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New age family doctor

Meet a family doctor who treats kids and parents with a blend of alternative therapies and mainstream medicine

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Originally published in Today's Parent October 2010

Take a quick glance inside the West Vancouver office of Anita Tannis and you know she is no normal family doctor. Instead of a hard examining table covered with paper, there is a massage table wrapped in fabric with an African print. On the walls: beautiful, black-and-white photos of children, a colourful, beaded quilt and a stick drawing by her six-year-old daughter, Signe. On a side table sits a Tibetan singing bowl and a white marble acupuncture model, a miniature human body covered with black dots to reveal the acupressure points.

It is an unlikely space for a medical doctor, but to Tannis, it makes perfect sense. She is at the forefront of a movement to integrate conventional with alternative medicine. And although she is one of only a few dozen doctors doing this across Canada, she believes people are hungry for this approach. When necessary, she will use medication, but often in conjunction with treatments like naturopathy, homeopathy or acupuncture.

“I’m quite cautious if someone comes in with symptoms that could signal a serious medical condition like cancer or inflammatory bowels,” says Tannis, a petite, soft-spoken woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a ready smile. “I like to get a conventional medical diagnosis before we start doing alternative therapies.”

Tannis always knew she wanted to be a different kind of doctor. Studying medicine at Hamilton’s McMaster University in the late 1980s, she started to see how medications could be overprescribed, and became interested in other kinds of healing. With a mother who was a dentist and a grandmother who was a midwife and healer, Tannis believes she is the natural evolution of her background.

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