As clean beauty and holistic healing continue to make their presence in the beauty industry known, Karen Burr and Sara Redmon teamed up to bring ancient remedies to the greater Indianapolis area at Materia Medica Herbal Blending Bar & Spa. We got to chat with the team to better understand the benefits of the treatments and services they offer.
Burr has been an esthetician for 17 years, a holistic health practitioner for 12, and is a graduate of The Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Her training doesn’t stop there, she has attended five herbal schools and a permaculture program for growing herbal foodscapes. She’s also a clinical herbalist and is a member of the Bio Nutrient Food Association. So what do all these credentials add up to?
“Conventional spa therapies are all about product sales and taking advantage of a client’s insecurities by the promise that a mass-produced skin cream in a plastic bottle with a shelf life of three years, (that) just does not resonate with me. This way of thinking, ‘take this pill for the ill or this overpriced topical treatment for a skin condition’ is why I wanted to create Materia Medica Herbal Spa,” says Burr.
The team at Materia Medica even teaches cooking classes on how to incorporate nutrient-dense wild foods into our daily diets. Everything used to treat clients at the spa is either wildcrafted from nature or grown in Karen’s own personal herb gardens that are never packaged in plastic and are never mass-produced. “I believe in matching the energy of my remedies to the energy of the person and you are never going to find this level of care in a drugstore, a department store, or a doctor’s office. When we are able to support and nourish the body on every level, healing occurs.”
The client base at the spa is primarily made up of the people who feel they have been failed by the western medical model and traditional spa environments for chronic conditions. “I see people who have battled skin conditions, depression, anxiety, G.I. disorders along with extreme hormonal imbalances. The beauty about all of this is that all of those disorders are all connected. As a practitioner who understands how to work with an individual as a whole through specific foods as medicine, how to understand the energy around them, and also how to avoid pesky environmental toxins. Together we are able to create a sense of balance and healing.”
Susan McAlister, RN, works with the team at the spa to treat clients that are in need of energy medicine for anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and trauma. Susan studied Vibrational Sound Therapy at Purdue University. This form of energy medicine uses tuning forks to bring balance to an imbalanced energy field through chakras. “Vibrational Sound Therapy may sound woo and voodoo but it is anything but, this is a very powerful and soothing form of medicine that thankfully is becoming more mainstream.” Karen then pairs custom herbal remedies along with these treatments to support both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems at a deeper energetic level.
To find out more about specific treatments or to learn more about how holistic health can benefit your specific situation, reach out to the team on Instagram @materiamedicablendingbar.
