About Anna
Dr. Anna Sitkoff is a Naturopathic Medical Doctor at Bear Root Apothecary and Wellness Center in Port Townsend, Washington. She has a bachelor’s of science in nutrition from California Polytechnic State University and a doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University.
Her motivation to become a Naturopathic Doctor stemmed from her mother, who has Lyme disease and her father, who lived with and eventually died from cancer. These experiences shaped her clinical experiences and studies with Lyme specialists and naturopathic oncologists in the Seattle area.
While at Bastyr, she performed laboratory research on medicinal mushrooms and explored their cytotoxic and immune modulating effects on different cancer cell lines. Her passion for medicinal mushrooms evolved into a career as a medicinal mushroom educator and author of the Medicinal Mushroom Chapter in the top natural medicine textbook, The Textbook of Natural Medicine. She has been a speaker on the topic of medicinal mushrooms at conferences throughout the country, she is the scientific advisor for the largest medicinal mushroom extract company in the world, NAMMEX, and is one of the founders of the up and coming mushroom supplement company, Lucidum Medicinals.
Her first passion was nutrition, and she has expertise in dietary approaches to health and wellness. This led to an interest in plants and mushrooms and an apprenticeship with an herbalist in Santa Margarita, California. Inspired by the healing potential of botanical medicine, she moved to Seattle, Washington and immersed herself in botanical medicine where she worked at an herb shop for eight years as an herbalist and tea formulator and spent weekends outside apprenticing with a local wildcrafter.
She also has training as a death doula and it is her priority as a physician to not only help her patients live a good life, but also to have a good death. She is interested in palliative care and is a resource for those who need support through the dying process.
When she is not studying and reading about medicine, she loves to trail run, do handstands, make essential oils, harvest medicinal and edible plants in the forest, and teach about medicinal mushrooms.