Preventative Health & Lifestyle Medicine

Personalized Care

Being a patient means being vulnerable, and being your doctor, I put myself in your shoes. In the ER, I stabilize trauma patients, perform emergency procedures, and help re-set broken bones.

Spending the last 18 years working in the emergency department, I have also seen the devastating effects of heart attacks and strokes. Unfortunately, most of these medical conditions are caused by the silent build-up of plaque in the arteries of the heart or brain. Often, people don’t know they are suffering from chronic disease progression until it is too late. While medications and procedures have the ability to treat these emergencies, I have become interested in what we can do to prevent the development of chronic disease in the first place.

We are facing an epidemic of obesity, diabetes type 2, and cardiovascular disease at unprecedented rates. Our modern society has made it easy to eat unhealthy food and become physically inactive. On top of this, stress is at an all-time high level. Our communal health is suffering, and I want to help everyone create healthy habits around the lifestyle choices we all make. We can eat better, move more, manage stress, and live healthier lives.

Our current state of healthcare emphasizes treatment of disease over prevention in the first place. This long accepted dogma has begun to shift amongst both doctors and patients. The rates of obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, cancer, arthritis, and so much more, are skyrocketing. There are many underlying factors at play which make it hard for people to choose a healthy lifestyle over an unhealthy one. For example, fast food advertising is a compelling force, constantly tempting people to choose high salt, high fat processed food, known to be responsible for a multitude of chronic disease development. The increased time spent on our mobile devices has led our society to become the most sedentary in human history. And worst of all, stress and anxiety are at an all-time high, also a strong contributor to worsening chronic disease.

We are in a state of mental health crisis, where access to resources such as counseling services have diminished, coupled with an increase in symptoms from loneliness, such as depression and anxiety. All of this negatively affects our abilities to cope, which affects our decision making. Making the right choice to eat better and be physically active then, becomes even more difficult.