Dr. Roberts Journey to Becoming an ND

BY: DR. MELINA ROBERTS

I often get asked “why I became an Naturopathic Doctor”, so here’s my answer.

I had a few different influences that led me to this path. One major influence was my personal experience with naturopathic medicine. As a child I had lots of allergies and would break out in rashes to almost anything from foods to things in the environment. I pretty much figured it was something I just had to learn to live with. When I was about 13 years old a wise family friend told my parents that they should try taking me to see a Naturopathic Doctor. And luckily for me, my parents did. I saw a Naturopathic Doctor in Toronto, followed his treatment plan which was to change a few things in my diet and take some supplements. To everyone’s amazement my allergies completely cleared up. To me it was “magic”, I never realized that there were legitimate schools you could go to in order to learn how to make these kinds of changes in people’s health.

As I went through my school, I always found the human body, health and sciences very interesting. I took Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo. I volunteered at hospitals, worked in medical doctor’s offices, did medical research and wrote articles in scientific journals.I was really gearing up to apply to conventional medical school. But the more time I spent in this environment, I wasnT really seeing people getting better and experiencing any revolutionary changes in their health.

While in university, I decided to spend some time at a naturopathic clinic. I would ask the patients that I encountered what their story was. I was amazed to find that every single one of them had a success story. I was intrigued and motivated to have this kind of effect on people’s lives.

I then did research into the naturopathic colleges and found that there are accredited, legitimate medical schools, but there was only 6 accredited naturopathic schools in North America. I applied to the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in Toronto, which at the time was the only accredited naturopathic college in Canada. I got accepted into the program and you could say that the rest is history…