Photographed by Geordy Pearson.Why it’s important to be uncensored
“Trust is everything in a doctor-patient relationship, and I think patients know that if you’re willing to say something they don’t want to hear, they can probably trust you. My lack of filter on my blog, Health Uncensored, is something I have the luxury to do as a functional medicine doctor that doctors who only have 10 minutes with a patient might not. [I use that medium] to be honest and answer questions and educate. I think the era of just saying ‘do this, take that’ is over, thanks to the Internet. You have to be able to explain why you’re recommending something, and why it’s relevant to that person specifically. The power to be honest and forthright is critical. Authenticity is really what [healthcare] is about.”
What everyone gets wrong about body image
“I think that as much as we celebrate individuality in our culture, there’s a lot of pressure to conform to a certain weight, a certain standard of beauty, a certain shape of a bum, or a thigh, or a nose. I certainly wish that we celebrated more people who look different than what we see in movies, on TV or in magazines. In all the naked people I've seen, I have never seen an 'average' body. There's no normal.”
What beauty means to me
“Beauty is the freedom to express yourself and get away from the conformity of our society. My most beautiful friends find a way to show their interior in the exterior through fashion and beauty, and that’s the coolest thing about beauty. It’s like an art form; it allows you to be creative.”
Why I don't diagnose with pills
“[At my clinic], we practice 'functional medicine' where we focus on getting to the root cause of the disease rather than just trying to Band-Aid a symptom with drugs. A lot of conventional medicine is a pill for every ill, and we don’t believe in that. We believe in looking at the context of your life: How you grew up, the medications you’ve taken, the foods you’ve been eating — all in context to figure out what’s really driving your disease. We don’t just try to manage your symptoms, and I think we have a lot of success helping people this way.”
