OUR APPROACH
""Is that just giving people supplements?"
- My own PCP, when I told her I was leaving the inpatient unit to complete integrative psychiatry training
I myself was very skeptical of integrative/functional psychiatry when I first learned about it years ago. So why did I take this risk, to train in a different approach? Three words.
Treatment. Resistant. Patients. I have seen so many patients who have tried every medication (and combination of medications) under the sun, with very little improvement. I want to be able to offer patients more than just another round of a medication from a medication class that they've already tried. Furthermore, I want to make sure we aren't missing something else going on! The practice of medicine seems very established and authoritative - but there is so much we still don't know. (Treatments like antibiotics and insulin have only been around for roughly 100 years. My grandfather was alive when the structure of DNA was discovered.) And this is even more apparent in psychiatry. So when it comes to what processes are causing symptoms of mental illness and what to do about it - the field is still figuring it out. We have some truly life-changing medications. But they don't work for every patient. If you have had to care for a seriously unwell and unstable family member who is not responding to conventional care - you don't have decades to wait for large, randomized, peer-reviewed studies to update clinical practice.
Integrative psychiatry embraces ongoing research and adapts to new findings quickly. Whether it's better understanding how foods we eat impact our gut integrity which impacts our IBS and anxiety, or whether doing extensive workup to ensure that a case of OCD isn't actually a post-infectious autoimmune condition, we'll work to better understand the pieces of your puzzle. And unlike some other integrative or functional medicine providers, I do not profit from my approach. I offer lab tests at cost and make no money from supplement referrals.