Food As Medicine faculty member, Aviva Romm, MD, is the mother of four grown children, a Yale-trained physician specializing in integrative medicine for women and children, a midwife, an herbalist and an award-winning author. Referred to as “the face of natural medicine in the 21st century” by Prevention Magazine, Aviva has spent nearly 30 years as a health care practitioner and advocate for the health and environmental concerns of women and kids.
Aviva is on fire about creating a better world for all of us, and she does this as a compassionate integrative physician with a social and environmental conscience.
Aviva is a past president of the American Herbalists Guild, a founder of the Yale Integrative Medicine program and the author of seven books on natural medicine for women and children, including Botanical Medicine for Women’s Health, The Natural Pregnancy Book, Naturally Healthy Babies and Children, Natural Health After Birth, and Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent’s Guide. She was one of the first pioneers in natural birth and botanical medicine for gynecology, obstetrics and pediatrics in the United States. Her books are read and loved around the world. She is also sought out as a botanical medicine industry consultant and medical journal editor and contributor, as well as being the Medical Director of the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia and an author of The Botanical Safety Handbook (American Herbal Products Association). Her most recent book (January 2017), The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution, looks at the growing epidemic of thyroid and autoimmune disease and presents a plan to heal these overwhelmed, overloaded systems, and to prevent and reverse the myriad of symptoms affecting the vast majority of women today.
Aviva recognizes that the current medical system is failing people by its lack of listening to and truly caring for the individual, and in its focus on disease management and over-diagnosis rather than on health promotion. Aviva knows that the epidemic of chronic disease we are facing in our country is not inevitable. It is preventable and reversible – if we look for and treat the root causes – largely through improving diet, nutrition and lifestyle, and by reducing stress and harmful environmental exposures.
Practicing what she calls “good medicine” and “transformational healing,” Aviva is a leader in the health care revolution to transform the current medical system that over-medicalizes life, from birth to death, into a model that respects the intrinsic healing capacities of the body and nature.
