These 9 naturopathic doctors are proving that obesity medicine needs an integrative upgrade

This is a partial post originally written by Dr. Ashley White – November 14, 2025
See the full post on Dr. Ashley White’s website here

A quiet revolution is happening in weight loss right now, and it’s not coming from where you’d expect.

It’s not emerging from hospital bariatric centers or academic medical institutions. It’s not being led by pharmaceutical companies or driven by insurance-based care models.

It’s being built by naturopathic doctors across Canada, who decided they wouldn’t wait for the system to figure out how to treat obesity properly. They’re doing it themselves—right now, in their communities, with their patients.

And they’re doing something most conventional programs can’t: they’re actually addressing the whole person.

The gap that had to be filled

Here’s what we know: We have medications that work as well as bariatric surgery for many patients. We have access to sophisticated genetic testing that can tell us a lot about how people may regulate their appetite. We have decades of research on metabolic health, nervous system regulation, and sustainable behaviour change.

What don’t we have? A healthcare system that knows how to integrate all of this into actual patient care.

The typical conventional medicine appointment looks like this: eight minutes with a physician who checks your weight, possibly runs some lab tests, maybe prescribes a weight loss medication if they feel like the patient has worked hard enough to deserve a medication trial, and advises you to “eat less and move more.” If you’re lucky, you may be referred to a dietitian for three sessions, which your insurance may or may not cover.

What’s missing?

Everything that actually determines whether treatment is effective in the long term.

Nobody’s assessing your micronutrient status to understand why you’re constantly fatigued. Nobody’s evaluating your nervous system state to see if your sympathetic activation is driving food-seeking behaviour. Nobody’s helping you develop appetite literacy—the ability to actually understand and work with your body’s hunger and satiety signals. Nobody’s looking at sleep, stress response, body composition changes, or the psychological impact of decades of weight stigma and failed dieting attempts.

But naturopathic doctors have been trained to do precisely this work. They’ve been doing it for years, just without access to the medications and the specific obesity medicine framework that would make their interventions even more effective.

Until now.

Got questions? We’re here to help!