After completing medical school and my Family Medicine training, I thought I was ready to “save the world” or at least as many patients as I could with all the training I had. Unfortunately, it took less than 1 year in a traditional Family practice for me to soon realize that my “black doctors bag” was limited to only pharmaceutical treatments and I soon found that much of my day consisted of managing chronic disease and medication interactions, rather than truly helping my patients to live fuller, active and healthier lives.

I soon had the good fortune of attending my first Integrative Medicine Educational Conference which introduced me to the concept or “root cause” of illness that I had never considered before, always being focused on identifying and diagnosing a disease and then automatically treating the symptoms of the disease with a pharmaceutical. After all, that is what I had 7 years of training to do. Instead of asking “why” did this patient develop this condition and what can be done to reverse what the original cause was?

Now after taking many Integrative Medicine courses in Nutrition, Hormones and other natural healing modalities I finally understand the “why” and “how” we develop health certain health conditions, even more importantly, I understood how to reverse and prevent the condition from worsening.

Integrative Functional medicine physicians have additional training to help you discover the “root cause” of your problems always focusing on lifestyle/nutrition, hormonal imbalance, potential toxin exposures, underlying hidden or historical infections, emotional/spiritual needs and proper digestion with adequate detoxification/elimination of toxins. It may take a deeper dive and additional specialty testing to discover and treat these conditions, but a little foresight and investment now may save substantially in the future if you consider the alternative possibility of multiple pharmaceuticals, specialists, potential unnecessary procedures, surgeries and even hospitalizations.