I love science, and I always have. I wore an old white lab coat around the house as a kid and spent hours on end staring into my microscope. My strongest fields throughout my medical training were gastroenterology, endocrinology, and neurology, but I chose to pursue family medicine because each specialty felt to me to be restrictive in its narrow scope of one and only one body system. Family medicine excludes no age, sex, or disease. I wanted to study it all and even took courses in plant biology, ecology, and tide pool identification. Studying bacteria, plants, parasites, and medicine has always felt natural to me. What doesn't feel natural is compartmentalizing it all.
The human body contains as many, if not more, bacterial cells as it does human cells. Those bacteria change over our lifetime and have recently been implicated in everything from cancer growth and spread to autism and schizophrenia. New research about the microbiome and all of its players is coming out at lightening speed, and suddenly, it doesn't seem so strange to study bacteria, plants, parasites, and medicine together. Enter, functional medicine.
If family medicine was a good fit for me, functional medicine is my hearts' calling. By delving into every symptom and system on a cellular level, I get to the root cause of the issue. Medicine is evolving, and so too should our physicians. If we know that "routine" and cursory tests such as an annual CBC and metabolic panel do nothing to detect or prevent disease, why do we continue to order them? When a non invasive stool test exists that looks for DNA of colorectal cancer cells, why is this not being offered routinely when people born in 1990 have twice the risk of colon cancer and four times the risk of rectal cancer as those born in 1950? It is well documented that it takes 17 years from the time new medical research is released for doctors to implement it in their care. Frankly, that is entirely unacceptable.
With the ever growing chronic disease crisis in this country, physicians need to step up to the plate, and we don't have 17 years to do it. Practicing functional medicine allows me to spend time with my patients and really hear their story. It allows me to apply a wide breadth of knowledge to treat what have historically been hard to treat conditions such as IBS, acid reflux, Hashimoto's, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia. There is most often an answer for why disease develops, as well as how to fix it. Functional medicine is the future of medicine, and I am beyond grateful that I get to be a part of this health revolution.
Certified with the American Board of Family Medicine
Licensed in New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, and Arizona
Clinical Instructor In Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College 2011-201
Brown University Family Medicine Residency
Saint George's University School of Medicine
University of New Hampshire (Women's Studies, Pre-Med)
University of New Hampshire (Women's Studies, Pre-Med)
Member of the Institute for Functional Medicine, American Medical Association, & American Herbalists Guild