Integral Medicine as Primary Care

When you need medical care, how do you want to be treated?

·        Do you just want the symptoms treated or do you want to also get to the root causes and make meaningful changes there?

·        Do you want your health challenge treated in isolation or within the context of your whole life?

·        Do you want conventional medical treatments on one hand, getting loaded up with a shopping bag full of supplements on the other hand, or a rational, reasoned approach using the safest, most effective options from either or both camps?

·        Do you want your care determined by recipes and algorithms or do you want to be listened to and receive care carefully personalized to you?

·        Do you want to wait until a disease shows itself or are you interested in staying healthy and vital in the first place?

If you like the latter options, then you would like Integral Medicine as your primary care.

When you think about it, where do you go to get your whole self treated?  

Of all the medical specialties available, I went into Family Practice because I liked the idea of treating you as a whole person: not just a physical body, but as a thinking, feeling human being with family and social interactions, immersed in a physical and energetic environment. Every aspect of your life influences your health, so every aspect needs to be able to be evaluated when searching for the root causes of your health issues. I found out early in my career that conventional Family Practice, as broad-based as it is, is poorly equipped to treat you as a whole person.

So I kept exploring…and thinking…and trying different ways to treat my patients better and better. But when you look at all of conventional medicine and all of alternative medicine, there are so many different theories about health and disease, so many different treatment modalities, so much to know, that no one can know it all. And our time together in the office is finite. So most practitioners specialize in one area of medicine or another. Over the years, I found myself specializing, too, but not in any disease or organ system. I found myself specializing in a way of problem solving.

And this way can be applied to just about any problem anyone has come to me for help with. It turns out to be particularly helpful for chronic diseases. You see, a chronic disease resists our attempts to treat it. Otherwise, we would treat it, it would go away, and it wouldn’t be chronic. So, if you have a chronic disease, and half of Americans do (and half of them have more than one at a time), finding and treating the root causes is especially important. A chronic disease often asks us to cast a wider net and dig deeper because the root causes are often not where we think to look first. Integral Medicine is very well-suited to help you do this.

But you don’t need a chronic disease to benefit from Integral Medicine. It is also the best preventative medicine I’ve found. If you talk to a conventional doctor about prevention, they think you’re talking about immunizations. But there is so much more to real prevention. More and more, doctors are also taking into account diet and exercise. But there is much more to real prevention than even lifestyle choices. How you see yourself and the world has a major impact on the choices you make and how your body responds. Integral Medicine can help you work on this level as well as lifestyle, etc.

The main point I want to make is that you don’t have to just live with things. Healing is always possible. There is almost always an answer to your life’s problems. Let’s work together, let’s apply the Integral Medicine process to help you find your health, vitality, and real purpose in your life. Don’t give up until you’re happy with your health.