About Dr. Nikki Martin

At Stanford University I was trained in emergency medicine, which I practiced for decades. During those years, one at a time, friends and relatives developed heart disease, hypertension, menopause, cancer, diabetes, dementia, and chronic Lyme disease. I began a lifelong course of reading and study to find answers for loved ones. This started with a phone call from a friend who had suffered a heart attack. He had one question: what should I eat? I realized I didn’t know, so I began to research it. Nutrition is a bottomless ocean of information, but the answers were there. It became his first and only heart attack.

I read through a library of natural medicine — books like Perlmutter and Bredesen on dementia, Fong on diabetes, Reiss on hormone balance, Fife on toxicology, Shanahan on nutrition, Buhner on herbs, and Horowitz on Lyme disease. I didn’t shed faith in the value of surgery and powerful Western pharmaceuticals, but I developed a new set of “first-step” tools, safe interventions that can be taken before or with treatments that are more invasive or have undesirable side effects. The ability to join or integrate various therapeutic systems defines the practice of integrative medicine. It is the destination of study.

Ironically for me, while I was helping others, I myself grew seriously ill. Doctors at several teaching institutions were unable to help me, so I became my own medical mystery to be solved. Ultimately I diagnosed myself with chronic Lyme disease, then did the work required to cure it. At that point I joined ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, and opened the Sebastopol office partly to reach chronic Lyme patients who have been ignored, misdiagnosed, and disrespected. None of that will happen here.