• Approach

    Naturopathic doctors (ND) are trained in Naturopathic Medicine, an 100-year old system of medicine based on these 6 principles:

    1. Healing Power of Nature: We work in harmony with the self-healing power of your body and mind.
    2. First, Do No Harm:  We use the safest treatments, before turning to more aggressive measures like drugs or surgery.
    3. Treat the Underlying Cause:  We identify and treat the underlying causes of disease, not just suppress symptoms.
    4. Treat the Whole Person:  We consider all aspects of a person, body/mind/spirit as one entity, each influencing the other and affecting health.
    5. Doctor’s Role is Teacher:  We teach you how your body works and how to support it best.
    6. Prevention is the Best Cure:  We give common sense advice on diet and lifestyle that help you maintain health naturally, and prevent disease from happening in the first place.

    We start by using the safest and least-invasive approach, before recommending more aggressive options like drugs and surgery.  These decisions are based on the Therapeutic Order of Naturopathic Medicine listed below.

    Therapeutic Order:  Steps to Establishing Health

    1. Address acute concerns:  This means addressing urgent concerns first, using the safest natural medicines and therapies to palliate symptoms.  As we work toward re-establishing health, it’s important to make the patient as comfortable as possible.
    2. Establish conditions for health: This means identifying and removing factors that disturb health.  We need to institute a more healthful regimen such as a proper diet, exercise, relaxation, sleep, and social connections.
    3. Stimulate the healing power of Nature:  This means using therapies that increase your vitality and help you heal yourself.  These include homeopathic and herbal medicines, exercise, hydrotherapy techniques and mind-body techniques.
    4. Tonify weakened systems: This means strengthening systems in the body that are under stress and need support.  Some examples include supporting the nervous, digestive, detoxification, respiratory, immune, hormonal and skeletal systems. This can be done with nutrition, herbal medicine, supplementation, and homeopathy.
    5. Correct structural integrity:  This means making sure your bones are aligned to promote normal function of your body.  When nerves get pinched between misaligned bones, the part of the body activated by those nerves can suffer.  This can be corrected with physical adjustments to all joints in the body.  We do refer to specialists (orthopedic massage therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths) as needed, for more in-depth structural care.
    6. Address Pathology:  This means dealing with disease directly.  We do this after we’ve done all the preceeding steps to give your body it’s best chance to heal itself.  Natural medicines can be used to combat disease directly if needed.
    7. Suppress Pathology:  This means stopping the appearance of symptoms.  Examples include suppressive, allopathic medication and surgery.  We recommend these as a last resort, because we believe that suppression weakens the bodies healing capacity and drives the pathology deeper into the body.