The Charlene Deeks Centre for Naturopathic Medicine




Services
Diagnostics
Medical training in conventional lab testing, diagnostic medical imaging, pathology, differential diagnosis, Chinese medicine and clinical nutrition gives a naturopathic physician several different options for assessing your health status.
Our diagnostics may include a combination of questionnaires, dialogue with the patient, laboratory tests, and more unconventional assessment tools such as tongue and pulse diagnosis (Traditional Chinese Medicine). Your family history, past or present lifestyle, workplace habits, home stress, or even an old accident can provide clues that will help lead to correct diagnosis and the best possible treatment. We rely on a thorough health history, nutritional assessment, physical examination, and medical reports as well as blood tests, urinalysis, gynecological examination, allergy testing, x-rays and other diagnostics. Assessment is an important part of our services, and we believe that our approach is second to none in providing an accurate, helpful diagnosis that enables us to specifically tailor treatment to your health and your needs.
Understand Your Drugs
Understand how your drugs work, how they impact your body, how herbs and natural remedies can safely assist current drug therapies in making you healthier - mind, body and spirit.
Many Canadians are taking one or more prescription drugs to control or alleviate symptoms associated with a chronic disease. In some cases, taking multiple drugs can result in troublesome side effects caused by one drug interacting with another. The same can be true if natural supplements are taken without checking for potential drug/herb interactions.
At Mahaya Cambridge, the prescription drugs you are taking are discussed in detail. You learn how they work, their benefits and potential side effects. Discussion also focuses on how natural remedies can help while paying attention to avoiding interactions with current drug therapies. Although many drugs are life-saving and needed to control serious disease, naturopathic medicine can very often assist in making the body healthier with less reliance on drug therapy as a result.
It is important to always notify your medical doctor when adding natural remedies like herbs to your self-care strategies; many common herbs are processed by the body in exactly the same way as common prescription drugs. Taking these drugs and herbs at the same time, can potentially impact the effectiveness of either the herb or the drug - causing toxicity or reducing efficacy overall. In addition, choice of drug, its class and dosage may change if the patient is at the same time making healthy choices about lifestyle, diet, vitamins and mineral supplementation.
At Mahaya Cambridge, our knowledge and experience in pharmaceuticals ensures natural remedies are safely integrated into your drug therapies with the ultimate goal of strengthening your body's own healing properties.
Clinical Nutrition
As nature intended, whole foods like fruits, vegetables, grains and essential fatty acids provide the human body with thousands of building blocks ensuring healthy body functioning.
We are what we eat – and what we digest. Ensuring absorption of a whole foods diet is central to good health and a long life. In contrast, a diet of nutrient poor highly processed foods can lead to sickness and chronic disease.
Many of us live in a fast-paced lifestyle with daily stressors that can quicken the loss of key body nutrients. For these reasons, we sometimes need to take nutritional supplements – vitamins, proteins, minerals, essential fatty acids and digestive enzymes – to correct for dietary deficiencies. Short term supplementation is also valuable in treating the conditions their very deficiency has caused.
Whole foods and nutrient supplements are both preventative and therapeutic medicine. Identifying our nutrient needs and the use of specific foods and supplements to improve health is called clinical nutrition.