About Tammy

In this section: Bio, Medical Philosophy, Mission Statement, Goals, Why Choose Dr. Tammy Grime, ND?

Bio

Tammy completed her premedical training with honors at the University of Guelph in Biomedical science and later continued her medical studies at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine (CCNM), totaling 9 years of post secondary education. She continues to advance her training yearly. Dr. Grime has done advanced studies in Environmental Medicine – the study of the impact of environmental chemicals in the etiology of autoimmune conditions, cancers, neurological conditions, chronic fatigue and chemical sensitivity and how to detoxify the body properly to effectively treat such conditions. She is board certified in Nutrient Intravenous Therapies providing significant and fast results for many conditions, and she’s done additional training in Gestalt Psychotherapy.

Dr. Grime has a busy practice in the High Park neighborhood where she’s been practicing for 5 years treating kids, teens, adults and athletes. She’s particularly skilled at treating gastrointestinal disorders and disease, fatigue, chronic fatigue and burn-out, fibromyalgia, anxiety and depression, hormonal imbalance, optimizing athletic performance, infections, cardiovascular issues, cholesterol, blood sugar and weight issues, headaches, migraines, allergies, multiple chemical sensitivity, heavy metal toxicity and lately her practice has increasingly been focusing on cancer treatment. She works in collaboration with many family doctors and specialists.

She passionately teaches courses for the public on detoxification, nutrition, and sports nutrition and has taught post secondary level courses in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and environmental medicine. Her group programs are popular because they are fun, interactive and supportive and the results speak for themselves. Participants are pleasantly surprised that they can think better, have more energy, sleep better, lose weight, stop craving, eliminate headaches and chronic congestion, decrease pain and have experience far fewer sick days!

Her patients are multifaceted individuals, with unique lives, unique characters, and varying lifestyles who often have multiple concerns. These concerns always interconnect. The treatment plan she will develop is tailored to you: modern medical findings are integrated with traditional healing therapies to provide you with an effective and well rounded approach that focuses on true healing and regeneration of health.

Dr. Grime is also a certified Bowen practitioner and uses Bowen Therapy to effectively and gently address various musculoskeletal conditions such as pain due to injury, chronic use or arthritis. She will recommend specific strengthening exercises where necessary.

Tammy will make suggestions about various lifestyle issues that may be affecting your health such as stress, difficulty sleeping, environmental/workplace toxicity, etc. She can work with you to shift destructive patterns of thinking that may be affecting your well-being, exploring connections between body and mind where appropriate.

She is also an avid musician, bicycler, and advocate for sustainability and ecological awareness. Fostering a sense of community is important to her. You may find her playing her bass or exploring local High Park and the Toronto trails in her spare time.

She has taught Anatomy, Biochemistry, Physiology and Environmental Medicine at various colleges in Southern Ontario.

My Medical Philosophy

We absolutely need modern medicine. It does save lives. However, for chronic health conditions, I would argue that it often does not offer the best solutions, and there are some inherent problems with our current system of care.

As published in the British Journal of Medicine and American medical journals, the third leading cause of death is “iatrogenic”, or related to medical treatment. Any long –practicing MD will tell you that we are living longer, but we are sicker. Doesn’t this tell us that perhaps we need to evolve how we view health care and medicine? It’s time we improve it.

Currently the only solutions you are offered (freely) to take care of your health are drugs and surgery. For chronic conditions medications are not curative; they effectively manage symptoms but do not create healing or repair of the condition, and often create harm due to toxicity or side effects.

I would argue that these are disease management strategies. They do not strengthen your health or heal or repair your condition. Our health care system is on the verge of breaking in it’s efforts to treat our aging population suffering from ever increasing incidence of lifestyle and environmental related chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, auto-immune diseases and cancers unless we change how we’re practicing medicine and how society as a whole thinks about health.

Let me give you a great example from my practice:

A 50 year old person is found to have polyps and precancerous and inflammation cells in their colon. Preventative resection (removal of a section) of the colon was recommended; colon cancer is deadly, current standard of care is to cut out affected tissue. This does come with risk. Note: the colons is very important. We need all of it.

We began naturopathic treatment. We determined causal factors of the chronic irritation in the colon causing cells the inflammation and dedifferentiation of cells. We applied treatments and medicines to heal, repair and strengthened her intestinal wall and using nutrients and herbs proven by evidence based medicine to be effective, and proven to follow the physiology and chemistry of repair. We improved her overall health as well.

Result: Follow up colonoscope showed complete resolution. No drugs (toxic anti-inflammatories) or surgery were used. Her arthritis also went away. We achieved successful aversion of surgery and successful collaboration between the patient, ND and GI specialist to care for and appropriately monitor this patient.

I believe in modern medicine, but I believe we can do even better by using an integrated approach. We need to further modernize modern medicine and the way we think about our health. We need to have less reliance on drugs and removing parts and more reliance of reparative, non-toxic, preventative and health strengthening approaches. Most of our chronic conditions have excellent alternative solutions.

I believe in evidence-based medicine and that this should guide treatment. Knowledge gained through vast clinical experience and wisdom of thousands of years should also not be ignored. This is based on a realistic understanding that majority of research funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry to promote the use of patentable products, and non-patentable natural methods or substances may never be studied in trials. Dependence on medication for chronic health conditions pays. More health restoring techniques using non-patentable products does not.

I know that my beliefs are true. They were never just mine to begin with. I learned them from university, and then from medical school and I see the proof everyday while I’m in practice. This knowledge comes from professionals all over the world, including MD’s, research scientists and biologists, nurses, and of course the thousands of practitioners in this field including ND’s an chiropractors.

Integrative medicine physician Dr. Richard Nahas, MD wrote, “While doctors are taught to follow guidelines and standards of conventional medical practice, they have stifled innovation and true progress in medicine. Clinical practice guidelines have improved patient care, but the individual physician-scientist has been an important figure in the advancement of medicine throughout its history and this should be encouraged in the spirit of discovery and progress.”

And finally, it is unquestionably evident that our health is not possible without the health of our environment. This is will likely be the most motivating reason to heal the planet and really recognize our connection and reliance on it. Environmental medicine – looking at toxicological causes for disease, and applying detoxification methods to treat – should be part of everyday medicine.

Mission Statement

To help shift our current paradigm of health care from disease management, to the science of healing and repair.
To improve the health of people, families and communities. To empower people.
To show people that there ARE solutions for their health conditions. Many conditions that you thought could not be resolved or improved CAN. Yes, you CAN feel better.
To integrate with conventional medicine so that approaching medicine in this way becomes the standard of care in the future. This medicine is valuable and if integrated, will save our health care system.
To provide excellent and caring care. To provide effective treatment for people and children with chronic medical problems.
To adhere to high standards of evidence based medicine, and medicine proven through years of clinical observation and experience with sound scientific basis for effectiveness.
Our health and disease can be intimately linked with our levels of stress, thinking patterns and emotional health. These aspects of health will not be ignored or separated out of your physical care unless you desire them to be.

Goal

My goal is to eventually see and be part of teams of health care providers that support your health collaboratively so that you receive the best health care possible.

Why Choose Dr. Tammy Grime, Bsc. ND?

You want to feel better and be healthier
You want better solutions for your health
You want to better understand your body
You take responsibility for your health, and want to be an active participant in your own healthcare
You want an integrated approach of conventional and naturopathic medicine. You understand that your family doctor is not trained in naturopathic/functional medicine and can’t comment on true herb or supplement interactions with medications etc. except in a very limited and cautious way.
You want your ND to be a highly trained medical professional that constantly upgrades her skills to provide the best care possible.
You want to be treated with respect and care; you want to be treated like a person, not a case of “X”.
You want to trust that your ND will communicate honest expectations and prognosis.
You want solutions that work and are effective. Sometime it seems like various treatments can be expensive and you don’t want to waste your time or money. You want to trust that you are being treated by a professional, medically trained and experienced to offer you the best possible care.
You want a doctor who will teach you, a doctor who will listen, a doctor expert in her field with significant experience and who is comfortable addressing emotional factors that play into your health.

Due to the access of information on the internet, patients are becoming better informed, which is excellent. However, then information can be unreliable, confusing and conflicting. Without a background of medical training and clinical experience, patients can often spend time and money pursuing therapies that are less likely to be effective. Simply going to a health food store and purchasing a supplement off the shelf to treat a conditions is often hit or miss. The cause of the problem has not been elucidated. Healing health condition requires medical training. The supplement may or may not work or even help the symptom. This is why some people feel alternative medicine doesn’t work. They haven’t applied the appropriate treatment.