An MD’s slow road to root-cause medicine.
Fifteen years in internal medicine taught me how to read a body through its prescriptions. The next chapter has been about learning to read it without them.
Why I left allopathy-only practice.
Spend long enough in a busy OPD and you’ll meet patients you cannot really help. Their reports are fine. Their bodies are not. They leave with one more pill and the quiet sense that no one is actually listening to them. After a while, that started to feel like the problem, not the patient.
I trained as a physician at MAMC and LHMC, then practised internal medicine for fifteen years. I am grateful for that training. It taught me to be careful, to read labs honestly, and to respect what medication can do in the right moment. It also showed me where it stops. Chronic conditions, the kind most people are told they will have for life, need more than a prescription. They need someone willing to ask why.
How I trained in functional medicine.
Functional medicine is not a rejection of allopathy. It is a way of using the same science to ask a longer set of questions. Why is your gut inflamed. Why is your thyroid struggling. Why does the same condition look different in two people on paper. I went back to studying, certified through the Institute for Functional Medicine, and rebuilt my practice around the patients I had not been able to help the first time around.
Four things that shape every consult.
Medicine is a tool, not an identity.
A prescription is one option among many. It is not the goal, and it is not who you are.
Root cause first.
Symptoms are signals. The work is to listen carefully and trace them back to where they began.
Slow is faster.
Most chronic conditions took years to settle in. Real change asks for patience, not pressure.
The patient is the protagonist.
You know your body better than any test. My job is to translate, not to take over.
Beyond Meds is not anti-medicine. I prescribe medication when it is the right tool, especially in the first weeks of a programme. The work is to get you off the long-term, daily, chronic medications most patients are told they will be on for life: metformin, BP pills, statins, levothyroxine, hormonal contraceptives. The kind of medicines that treat the symptom forever and never address the cause.
On Sunday mornings I am usually with my dog, a coffee, and an old book. The hardest condition I have ever treated is my own perfectionism.