When I was in medical school and throughout my Residency I was taught how to diagnose and treat medical problems, mostly using medicines and surgery.  This concept worked quite well with my earlier practice in ER medicine, and also in my OB-GYN career. In the ER, my patients were in acute crises, while OB-GYN patients were usually younger or pregnant.

However, as I got older and my patients got older, I found that this style of medicine was clearly not enough. The diseases of older patients did not respond to healing like younger patients and at best were dealt with a steady decline.  Most of the conditions I began to treat at the time were then called the chronic medical conditions of aging, i.e. Heart Disease, Cancer, Arthritis, Diabetes, Cognitive Disorders, Hormone Disruptions, etc.., and the generally accepted perspective was for people to just accept their fate, get old, and decline until they finally die. But my own experience had taught me that, while there are many things in terms of health that we can’t control, there are also many things that we can. So my quest became a question:  How can we age gracefully and maintain our health for as long as possible?

Maintaining Health Instead of Treating Disease

The “diagnose and treat” style of medicine was simply not getting me to the root cause of the problem.  This led me on an educational journey to discover modalities outside of what I was taught in medical school.  I sought out 3 different programs: the first was in Regenerative and Anti-Aging Medicine, the next was in Metabolic and Nutritional Medicine, and the most recent was in Functional Medicine.  Through these 3 programs, I learned (and continue to learn) eye-opening techniques taught by PhDs and MDs from around the world.  I discovered that Integrative Medicine is a healing-oriented approach based on finding the root cause of the disease and, in many cases, finding it before it causes disease.

Today

Through world knowledge and the quest of many more doctors and other academics, the Integrative method of treating diseases has swung doors wide open to new discoveries. Presently, there are Integrative Centers popping up in many of the world’s Centers of Excellence.  Here in the U.S., for instance: The Osher Center for Integrative Health (at Miami and Vanderbilt University Schools of Medicine); Cleveland Clinic Center for Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine; Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine (with Director Dr. Mark Hyman).

If you or a loved one has been experiencing signs and symptoms that are bothering you, we encourage you to schedule a consultation.  We do a careful assessment of each patient’s symptoms, health history, lab/blood work, and current health state to determine a course of action that’s not only going to treat the symptoms but also get to the root cause of the problem.