“It’s exploded. There are so many more,” Bohl said. “I believe it’s being readily accepted much more now than what it was.”

Driving the growth, she said, is people’s desperation to feel better.

“A lot of the clients we see, they’ve been going to therapy for many years. They’re taking drugs and nothing is helping them. They go to a few of these holistic sessions and then they’re amazed at how much calmer, how much more peaceful they feel,” Bohl said.

An increasing number of options in holistic health also have become available locally in recent years. In part, it’s due to more practitioners, but it also reflects the interest among practitioners to expand into more modalities to offer more choices to their clients.

New in Minot, Lymphatic Enhancement Therapy offered at Whole-istic Wellness in Minot stimulates the lymphatic system using a wellness device paired with manual techniques to encourage lymphatic circulation and enhance detoxification. In other words, it assists the garbage disposal of the body to work more efficiently, which can contribute to a plethora of health improvements. Photo from Arcturus Star Products.

As a pioneer in holistic health in Minot, Angela Holter, with Magic City Stress Relief Center, recalled how difficult it once was to get people to think about health in a different way. The past several years have been a different story.

“I think we are just in a much higher stress space, and people are just really looking for a way for them to actually like being alive and feeling good and wanting to get up in the morning and be excited when they have to go do the 30 things they have to do that day. We live a very busy life,” Holter said.

Previously living in Illinois, Holter took a job in a chiropractor’s office because it advertised the job as stress free.

“And I was tired of being stressed. That was when everything opened up. I saw he wasn’t just a chiropractor. He was also a healer,” she said.

Her own path into holistic health came after exposure to the work of an electrodermal practitioner. Her 30 years in holistic health started with energy healing, but she found her fit with biofeedback about 20 years ago.

Mia Farstad, a certified sound healer with specialized training in her tools, uses one of those tools to create soothing sound last December. Backed by science, sound healing has been shown to reduce stress, relieve pain, improve physical and emotional well-being and support neurological health.

Holter practices quantum biofeedback, which works with the subconscious.

“It just retrains the body and the nervous system to reset. And it’s gentle,” she said.

Shawnya Meland, the owner of Soul Therapy in Minot, said her path into holistic healing began when looking for therapy to help her son. She wasn’t looking to become a practitioner but various experiences at her church convinced her the spirit was leading her in that direction.

“Healing is my passion. I love to help,” said Meland, a Reiki practitioner.

Holter and Meland are among practitioners aligned with The Difference to provide care to its clients who have experienced trauma. The Difference, which receives private and federal funds, will pay for the first three sessions for clients. A client can choose from a modality from The Difference’s list of practitioners.

Roxy Peskey sits next to the hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber at Minot Health Clinic, where she has received HBOT and red light therapy. Peskey said the therapy eased wound pain from surgery following a femur bone break, cleared the associated brain fog and has left her doctors impressed with the healing that has occurred. Photo courtesy of Minot Health Clinic. Submitted Photo

Holistic healing modalities offer help to release the emotion attached to traumatic moments, Bohl explained.

“They still have the memories, but they’re no longer held within that grasp. They’re no longer held in a trap of that horrible emotion, and they just feel so much better,” she said.

More people are recognizing the connection between mental health and physical health, Bohl said. The culture tells people to just get over it, but the more people stuff the pain inside, the more likely it will manifest as physical disease, mental health issues and inability to sleep, she said.

Bohl cited the research science behind holistic medicine.

“They’ve proven that this works hand in hand with traditional medicine. I do not say throw away your medication and make this holistic. It has to be used together for the greatest impact on a person’s life, absolutely,” Bohl said.

Evaluations filled out by The Difference clients show more than 50% improvement on anxiety, fear and sadness for clients.

“So we know it’s working. We know it’s improving their quality of life,” Bohl said.

Among modalities available through The Difference include therapeutic massage, hypnotherapy, autism touch therapy, acupuncture, Reiki, craniosacral therapy, Radiant Heart, reflexology, whole body red light therapy, BEMER circulation therapy, lymphatic decongestant, psychic medium, quantum biofeedback, sound healing, chiropractic, footbaths and laser therapy

Clients don’t need to list details in applying for assistance, nor do practitioners need to know details of a client’s trauma to offer treatment.

“We have our modalities, but it’s our clients that are doing the work. We’re just kind of giving their body permission to start healing. It’s really up to the client how much they’re going to take in,” Meland said.

“There’s a lot of different levels of everything that we’re healing. It’s not just their physical ailment that they’re going through,” she added. “It’s multi-layered.”

Holter said she began her involvement in holistic health by seeking to learn about a number of modalities.

“I used to get so frustrated with myself because I thought, ‘Well, I should really just focus on this, but I’ve got to have this too. And I didn’t understand it was because when I bring a client in and I’m evaluating them, if I can’t get through a certain way, I have another way to go around the resistance, because then they’re not afraid. And I think that’s part of why there are so many modalities,” Holter said. “They’re all right. They just work for people at different times, for what they need at that moment.”

Minot native Stephanie Nisek, a naturopathic doctor and acupuncture practitioner based in Bismarck, has offered services in Minot for about 11 years.

“A lot of people in North Dakota are very naturopathically minded. They just don’t know that that’s what we call it,” Nishek said. “Wanting alternatives to having to take a medication for everything and wanting to have more medical freedom and involvement in what their wellness journey was going to look like – that’s kind of the name of the game with naturopathic or integrative medicine.”

North Dakotans also don’t tolerate any kind of sham, Nishek said.

“If it was a complete hogwash,” she said, “we wouldn’t be growing our client base the way that we are.”

She said over the past decade more people have begun seeking out alternative means of care out of their own interest rather than the recommendation of a professional.

“As our communities become more diverse and we have people coming to our community from other places, many of them bring knowledge of these alternative practices with them,” she said. “In other cases, I get to be the first to introduce them to something new, which is also really cool.”

Chronic pain is the most common reason people seek out acupuncture, but she is seeing people come desiring other types of healing, such as concerns over fertility, anxiety or digestive issues.

“The use is expanding, and it’s starting to look more like the way that traditional Chinese medicine was originally developed,” she said. “Which is the idea of using acupuncture to move the body back toward balance as opposed to just addressing a symptom at a time.”

Traditional medicine, including medications, remain important, but alternative care can help with symptoms that might not be responding to traditional medicines or can hold off a surgery that is a last resort, she said.

Sunni Benson of Minot became involved in complementary medicine in 2009 during her study of massage therapy. Licensed as a massage therapist in 2011, she then started looking into additional modalities and moved into energy healing through Reiki.

“For me, that move made sense because I was really into studying acupressure at that time,” she said. “Acupressure is a study of particular points in the body that are associated with different organs and different emotions.”

She also has added hypnotherapy and the related Rapid Transformational Therapy. Hypnotherapy is a useful modality in many types of situations, but Benson said most of her clients come for trauma-related issues, depression or anxiety. However, she added, it also can be useful for people who want to better understand their behaviors, such as procrastination or insomnia.

Hypnosis as entertainment has created a stigma with hypnotherapy, although they are not the same, Benson said.

“I love my clients and I think that they trust me when I go to work on them. So that’s allowed them to be open to the idea of me doing hypnotherapy with them, and once they’ve given that a chance, it’s really amazing the changes that these people have made in their lives. It’s been pretty awesome just to witness,” she said. “I definitely think that there’s still stigma out there, but I do think that we are moving in the right direction.”

The Difference hosts a monthly meeting to bring holistic practitioners together to share information and grow in their own knowledge, Bohl said. Most practitioners are in the Minot area, but Bohl is working at finding more practitioners in the neighboring communities to align with The Difference. The Difference assisted clients from nine counties last year.

Bohl also said she wants to find practitioners within the Native culture to be able to offer healing modalities that provide the comfort level that Indigenous clients require to experience healing.

Bohl added that as much as different types of alternative health options have grown in the area, there’s room for more and new holistic modalities.

“There’s so much God wants us to know if we just stay open to it and keep doing his work,” Bohl said. “We’re going to continue to grow and to learn and to spread that healing.”