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One of the most frustrating things in the healthcare space? When you know something isn’t right, and countless doctors can’t give you an answer. That was the case for Kael Robinson about seven years ago. “I kept getting colonoscopies, CT scans,” says the 35-year-old Denver resident. “I was retaining so much water, my stomach basically looked like I was pregnant.” Then she went to a homeopathic doctor, who guessed she’d contracted parasites during her work travels in South America and India, and gave her a medicine to treat them. She took the medicine. And after, for the first time in months, Robinson felt like a normal human being.
The experience was the first step in her journey down the alternative medicine rabbit hole. Robinson has since received treatment from more than 200 different types of healers, immersing herself in the New Age–sounding world of shamanic journeys and energy work. Now she’s bringing her positive experiences to the masses with Healing Days, a series of events at the new Ramble Hotel in RiNo that offers group workshops and private treatments with a host of wellness practitioners, from yoga teachers and therapists to less traditional folks who deal in chord cutting (releasing negative energy) or astrology readings. “People are searching for what is going to make them healthier people in the mind, body, spirit way,” Robinson says, “instead of just their bodies and their minds.”
If it sounds a little out there, it is. But thinking outside the prescription drug box in terms of solutions to health issues is something we should all be doing. And Robinson’s grab bag of treatments allows you to sample different modalities before jumping headlong into a foreign healthcare space. The event isn’t cheap, per se, but it also could be worse: Prices start at $150 for a full day of group sessions on Saturday, plus breakfast, lunch, and access to the juice bar, a gift bag, and discounts for private treatments. (For $250, you get two private treatments and dinner on Friday night with a medical medium as the keynote speaker in addition to everything else; for $450 or $650, you can stay at the Ramble for one or two nights.)
Robinson hopes to throw Healing Days events every three months in Denver (a place she says has “such good energy”), with plans to expand into New York and Los Angeles in September. Farther down the road, she’d like to open a brick-and-mortar wellness club that provides access to some of her favorite practitioners. “It’s a daily struggle that we go through now with technology and all sorts of things that can trigger us in different ways,” Robinson says. “You need to know the right people to go to, to clear your system and help you.”
If you go: Saturday, May 19, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Ramble Hotel, 1280 25th St.