How To Become A Naturopath: Dr. Sonya Nobbe

Intro: What do you want to be when you grow up?

SN: If you had told me a few years ago that I would be sit­ting here so few years into my career and have an entire clinic, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have believed the hun­dreds of patients that have come to find me and have had such suc­cess. And I real­ize there is noth­ing I should have done dif­fer­ently except maybe have a lit­tle bit more faith in my potential.

My name is Sonya Nobbe and I am a natur­o­pathic doc­tor, owner and Clinic Direc­tor of Kingston Inte­grated Health Care. Con­ven­tional med­i­cine is dis­ease ori­ented. Natur­o­pathic med­i­cine is patient ori­ented. And the dif­fer­ence is almost entirely philosophical.

To be a good health­care prac­ti­tioner, you really have to be solid in your under­stand­ing of what good med­i­cine is. If you edu­cate your patients from that place of under­stand­ing, then your prac­tice will grow.

Becom­ing a natur­o­pathic doc­tor required a lot of energy. It was a very really rig­or­ous edu­ca­tion. A lot of money. Try­ing to find the finances to get through it was a chal­lenge at times.

You have to be com­mit­ted. It’s that faith in what good med­i­cine is that keeps push­ing you for­ward to get through it. Find your sup­port net­work. Make sure your fam­ily and friends are on board. Or find those things that give you that sol­i­dar­ity and that ground­ed­ness so that you can con­tinue through such a dif­fi­cult programme.

I got busy pretty very quickly in my natur­o­pathic prac­tice by writ­ing a lot of arti­cles. The more infor­ma­tion you can pro­vide to some­body the more will­ing they are to explore their health care options.

I chose natur­o­pathic med­i­cine because the pro­fes­sion in its entirety has so much more poten­tial for growth and change. When you sup­port one per­son, and you sup­port their men­tal, their emo­tional makeup, you’re not just help­ing them out, you are sup­port­ing their fam­ily, you are sup­port­ing their com­mu­nity. And that just gets big­ger, and grows from there. It’s avery pow­er­ful thing to know that you are mak­ing such a big difference.

It was absolutely worth it. You wouldn’t turn back for a second.

Intro: What do you want to be when you grow up?