Clinical Services

We practice integrative primary care that is comprehensive, whole person, individualized and centered on patients’ unique needs and goals. We combine state-of-the-art conventional family medicine is with life style medicine (nutrition, exercise, stress reduction), mind-body, botanical, and manual medicine to create a whole-person approach to health and illness.

We believe that coordination of care is vital for improving wellbeing and preventing unnecessary interventions and keeping our patients safe. We, therefore, make every effort to coordinate care with our collaborative teams of physicians and non physician practitioners.

 

 

We provide integrative consultations for patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart failure, chronic lung disease, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, cancer, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, anxiety, depression etc. These are patients who would like to continue their primary care with their longstanding physician but would like to integrate lifestyle medicine as well as evidence based, safe complementary practices such as nutriceutical and botanical supplementation, meditation and other mind body techniques and would like guidance and referral to other practitioners if needed (acupuncture, tai chi yoga, chiropractic, osteopathic care, physical therapists, physical trainers, massage therapists, dieticians, health coaches, social workers, psychologists, and others).

 

We follow the same partnership model in our consultative practice. Many of our consultation patients want to know if the supplements they take are appropriate, safe and have no interactions with their pharmaceuticals. In fact overseeing safety of integration at all levels is essential to our practice.

 

 

This program also focuses on empowering patients with the knowledge and lifestyle skills necessary to improve their general well being and master the management of their illness. The group visits provide a series of individual clinical evaluations followed by a 60-90 minute educational session, which offers the opportunity to interact as a group and learn from patients who are experiencing similar illnesses. These group educational sessions include experiential sessions in nutrition, exercise and stress management. Our practice currently features group visits for asthma, lipid management, menopause, and osteoporosis.

 

A series of 6-8 workshops with meditation as the core experience for stress management. The group is introduced to several forms of meditation including breathing techniques, the stress relaxation response, mindfulness meditation, walking meditations, heart-centered meditations and others. Additional aspects of stress management discussed are sound nutrition, movement, sleep practices, time management and prioritization, awareness of thought patterns and related emotions.

 

Integrative medicine believes that health is a state of optimum function, contentment, balance and harmony of our physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual aspects of our existence.

 

Integrative medicine seeks to combine all that is relevant to the promotion of health and the facilitation of healing. Knowledge and skills are derived from conventional medical practice, contemporary complementary and alternative practices as well as traditional healing arts.

The breadth of integration is influenced by evidence based scientific information as well as attention to the safety and lack of harm of practices and their congruence with patient and physician beliefs.

 

The role of the physician is that of a facilitator of the process of healing. Information exchange, validation, respect and love facilitate healing. A physician patient partnership with attention to the uniqueness of the patient story is empowering and healing.

Integrative medicine is socially committed to empower patients and communities to take charge of their health.

 

Integrative medicine understands how systems operate and is aware of the interactions between individuals and social/economic systems (family, job, community) and how such interactions are affected by illness and how they affect illnesses as well.