FALL CITY – Last month marked the seven-year anniversary of a business Bonnie Sherwood believes should be at the forefront of health care.

The Mountain View Nutrition & Healing Center has been a resource for those in the Valley weary of traditional medicine and hopeful that cures for illnesses can be found in nature.

“It [the natural health store] is helping them find ways to help themselves that they hadn’t thought of before,” Sherwood said.

Sherwood got into the business after an incident 26 years ago when she took her 3-year-old son to the doctor for bronchitis. Her son was prescribed an antibiotic, but began to break out after he started taking it. After Sherwood took her son in again and mentioned that one of his relatives had scabies, the doctors prescribed another antibiotic. Nothing improved and after researching for awhile, Sherwood came to believe that her son was actually having an allergic reaction to the antibiotics.

“It really made me leery of [traditional] medical doctors,” she said.

Sherwood investigated natural remedies and started to administer simple supplements to her family, such as spoonfuls of olive oil or cod liver oil capsules. She learned more about natural healing supplements and found that many ailments could be cured not by treating the symptoms, but by avoiding the causes.

“I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” she said.

She eventually got a job at the Evergreen Health Pantry in Bellevue. After working there for 16 years, Sherwood started to think about opening her own store and was driving through Fall City one day when she noticed a vacant storefront on the Redmond-Fall City Road. The thought of opening a store in the Valley, where she grew up and graduated from Mount Si High School, was appealing to Sherwood who then talked to the owner of the building. The owner knew her family and Sherwood got the space. Her first day of business was May 19, 1997.

“Here we are, seven years later,” she said.

Mountain View stocks shelves of supplements and natural extracts. There are natural treatments for everything from acne to libido loss and Sherwood carries all of it. She stocks a couple of lines of nutritional supplements and she even has a natural pet food selection in the back. There are sugar-free and caffeine-free soft drinks, food bars and candy for those with an empty stomach.

There also is a library of natural medicine books, all-natural cosmetics and a smattering of gifts, like cards and candles.

Sherwood is a believer in natural health care, but she wasn’t born that way. It took a health care issue to get Sherwood interested, a process many other people go through. Her brother, whom at one time was taking three different medicines for his blood pressure, is now off those medications thanks to natural remedies recommended by Sherwood.

While the dominant school of thought in health care may be to prescribe powerful drugs, Sherwood thinks that if people took better care of themselves beforehand and paid attention to what their bodies wanted, a lot of problems could be avoided.

“Sometimes people know their body better than anyone else,” she said.

Sherwood takes pride in how she cares for her customers and looks to help them improve all aspects of their lives, which include mind, body and spirit. When she got interested in the subject 26 years ago, Sherwood said people opened stores to help spread a message of health conscious living. Now, with major grocery and pharmacy chains starting to carry herbs and nutritional supplements, the market is starting to thin out and smaller stores will have a harder time staying open. Sherwood is thinking about getting some kind of certification in case the government makes some of her over-the-counter supplements available only by prescription.

But Sherwood would not want to do anything else. She invited some massage therapists, including her brother, to set up a shop in the empty space behind her store. Customers routinely tell her how thankful they are Mountain View is in Fall City, and she gets to do business with a view of the Snoqualmie River from her store windows.

It’s a healthy lifestyle.

* Mountain View Nutrition & Healing Center is located at 33605 Redmond-Fall City Road. Contact them at (425) 222-4096.

Ben Cape can be reached at (425) 888-2311 or by e-mail at ben.cape@valleyrecord.com.