Do I have to choose between Naturopathic care and my medical doctor? How do their roles fit together?

No! Absolutely not!

The best health care is a combination of both.

It’s your family doctor’s job to ensure that you don’t have a life-threatening illness. Drugs and surgery are excellent life-saving tools, which is what they are designed for. Also, your family doc is an excellent first-line diagnostician and will make sure you get proper diagnostic testing. Conventional care however, is not designed to heal and repair the problem, but to control it as best it can. Drugs and surgery unfortunately do not provide great solutions for chronic disease, nor does it focus on actually getting your body healthier. Most people suffer from chronic, non-emergency symptoms before they need life-saving measures.

Chronic diseases are conditions like cancer, clogged arteries, menopausal symptoms, chronic headaches, arthritis, auto-immune conditions, crohn’s, colitis, hypertension. What do you notice about these conditions? None of them are cured by medications, but they are controlled to varying degrees of success, using medications.

My job, the ND role, is to collaborate with your MD and provide medical expertise in healing and repairing the problem, the reason it got there, and getting you HEALTHY! We also provide other types of diagnostics to determine how finely tuned your system is, to discover more functional problems (like adrenal fatigue and sub-clinical hypothyroidism, food sensitivities) and to look for issues of environmental toxicity as significant etiological factors for certain conditions.