When Dr. Payam Kiani first considered a career in medicine, it was because he wanted to help people through health care. He thought about becoming a family doctor practising conventional medicine. Then someone told him about naturopathic medicine. “The more I researched it, the more I realized the research principles, the practice, the philosophy of naturopathic medicine was more in line with what I believed and what I thought was missing in health care, so I decided to pursue it. It’s been almost 10 years and I haven’t looked back.”
After completing his undergraduate degree in Premedical Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Payam enrolled at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in Toronto in 2001. He graduated in 2005 and has been in private practice since, and occasionally returns to the college to teach and supervise.
Throughout his journey he’s been guided by the notion that health care ought to be more preventative and shouldn’t create further problems or side effects. “It should be more consistent with how the body naturally heals. My belief is that you have to look at the person as a whole and treat them as a whole, not just one symptom here, one symptom there.”