Why This Work Is Personal

In my second year of medical school, I started having insomnia, anxiety, mood swings, weight loss, and a hand tremor. My doctor immediately dismissed me and told me it was medical school stress and I was simply imagining I had every disease I was studying.

I knew better. I'd just spent two years in the Peace Corps in Paraguay and lost my mother to pancreatic cancer four months after she was diagnosed. I'd been through real stress, and it never looked like this. So I pushed for a full workup.

A few weeks later, she called me and told me I had Graves' disease. My immune system was attacking my thyroid.

My doctor had no interest in why. She gave me three options: medication to shut my thyroid down, radioactive iodine to destroy it or surgery to remove it.

I opted for what I thought was the lesser of the three evils - medication to shut down my thyroid. Within weeks, I was exhausted, my hair falling out and everything was dry.  My doctor ran labs and found that I was hypothyroid and my liver enzymes were sky high.  I was diagnosed with toxic hepatitis from the medication and I was headed towards liver failure. I was now left with two choices - radioactive I-131 thyroid ablation or surgical thyroidectomy.  I chose to have my thyroid ablated. It remains the biggest regret of my life.

This experience shaped everything that came after. As an ER physician, I kept seeing patients dismissed the way I had been. Functional medicine gave me the answer I'd been looking for: find the root cause instead of managing symptoms forever.

Conventional medicine failed me. My mission is to make sure it doesn't fail you too.