Your first appointment with a naturopathic doctor is up to 75 minutes in duration, and focuses primarily on gathering the information required to create an effective treatment plan for meeting your health goals.
The information collected may include the history of your main and related health concerns, discussion of the information included in your intake forms, information about lifestyle factors that may provide challenges to success treatment, physical examination findings, and recommendations for further laboratory testing or requests of your other healthcare providers for already-completed laboratory test results.
Your treatment plan will typically be laid out at your second, up to 60 minute appointment.
Although every patient’s treatment plan is individualized, all include nutritional and/or lifestyle prescriptions to support a return to health, and usually use of natural medicines (e.g., botanical [herbal] medicines) or treatments (e.g., acupuncture) to stimulate healing.
Depending on your level of knowledge, or the complexity of your health concern, it may require more than one appointment to fully implement your treatment plan.
Follow-up appointments are scheduled according to the therapy selected (e.g., use of acupuncture requires multiple appointments), your health concern (e.g., assessment of treatment to lower cholesterol levels requires a different timeline than assessment of an elimination diet) and your response to treatment (if your response to treatment is “great”, less frequent monitoring is required than in the case of a less robust response to treatment).
The ultimate goal of naturopathic treatment is for you to be empowered with the knowledge to take control of your own health, requiring consultation with only quarterly, bi-annually or annually (depending on your health concern and what you are comfortable with) to monitor maintenance of health improvements.
Patients returning to our care after longer than one year from their most recent appointment are booked for a 60 minute “Re-introduction Appointment”. This allows us to thoroughly update ourselves on your current health status so we can offer you optimal (and safe) care moving forward.