This is your journey
The Kintsugi Health way
KINTSUGI (also known as KINTSUKOROI) | The ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with precious metals like liquid gold, liquid silver or gold powdered lacquer. By highlighting the imperfections, the once broken piece is turned into something unique and valuable, stronger and with more beauty than before.
Kintsugi Health is about resilience – the ability to get up and to put yourself back together again when life pulls the rug from under your feet. It’s about a healthy body and a healthy mind – mending broken thoughts, repairing damaged foundations, changing unhelpful habits.
Kintsugi Health is about your health story – it’s about the good and the not-so-good chapters, it’s about taking control of the story line and re-writing the plot.
Using the principles of lifestyle medicine, our aim is to help patients change what they do and how they think, to provide a healthier foundation for their health.
We apply the principles of functional medicine to repair the imbalances caused by a damaged foundation, and to optimise cell health and function.
About the Kintsugi Health way of healthcare
Welcome To Kintsugi Health
My name is Dr Nelda Swart and I’m the Founder of Kintsugi Health. I qualified as a medical doctor in 1986 and have worked in mainstream medicine as a GP until 2018.
It was my love for people and their unique life stories, as well as a frustration with the limitations imposed by regular 15 minute consultations, that led me to open up my own slow-medicine practice in 2018. I discovered functional medicine soon afterwards and knew that this is the way I want to practice.
I have been overwhelmed by the number of patients interested in a holistic root-cause focused approach to their health problems. I soon realised that I was working as a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’, and that trying to spread my skills and time so thin was a disservice for my patients.
For this reason I decided that we would rather help a smaller group of patients really well, than trying to help all patients a little bit.
That is why we now focus exclusively on metabolic health (weight management, blood sugar control and cholesterol issues), chronic pain, women’s health and gut health.
There is a significant overlap between mainstream medicine and functional medicine approaches in the management of these conditions. It makes sense then that these are the areas we can help our patients the most with.
What is functional medicine?
We head to the source
Mainstream medicine offers a flotation device to stop you from drowning. Functional and lifestyle medicine looks upstream to find out why you are in the river in the first place.
That's where Kintsugi Health can help.
Building a healthier foundation
Chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, fibromyalgia, anxiety, depression, and many other conditions can not be cured with medication. They are caused by a complex interplay between our genes, our environment, what we eat, what we do and how we think.
Using the principles of lifestyle medicine, our aim is to help patients change what they do and how they think, to provide a healthier foundation for their health. We apply the principles of functional medicine to repair the imbalances caused by a damaged foundation, and to optimise cell health and function.
We acknowledge that emotional and physical well-being are intricately linked, and that behaviour change will be compromised unless we pay attention to both. Our patients hold the key to their own health and well-being. Our role as practitioners is to facilitate the unlocking of a patient’s own resources through education, counselling, nutritional support and lifestyle optimisation.
Meet Our Team
