SLP 536: Medicine with Heart with Dr Michelle Woolhouse
In this heartfelt conversation, Kim sits down with Dr Michelle Woolhouse, an integrative and holistic medical doctor, to explore self-love and health. Together, they reflect on the growing need for deeper, more human centred care in a medical system that often prioritises speed and quick fixes. Michelle shares her personal journey from traditional training to a more holistic practice, describing how burnout, time pressure, and societal expectations have pushed medicine away from empathy, depth and meaningful connection.
Kim and Michelle discuss how true healing requires looking beneath symptoms to understand trauma, emotional patterns, and the body’s innate wisdom. Michelle explains why longer, more intentional consultations allow space for this depth, and the two explore how early life experiences shape adult wellbeing. Their conversation also touches on the changing perception of doctors, the rise of integrative medicine, and the importance of restoring empathy and humanity in healthcare.
They explore the intelligence of the heart, the role of awe and nature in healing, and the need to honour rest and resilience. Both women emphasise the value of embracing discomfort as a catalyst for growth, and Michelle shares how self-love can be cultivated even when it feels difficult. Sometimes beginning with the love we receive from others.
The episode weaves together reflections on aging, personal development, intuition, and the profound healing available through connection with nature. Kim and Michelle close with mutual appreciation and a commitment to supporting people to trust their bodies, reconnect with themselves and navigate midlife with compassion and confidence.
About Michelle
Dr Michelle Woolhouse is an integrative GP, thought leader, and visionary in whole-person medicine. With nearly 3 decades of clinical experience, she combines the best of science, psychology, and spirituality to help people rediscover balance, vitality, and meaning in their health journeys.
Michelle founded and built Whole Medicine, one of Victoria’s largest and most respected integrative medical clinics, which she successfully sold after more than a decade of growth and innovation. She went on to co-found Vively, a digital health platform that has supported over 30,000 Australians, providing real-time insights into how lifestyle choices shape metabolic health.
A passionate communicator, Michelle co-hosts the acclaimed FX Medicine podcast — with more than 385,000 downloads — and was recognised by BioCeuticals with the Best Broadcast Award for The Good Doctors Podcast in 2017. Her lifelong commitment to the advancement of integrative and lifestyle medicine was honoured by The National Institute of Integrative Medicine with the Outstanding Achievement and Contribution Award in the field of Integrative Medicine in 2019.
She is the founder of Enliven Retreats, transformative experiences designed for personal and professional renewal, and the author of The Wonder Within: A Heart-Led Playbook for the Anxious, Stressed and Burnt-Out.
As a highly sought-after speaker, Dr Woolhouse is known for her warmth, wisdom, and visionary thinking. Her current work focuses on perimenopause, burnout, and mind-body medicine, where she continues to empower others to reconnect with their innate capacity for healing and wholeness.
Her definition of Self Love is: Self love is a deep respect for the opportunity that our human life brings.
Her favourite quote is from: Carl Jung -The constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.
Links to follow:
Website: https://www.drmichellewoolhouse.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.michellewoolhouse/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theholisticgp
Michelle’s book The Wonder Within https://www.drmichellewoolhouse.com/products/the-wonder-within
Quotes:
I started medical school at 17 and have dedicated most of my life to health and wellbeing.
I love humans, people in general and stories that people have.
At the core of every consultation is the human being.
We are part of nature, we belong to nature.
I think most people go into medicine with a fairly significant love of humans.
The training and those early years in medicine are very gruelling and they often can wound doctors quite enormously.
Burnout in medicine is around some 70%.
We have lost reverence, for the magic that occurs in slow time.
People are starting to value depth over a surface quick fix.
There is a level of expertise that with training and through 10, 15, 20, 30 years of sitting with humans at their most vulnerable.
You are listening to in between the words.
Maybe you got your freeze response not even from anything that happened. Maybe it is just acknowledging that that freeze response was a response by your forebears to survive.
We can only take our patients as far as we are willing to go ourselves.
Western medicine is Ayurvedic medicine. It is a traditional medicine. It has very holistic imprints in its history.
Life is also medicine.
Our heart is fully functioning with its own nervous system at four weeks when the embryo is four weeks old.
The heart is like the core receptor.
The heart can learn, remember, sense and feel, all without input from the brain.
Awe is the fastest interconnection to the heart space and we should be seeking awe at our peril.
One of the things I feel we have lost is this deep respect for rest and balance and with that we lose our recovery time.
Until we get that back there is that recipe for overwhelm, over productivity, hyper vigilance and high stress.
We are teaching resilience skills rather than in the trust that the body is inherently resilient and that it does have wisdom, and we know what to do.
When we sit in comfort and don’t do these things we are at risk of losing a sense of edge and growth.
You want to be growing until the day you die.
To honour oneself is to honour life itself.
I love playing around with being a receiver of life.
Leaning into the love of others to help bring it home to yourself.
One thing that I think is missing in everybody’s personal journey is this sense of thrusting their own body wisdom and that does come with tremendous practice.
In order to garner trust, it is something that grows very slowly and can be lost very quickly.
We want to be kind in real time.
Introspection is this almost like the going within to understand that body wisdom.
To be human is to embrace the dichotomies. To embrace the extremes and understand the paradox of what it means to be human.
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MUSIC INTRO & OUTRO
Many thanks to Wes and Charlotte Carr – https://wesleydeanmusic.com/
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