Dr. Anne Marie Chomat, MD, PhD, MPH

Practicing on Salt Spring Island & Crofton.

Anne Marie brings a physician’s understanding of the body together with a deep curiosity about the whole person and the life in which that body exists.

Trained in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, she takes symptoms and physiology seriously. At the same time, more than 25 years across medicine, participatory research, community health, spirituality, and healing have taught her that wellbeing cannot be understood by looking at the body in isolation. Our health is also shaped by our experiences, relationships, environments, histories, and the ways we have learned to move through the world.

Rather than beginning with a predetermined explanation of what is wrong or what needs to change, Anne Marie listens deeply for patterns across a person’s health and life experience. Her approach is grounded in curiosity, compassion, and respect for the wisdom and agency each person brings to their own healing.

Her work invites people into a different relationship with themselves and their bodies: learning to meet difficult experiences with greater compassion, giving voice to parts of themselves that have long gone unheard, and loosening patterns that once helped them survive but now constrain how they live. These shifts can open the way for deeply embodied change—greater steadiness and resilience, renewed energy and capacity, and a growing ability to meet life’s challenges without becoming so easily overwhelmed.

For Anne Marie, healing is not simply about understanding ourselves or feeling better. It is about recovering our capacity to live more fully—to inhabit our bodies with greater trust, reconnect with our creativity and sense of purpose, express more of who we are, and shape our lives in ways that feel true to us.

Her approach is integrative and individualized, drawing from medicine, public health, participatory research, transformational coaching, and somatic, contemplative, and emancipatory practices. Sessions are conversational and may include guided inquiry, body awareness, reflective practices, guided meditations, or, where meaningful, symbolic, ritual, and nature-based work.

Anne Marie completed a Master of Public Health and a transdisciplinary PhD exploring intergenerational stress and maternal and infant health. Her work across five continents, engaging with diverse communities and populations, has deepened her understanding of health as biological, personal, relational, and inseparable from the environments and worlds in which we live.

Her understanding of healing has been profoundly shaped by nearly two decades of work alongside Indigenous Maya women in Guatemala. In 2013, she co-founded Buena Semilla (Good Seed) together with Maya women and has continued to lead the organization alongside them. Through this work, collective healing, relational repair, and the recovery of voice, identity, and personal and collective agency have become foundations for women’s leadership and community-led change.

This work has strengthened her conviction that healing is deeply relational—not only in how we recover, but in what becomes possible when we reconnect with ourselves, one another, and the living world.

At Madrona, Anne Marie offers individualized, non-clinical Integrative Healing Guidance. Her work does not include medical diagnosis, assessment, or treatment and is intended to complement, rather than replace, care from licensed healthcare professionals.

Outside of her work, Anne Marie loves painting, writing, dancing, hiking, swimming, spending time in nature, and life with her husband and two children. She is grateful to call Salt Spring Island home.

Anne Marie offers sessions in English, Spanish, and French.