FARMINGTON – A new health center serving the Farmington area opened a few months ago and offers a natural approach to health concerns. Combining scientific research and traditional knowledge in herbology, nutrition and body energetics, the owner, Dr. George De Lalio, says he creates personalized treatment plans to correct malfunctions within the body that cause disease.

De Lalio has been practicing natural health care for almost 20 years. He is a certified herbologist, clinical nutritionist, chiropractor and registered nurse. He also holds diplomate status with the American Academy of Pain Management. He has traveled throughout the world pursuing advanced studies in nutrition, herbology and the energetics of the body, including in China and Tibet. After spending two years in Canada on sabbatical studying primitive living skills and herbology of North American Indians, he and his two sons moved to the Farmington area five years ago and provided free health care for the needy. During that time, he became a Maine guide. Seeing a need for natural health care, he has opened this practice at 121 Broadway.

“Natural health care is getting back to basics,” he says. “Many of the most modern drugs have been derived from traditional knowledge about plants and herbs. The wonderful thing about herbs is that the side effects associated with drugs are avoided, with comparable effectiveness in many cases.”

He said a new model of health care is developing that is slowly being embraced by many medical doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, dentists and other health care professionals. This model is called functional medicine. The Institute for Functional Medicine defines it as a holistic, person-oriented approach that seeks the root cause of an illness by identifying how and where the body is malfunctioning and supporting it so that the illness no longer needs to show itself.

De Lalio can be reached at his office, Healthy By Nature! at 778-9700. He said most services are covered by most insurance plans and an initial consultation is complimentary.