlooks, so that you can give your clients real, lasting solutions for lifelong wellbeing. If I asked a hundred postpartum providers how they got in this field, somewhere around 85 of them would give me some version of the same story, and it goes something like this Well, I had my baby and the support was not there. My doctor didn't understand what was going through me and I felt so alone and I struggled for months before I finally found help. And then I realized I never want another mother to go through what I went through, or I get this one too. I've been supporting women after birth for years in my practice, but when I had my own baby, I saw everything else that I have been missing. I questioned everything that I've done or said with my patients. It became my mission to learn everything I wasn't taught about in medical school. I'm Miranda Bauer, and for the last 15 years, I have worked with hundreds maybe even thousands at this point of providers in the postpartum space, and here's what I've learned the origin story, where we've come from as providers, is both our greatest strength and our biggest blind spot, and today I want to talk about the uncomfortable truths about how most of us entered this field, why the healthcare system is failing mothers so badly that they are seeking answers from influencers, and what happens when someone spends 15 years building the expertise that should have existed all along. Because I just completed something that represents a massive feat in the entire field, something I have never imagined that I would have created when I started my journey so many years ago, and it's got me reflecting. In this episode, I've just been spending so much time like looking back at how far we've all come and how much further we still need to go, honestly. So let me start here with saying this is not pretty right. Women's healthcare it's quite a joke, I'm sorry to say. I'm not sorry to say it is. Women's healthcare hasn't been studied, it's been ignored, it's dismissed, it's treated as an afterthought to men's healthcare for decades, and we have proof. I actually just posted a study in my Instagram on how the money that we have from our federal government goes to healthcare areas, different healthcare areas, and only 7% of that money 7% out of 100% goes to women-specific health issues. When women-specific health issues are what's taking up well over 80% of the sick healthcare Isn't that insane?

Speaker 1:

When a woman goes to her doctor with hormonal issues and fatigue and mood changes and hair loss and weight gain and sleep problems and autoimmune symptoms, what does she get? Always birth control and an antidepressant oftentimes both right. And that's not healthcare, that's symptom suppression. When a new mom is struggling with postpartum depression or anxiety or rage or autoimmune issues, what's the standard protocol? It's an antidepressant and a referral to therapy.

Speaker 1:

There's no investigation into nutrition, no understanding of the massive physiological depletion that's occurring in pregnancy and breastfeeding, no understanding of what's happening to her nervous system or the support systems that are in place or maybe even the traumatic events that may have occurred during that time. There's no comprehensive approach to actual recovery. And here's the thing. This isn't the fault of individual doctors. They weren't trained in. This Medical school spends maybe a few hours on postpartum mental health, if we're lucky right, many, many that it doesn't even. It doesn't even touch that for many of them. And zero time, no time on postpartum nutrition or the complex biochemistry of recovery. They're doing the best they can with the limited tools that they were given.

Speaker 1:

And moms are suffering. And when they can't get answers from their own healthcare providers, where do they go? They go online. They find influencers who say, like I struggled, like you did and here's what saved me, and then suddenly, like these one-off solutions, become the gospel for thousands of desperate moms. The problem isn't that these influencers are necessarily bad people. Yes, many of them are just out there to make a buck. I get it, I know it, I see it all the time. The real problem is that they're offering singular solutions based on singular experiences, to complex, multifaceted problems that require comprehensive understanding, and you cannot blame moms for seeking these answers. When your doctors hand you a prescription and send you on your way, and someone online is offering hope and understanding and this detailed protocol, where are you going to turn? That's exactly why so many of us have become providers. We experienced this healthcare failure firsthand. We became mothers, then suddenly saw the massive glaring gaps in care. We realized that what's been told for us as normal was actually preventable and treatable, and most of us, especially those who've become specialized providers we start seeking training, real training, evidence-based, research-backed training and then that's how people find us at Postpartum University because they know there has to be more, there has to be a better way, there has to be a place they can go to to get solid information on postpartum, and here's what happened recently.

Speaker 1:

I've been reflecting on this so so much in this whole story because I just completed the postpartum nutrition manual. This is 360 plus pages. It is a comprehensive guide. It's taken me over five years to write and it's finished. I seriously, I seriously cannot believe that this is done, and I've been thinking about, like when I first started this journey, how incredibly different the landscape was back then.

Speaker 1:

This was before influencer era as we know it today. This was when postpartum depression was still like. It was taboo. We didn't talk about it, and I remember being one of the few people who were willingly like talking about postpartum struggles openly, and the response from women was often like silence. Like, are you, are you serious, are you bringing this up? Or? Like, am I allowed to talk about this? Like, is this okay, right? There was discomfort. There was no field anywhere that would give me the answers I was seeking. From my own postpartum experiences, not.

Speaker 1:

I knew becoming a doctor would never cover postpartum care, and not in any meaningful way. Medical school does not touch it. And midwives they have this. These crazy hours. I felt like they were like the superstar of the world, but they were very focused primarily on birth, not the months and years of recovery afterward, and so the closest thing that I could find was becoming a doula, and this was before postpartum doulas really took off as a specialty.

Speaker 1:

I entered the field right when they started making certifications in that and I got certified in that too. I got certified in everything, but even then that didn't address the complex nutritional and biochemistry and neuro, psychological and like all these aspects of postpartum recovery that I knew as a biology student, as somebody who's obsessed with this. This was all part of the puzzle, and so I that's what I did. I obsessed over it Like I did what every biology major student would do at the time. I was seeking out every certification, every training, every piece of research I could get on my hands on. I was taking classes. I have more college credit than is socially acceptable. I was collecting puzzle pieces from dozens of different fields and I was trying to create this comprehensive picture that didn't exist anywhere else, and I will tell you I do not recommend it. I am still paying that debt today.

Speaker 1:

I'm telling you this was not casual learning. This was years of intensive study and trial and error with clients and myself, and going deep into, you know, the chemistry and biology and endocrinology and nutrition, and taking tons of classes to complete my degrees, on top of certifications and birth conferences and independent research. These are fields that barely acknowledge postpartum recovery as a distinct physiological state, and so it's like taking pieces from it. It was, like you know, reading an entire book about birth and then being there for the last chapter on postpartum and I was. I was working with moms at the time too. I was seeing what worked and what didn't. I was constantly refining my understanding and reading research papers until my eyes burned, and taking my background in biology and expanding it into territories that most people never even venture into.

Speaker 1:

And all of this was because there was no comprehensive resource. There was no textbook, there was no manual, there was no systemic and systematic approach that addressed the full spectrum of postpartum recovery. Everything was scattered and incomplete or just plain wrong, right, just plain wrong, just plain wrong, right, just plain wrong. So completing the postpartum nutrition manual it feels so surreal like over 15 years of work, five years writing it, like taking everything that I've learned, not just from my own four vastly different postpartum experiences, but from the 15 years of working with thousands of mothers and hundreds of providers. So when I started writing it I had no idea it would become this massive. But as I began like documenting everything and really expanding the postpartum nutrition certification program Like that was the big thing, like I was adding so much and people were coming into the training, I'm like, oh, I want to learn more about this, I want to go deeper in this, or they would have questions. Right, we always had Q&As every other week and we still do and what they would come up with and their questions and the changing landscape too. Right, as we talk more about like these different areas and as we understand more about the postpartum body or how food affects us, like the science has grown, thankfully, thank God, although it's still in the baby stages. All of these components had to come together and so we actually we redid the entire postpartum nutrition certification program very recently. It's so freaking comprehensive and then we got it accredited, so that's super exciting. And now we have this manual.

Speaker 1:

It was like the collection of everything that was put into all of my work over the last 15 years. So I had no idea. I had no idea that it was going to be this big. I am just like realizing how much knowledge has been accumulated over these years. It has kind of represents like something that should have existed when I struggled through my first postpartum experience. It's the resource I wish I had when I desperately was seeking answers and finding only scattered pieces of information. But even more than that, I think it represents the integration of ancient wisdom and modern science, because the comprehensive approach to postpartum recovery that has had to be, you know, built from scratch. Was it actually from scratch? No, not at all. Like.

Speaker 1:

Traditional cultures understood this. They had all of these things. They knew the recovery requiring, you know, specific foods and specific support and timeframes for healing, and all of these different things. They have their own protocols, as we call them. So what's new, though, is taking that traditional wisdom and validating it with biology and chemistry, and nutrition and science, and understanding not that it's not just warming foods that help postpartum recovery, but why they help from a metabolic perspective.

Speaker 1:

Not that community support matters, but how isolation affects stress, hormones, brain rewiring and neurotransmitters, and even milk production, and it was like my intention with this was like Dr Joe did, the founder of functional medicine. He took ancient wisdom, wisdom that had been healing people for thousands of years, and he merged it into the modern language of science. He gave it a language that doctors already understood, so that he could blend and bridge both worlds the science and the sacred. And that's what I really wanted to do with this manual. I can see that I was essentially like reclaiming this ancient knowledge while building it up with modern understanding. So, taking my biology background, my lived experiences, my deep dive into research and years of working with diverse clients, to really restore what we should have never have lost, what we should have never have lost and completing this manual makes me realize how far we've come, not just for me personally, but for all of us, all of us who are working to reclaim what we knew before the medical system took over and turned birth and postpartum into pathology instead of the sacred natural processes that they are.

Speaker 1:

We really don't need to systematize postpartum recovery. We need to remember what we knew before the system convinced us we didn't know anything. Women have been recovering for millennia. Traditional cultures have had comprehensive approaches to postpartum care that modern medicine has largely abandoned. We had the 40-day lying in. We had warming foods, community support, understanding that recovery takes time, and specific nutrients and specific ways of being and getting care specific nutrients and specific ways of being and getting care.

Speaker 1:

But I also know that in our modern world, we can't just go backward, and I think that's what a lot of people really feel this is is, if we just go back to that, it would be going backward and also like we've gotten ourselves in this pickle where we are so busy. So go, go, go go. We're all working. We all have these insanely crazy lifestyles. And how do we do that? Again, right, how do we provide care to our friends and our aunties and all of the people around us that need this care when we are struggling and need this care? Right, we need somebody else to come in and give us the care because we're falling apart. Right? How in the world are we going to go out of our own homes, which feels like a chaotic mess, and help somebody else in theirs? Right? How can we do that? Like, that feels for so many of us so impossible. That feels for so many of us so impossible.

Speaker 1:

And so we need to take this ancient wisdom and blend it with the modern science and see how that can teach us and move us forward, much like Dr Joe did when he founded functional medicine. He took that traditional healing practices and he merged them with scientific method and the modern research and he made it to a field that is doable in today's modern world. And that's what I've done my best to do here. I'm not comparing myself to Dr Joe. He is like absolutely incredible, exceptional. If you don't know who he is, please go do your research and find all of his amazing resources. It's something that I aspire to be.

Speaker 1:

And taking all of that in for postpartum recovery, what traditional cultures understood, what we instinctively know about postpartum and validating it with all of the science and research put together in one place, with all of the science and research put together in one place. And when I work with providers now I see this constantly. Some come to me because they became providers after their own difficult postpartum experiences. But increasingly I'm seeing providers who are already in practice nurses and doctors and lactation consultants and therapists. They became mothers themselves after being in practice and then suddenly saw these massive gaps in their own training. I see lactation consultants who thought they understood breastfeeding challenges until they experienced them personally and then realized how much of their training missed about the nutritional foundation of milk production, right, for example. And I see doctors who were comfortable prescribing antidepressants until they experienced postpartum depression themselves and realized there had to be another way, like there has to be some more options available. I see therapists who specialize in postpartum mental health until they had their own babies and understood for the first time how much biology and nutrition affect mood and recovery. And I see pelvic floor physical therapists who thought they understood the mechanics until they experienced the full body depletion that affects everything about postpartum healing. That much more you know.

Speaker 1:

And so these providers. They are already expertises, they are already in the field, they are doing the hard work, but motherhood opened their eyes to how incomplete their training was when it came to truly supporting postpartum recovery. For most people, right. This obviously is not the case for everyone, but they see the gaps in traditional healthcare. They experienced firsthand how inadequate the standard approaches are and they are looking for training that bridges what they learned in their original education with the comprehensive understanding that mothers actually need. And, of course, there are also incredible human beings that I've met in this field doing the most amazing work, and they don't have kids. I want to shout out to them too my midwife is one of those many providers. We don't have to have kids in this space to do the incredible things that we are seeing here. But this is exactly why providers find their way to postpartum university because they know there has to be more than what they learned in nursing school or medical school or their original certification programs. Some know because they lived it as patients. Others know because they became mothers while already being providers and suddenly saw their own limitations. And when these providers get comprehensive training, when they take their professional background and expand it with this deeper understanding of postpartum recovery, that's when magic happens. They become the provider their communities desperately need. They can offer what traditional healthcare typically cannot provide.

Speaker 1:

And the manual I just completed. This is not just my achievement. It represents what becomes possible when someone commits to reclaiming ancient wisdom while building it up with modern scientific understanding. I know so many of you are out there feeling beat up, feeling pushed down, seeing so much of the hate that goes on on like social media when it comes to this modern science versus this alternative way of thinking or what quote unquote feels alternative, which is actually the original. I get it. It is so hard to be in this world right now doing the work that you're doing, but I'm telling you, continue, because when these achievements happen, they literally change the way we function in our world, and when we heal the mothers, we heal the world, and that's what we so deeply need right now.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I know many of you might be asking how do I get my hands on this manual? It is only available for those who complete the postpartum nutrition certification program. It is the backbone to our certification program, so that's where everybody will be able to get it, and it's really filling the gap that's driving women to seek answers from people who are not qualified, like influencers, to accept inadequate care from traditional healthcare. And by having something like this a tool on our side, we are becoming experts here and being able to support women in a way in which they've not experienced before and that they're so desperately seeking. Because here's the truth.

Speaker 1:

Mothers deserve approaches that honor the sacred nature of postpartum recovery while being grounded in solid science. They deserve comprehensive, delivered care by providers who understand both the traditional wisdom and the biology and the physiology and the chemistry and everything in between, the spiritual journey and the science behind that. They deserve providers who understand they don't need to invent new approaches to postpartum care. Right, you don't have time for that. I have already done that. I've spent the last 15 years doing that and we need to remember what we knew and elevate that in what we've learned.

Speaker 1:

When I think about where we started, when I was like cobbling together information from dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens probably hundreds of different sources, like when postpartum depression was whispered about rather than discussed openly, when there was no comprehensive training available. And look where we are now. It's remarkable. We've begun to reclaim what traditional cultures knew about postpartum recovery. We've validated ancient wisdom with modern research. We've trained thousands of providers who are now serving their communities with an understanding that integrates both science and sacred approaches to healing. And we're not done. The fact that mothers are still desperately seeking answers online, that they're still not getting comprehensive care from traditional healthcare providers that tells me we still have so much work to do.

Speaker 1:

Every provider who joins this work, who commits to understanding both the ancient wisdom and the modern science, is part of reclaiming postpartum care. They're part of restoring what mothers have always deserved that comprehensive support that honors both the sacred journey of motherhood and the very real physiological needs of recovery. Your story got you here, whether that story is your own difficult postpartum experience or your realization, as a provider, that your training has massive gaps. But your commitment to understanding both the ancient wisdom and the modern science will determine how well you can serve the mothers in your community. Need you someone who honors their sacred nature of their bodies and their body's wisdom and the postpartum recovery, while understanding all of these other components? Who respect traditional wisdom while being grounded in current research? That wisdom exists today it exists and the modern research supports that all of the ancient wisdom that has been in existence for some time and the comprehensive approaches that have been developed and tested.

Speaker 1:

This is here, it's now, and the only question is are you ready to be a part of reclaiming postpartum care for what it is and what it always meant to be? Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to see you next time. Thanks so much for being a part of this crucial conversation. I know you're dedicated to advancing postpartum care and, if you're ready to dig deeper, come join us on our newsletter, where I share exclusive insights, resources and the latest tools to help you make a lasting impact on postpartum health. Sign up at postpartumu the letter ucom which is in the show notes and if you found today's episode valuable, please leave a review to help us reach more providers like you. Together, we're building a future where mothers are fully supported and thriving.

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Maranda Bower

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