About

After practicing as an oncologist for several years, I still felt that patients often struggled with healing. We could treat the cancer—but with unintended consequences of challenging symptoms (fatigue, nausea, neuropathy, etc) that could persist for months or years after the treatment. I found that patients often struggled to manage the complexity of their care, ending up with a care team that could have a dozen different practitioners (requiring a dozen different appointments, each focusing on one condition). And I realized that this wasn’t just true for cancer—it was true for many complex conditions. There had to be a better way.

Then integrative medicine re-entered the picture. I was fortunate to be practicing at Thomas Jefferson University, which had recently launched the first Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences in the country, and had the wonderful opportunity to further my knowledge by completing a fellowship in Integrative Medicine. My journey to understand the world and healing continues, with the goal that I can help others with this knowledge. I am continually learning about healing practices (such as meditation, Qi Gong and other movement practices, herbal medicine, acupuncture, Eastern medicine, and functional medicine). I strongly believe that many of these approaches should be incorporated into an individual’s healing process.

My clinical practice is now focused entirely on helping people heal using a systems medicine approach. The body has an amazing capacity to heal, even from complex and recalcitrant conditions. In order to do this, it needs support that is both precise and holistic. We need to understand the specifics of a chemical pathway—and we also need to realize that such a pathway exists as part of a bigger whole, and changes made without consideration of the bigger context can have unintended downstream consequences. Treating symptoms doesn’t get to the root of illness. And illnesses rarely have a single root cause. We need a framework that combines the precision and focus of a biomedical approach with the holistic, big-picture vision of both traditional and innovative healing approaches.

I’m fascinated with the complexity, sophistication, and elegance of living systems.

I’ve always been amazed by how the body and the world work. When I was 8, I remember getting a cut on my hand and wondering how this miraculous fluid, blood, could carry so much life force throughout the body—and how my hand could heal itself when left to its own devices. When I was in college, I studied chemistry and philosophy, deepening my interest in both the biochemical and the more metaphysical aspects of life. This examination was the foundation for my appreciation of core principles—concepts present in both philosophy and science that are fundamental to understanding the resulting system of thinking (be it biomedicine, Chinese medicine, or a specific person’s view of the world). In medical school, I ultimately chose to focus on internal medicine, which I perceived to be the speciality that most focused on seeing patients as people, not as diagnoses. I remember learning briefly about integrative medicine at the time, and was intrigued by the ability of this new field to pull all the pieces of health together, but it was not clear to me how to practice it.

When I began residency at UCSF, I was struck by a few things. First, it seemed to me that it was hard for people to get good healthcare. While a lot of good tools were available, when it came down to it, both patients and healthcare practitioners struggled to reliably and meaningfully connect with resources—and with each other. I became increasingly interested in the how of healthcare delivery—how do all the pieces in this complex puzzle that is healthcare fit together? And how can patients with extraordinarily complex conditions (like cancer) thrive in such a system? This led me to pursue an MBA in healthcare management at the Wharton School, as well as a fellowship in medical oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, to explore the systems that affect care—both inside the patient AND outside the patient.

My Credentials