Dr. SUNITA IYER

I am one of those lucky ones that gets to do things that I enjoy and love. My goal is for people to feel lighter and more able to be well when they walk out of my office. Ultimately, my patients are in charge.  I am the guide, your witness, and a teacher.

Eastside Natural Medicine is my second ‘baby.’  Jean-Paul and I dreamed up our integrative clinic from what was originally my one-woman show.  It has been an incredible labor, birth, and parenting process.  And we are really proud of what we have to show for it: a family of providers who love what they do and love to care for your families.  What we do here is pretty special.

As a midwife and a naturopathic physician, I have enjoyed a bit of the ‘town doctor’ life.  Working with families to get healthy, have babies, parent, and age is just a snippet of what my practice has entailed over the years.  My areas of specialty in primary care are pediatrics, pregnancy and postpartum, and parenting (The 4 P’s).  The areas that I have distilled in my wheelhouse are perinatal, adolescent, and pediatric mental health.  You can find me speaking at conferences locally and nationally about stress and PTSD, trauma-informed care, & perinatal mental health, and the impact on providers and families alike.

More recently, I have relished my role as a teacher.  I have taught at Bastyr University since 2009, and in 2016 I shifted to teaching at the University of Washington Bothell as well.  I teach primarily in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences to students joning the field of healthcare as nurses, health educators, and public health advocates.  As my role as an educator expands, I am stepping back from clinical care to make room for newer and dynamic physicians to grow and learn here at ENM, and to pay forward the abundance that I have experienced over the last decade.

I started this whole voyage after completing my undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago (’98) and my doctorate at Bastyr University (’08). In between, I worked for several years in a residential program in Boston, MA for pregnant and parenting teenage women. That work changed my course and my life in all of the best ways possible.  I can honestly say that those incredible women, their children, and my mentors taught me more about myself, parenting, and our broken health care system than I may have ever learned. They have been and continue to be some of my best teachers; I carry those lessons into what I do each day with families and in the classroom.