I believe in the power of integrative & cannabinoid medicine to transform medicine from a broken disease management system into a ‘Resilience Medicine’ system. My clinical work with patients as well as my teaching, speaking, writing & advocacy work is focused on empowering patients to reclaim their resilience, wellbeing & quality of life no matter what health challenges they are facing.
Medical School
“I went to medical school full of inspiration about all of the amazing health and wellness tools I would one day be able to bring to my patients. I already had an interest in mindbody & nutritional medicine as an competitive athlete (swimming) and gotten into supplements and food to help my own issues (painful periods as a teen and recurrent UTIs and sinus infections).
To my initial surprise, this wasn’t what you learn about in medical school. Instead, I learned the ins and outs of a mostly drugs and surgery based ‘disease management’ system to fight fires once they were well underway. It was highly impersonal and not at all focused on root causes or reversing chronic illness.
The western medical tools I spent so many years learning are indeed lifesaving & helpful for ‘acute medicine’ but my interests lied in creating truly holistic health and empowering people living with chronic illness.
By my final years of medical school, I realized nearly all my mentors who I looked up to in my new profession suffered from stress, fatigue, burnout and chronic health problems themselves.
Most of the patients we saw who suffered from chronic health problems like insomnia, anxiety, IBS, type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and treatment resistant depression didn’t get better with the pills only approach.
I saw how much our studies and our practice revolved around adding on more pills for every symptom and then side effects of the first pill and how little doctors actually knew about healthy living, nutrition, how to be happy and reduce brain stress & inflammation. Many patients felt frustrated and not listened to.
I knew that there had to be a better way to do medicine.