Triple board-certified, including board certifications in pediatrics and internal medicine
Trained in functional medicine through the Kresser Institute’s ADAPT Functional Medicine Practitioner Training Program
Dual residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Icahn School of Medicine/ Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan
Medical degree from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Graduate of University of California, Berkeley: Bachelor of Arts in Molecular and Cell Biology and Masters of Public Health with emphasis on biostatistics and epidemiology
Being a pediatrician as well as an internist, I thought I knew all I would ever need to know about how to raise a healthy child and keep my family healthy. Then, while on maternity leave after my first son was born, I began learning about functional medicine. If you’re unfamiliar with functional medicine, it focuses on discovering the root cause of diseases and helping patients achieve optimal health through changes in their diet and lifestyle.
This triggered a huge paradigm shift for me. I realized for many diseases I had been addressing with long-term medications, I could instead completely resolve the illness in most of my patients by digging deeper for the root cause. I realized I could heal them using food, elimination of environmental and food toxins, increased outdoor exposure, improved stress management, and other lifestyle changes.
Now that I was a mom, I started looking even deeper into all aspects of pediatric health. This time, instead of just practicing what I had been taught, I looked at everything with a new lens. I was looking for information as a parent who wanted to make the best decisions for my child.
I was shocked to find out that a lot of the information I had been taught in medical school had not included important aspects of the published science available. For example, for children with neurologic issues like autism and ADHD, dental problems, autoimmune issues, allergies, eczema, asthma, obesity and most chronic illnesses, there are often underlying gut issues, nutritional deficiencies, environmental toxins and other causes contributing to their diseases. By addressing these causes, I now know I can dramatically improve the symptoms and in many cases, reverse the diseases.
I am excited to combine my training in functional medicine and ancestral health with my foundational knowledge in internal medicine and pediatrics to help people achieve optimal health.
About Medford Functional Medicine:
Our mission
Our mission is to empower people who are motivated to reclaim their health and their family’s health by working with us to identify and treat root causes of disease and realign their lifestyle to match their evolutionary potential.
Our approach
We partner with families to provide personalized care through functional and evolutionary medicine, ancestral health principles and lifestyle changes.
Functional medicine
Functional medicine is a personalized, science-based approach to healing that focuses on the interconnectedness of all of our systems (for example gut inflammation leading to neuroinflammation and mental health disorders) to address root causes of disease, especially chronic diseases.
Root causes can include nutritional triggers, environmental toxins, gastrointestinal inflammation, hormone imbalances, physical and emotional stress, and genetic predisposition –just to name a few. However, root causes can be a combination of these or other factors.
An experienced functional medicine practitioner can work with you to identify any and all causes of your symptoms.
Evolutionary medicine
Evolutionary medicine uses the science of evolutionary biology to identify ways to prevent and treat illness. Using our knowledge of evolution, we can gain insight into how aspects of our modern lifestyle may not be suited to our evolution. By changing some of those aspects, we can recover our health.
Ancestral health
Closely aligned with evolutionary medicine, ancestral health uses knowledge from anthropological and paleontological findings to identify practices of our ancestors that may benefit us in our modern lives and help us achieve wellness.
For example, analysis of human jaws from many centuries ago compared to modern jaws reflect changes that have led to crooked and diseased teeth in many people today. If we look at what changes in people’s lifestyles occurred during that time period, it can lead us to ways of preventing those kind of jaw malformations in children and correcting those malformations in adults.
Lifestyle changes
Lifestyle changes that we may focus on include:
- Nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory foods
- Optimizing sleep
- Spending more time in nature
- Improving stress management
- Staying active, incorporating more movement in your life
- Making connections and staying connected to other people