I am one of those lucky ones that gets to do things that I enjoy and love. I am a guide, a teacher, and someone that will both cackle with laughter and cry with you. Sometimes at the same time 🙂

As a midwife and a naturopathic physician, I have always enjoyed a bit of the ‘town doctor’ life.  Working with families to get healthy, have babies, parent, and grow older is just a snippet of what my practice entailed over the years.  I am captivated by Transitions and Transformations: Birth. Postpartum. Adolescence. Menopause. Aging. Retirement. Loss. My role is to sit by you as a guide, educator, and resource through all of it. We love to award medals to the people who stick it out or vilify the people who move on; the reality is we are always moving on and being changed. I want to help you be the leader of that movement and change.

My goals and expertise are always to support you and your whole family’s well-being and I will always be a “kid doc” and midwife at heart. As your guide in Transitions and Transformation, I have deepened my own focus and clinical specialization in three areas that coincide with periods of our lives where everything shifts and changes who you are in the world:

• Perimenopause & Menopause: the sleep disruptions, mood changes, and joint pain and midlife events accompany the biochemical events
• Adolescent mental & behavioral health: the sleep needs, mood changes, and stress management as the differentiation and individuation evolves
• Fitness support & Injury Rehabilitation: how to get started and start again after being sidelined and frustrated

While I will provide laboratory assessment and medical management as a Licensed Naturopathic Physician, it will be important for you to have identified a Primary Care Provider who can offer adequate 24/7 call coverage and immunizations. My commitment to offering sustainable and individualized care makes these services logistical and operational challenges as a solo provider. Thus my role as a doctor has shifted from being simply a primary care hub to a coach in your transformation.

In the last few years, I have also focused on my role as a teacher and this is woven into who I am as a provider.  I have taught at Bastyr University since 2009, and in 2016 I shifted to teaching at the University of Washington Bothell, where I am now an Associate Teaching Professor.  I teach in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences to students joining the field of healthcare as nurses, health educators, and public health advocates.  As my role as an educator grows, I have returned to clinical care to blend what I have been lucky to learn and witness in all of my professional roles as a teacher, doctor, midwife, and entrepreneur. What I offer now as a clinician, coach, and teacher, has transformed, as have I.

As some of you may know, my second ‘baby’ was Eastside Natural Medicine, the integrative clinic that was dreamed up from what was originally my one-woman show.  And I am really proud of what evolved: a family of providers who loved what they do and loved to care for your families.  While I miss and have deep regard for what was created there, I am thrilled to move back into clinical practice in a new and sustainable way. My small private practice looks very much like the way it started; just me in a room. Full circle.

I started this whole voyage after completing my undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago (’98) and my doctorate at Bastyr University (’08). In between, I worked for several years in a residential program in Boston, MA for pregnant and parenting teenage women. I can honestly say that those women, their children, and my mentors taught me more about myself, parenting, and our broken health care system than I may have ever learned. They have been and continue to be some of my best teachers; I carry those lessons into what I do each day with families and in the classroom.

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