UPDATE:
I have retired from practicing medicine and have opened up a new consultation practice teaching people how to tap into their own interoceptive senses to better guide their health and wellness.
To visit my new interoception consultation practice…
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The Short Version:
I teach people how to improve their health by working with their physiology instead of against it.
My goal is to give you the information and the tools you need to bring your body back to health.
I love my work. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and there are few things as satisfying and fun as helping people feel better.
The Much Longer Version:
My childhood was spent following animal trails in the woods and building forts, hauling water, chopping wood, building the fire in the mornings when the cabin had dropped to below zero temperatures, and spending long winters holed up in my room after school, reading the giant stack of books I would get at the public library once every couple of weeks.
Life in rural Alaska will really teach you what is important: physical health, mental health, and indoor plumbing!
You can get by without the indoor plumbing, but there is nothing like a long, dark, Alaskan winter to make you really appreciate the importance of physical and mental health.
I took my appreciation for those wonderful things and moved to Washington state in 1990, where I attended CWU planning to become a teacher. That plan was derailed part way through the Education program, when I took a Human Physiology course “just for fun” and fell in love with the subject.
I graduated with my BS in Biology from Central Washington University, and then my nerdy fascination with human physiology led me to Bastyr where I earned my Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine in 2001.
I have spent my career as a physician focused on the treatment of autoimmune and other chronic disease, and I have been privileged to hear a great many stories over all these years. With time I began noticing patterns in the stories, threads that were common to my patients who were dealing with chronic disease.
It seemed to me that very often my patients didn’t seem to be “sick” so much as their body was stuck in a particular physiological track, and some sort of feedback loop was holding it there, causing it to spin out and create pain and dysfunction.
With that thought in mind, I changed my treatment of chronic disease, and I have found that helping people shift their physiology to be in a more balanced state, helps them break out of the cycles of chronic disease and finally move forward with their lives.
When I’m not doctoring or telling my kid how lucky he is to grow up with indoor plumbing, my favorite thing is still to curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a good book.