"Ok, we'll increase your blood pressure medicine and I'll make a referral to dermatology for your skin and one to endocrinology for your thyroid. Here's a script for a pain med for your knee. If that doesn't help, we'll get you to ortho. Oh and watch your sugars; you're in the prediabetic range now."

Sound familiar?

In medical school, I can't count the number of times someone asked, "What are you going to specialize in?" After all, the glamour and glory (and money!) are in the specialties! Who goes into family practice anymore?

But I didn't want to be an "ear" doc, or a "heart" doc, or a "bladder" doc. I wanted to be a "people" doc! And people are a beautiful, complicated, and dynamic integration of physical body systems, mental and emotional wellbeing, and spirituality. It felt like a cop-out to effectively blind myself to the complexities that come with caring for people to specialize in some narrow aspect of human health (although there are times where I'm grateful for the specialists).

Meanwhile, I observed how so many people were simply being triaged by primary care to the specialists - and no one was stepping back to look at the whole picture!

Worse, if a patient had multiple symptoms, it often frustrated their doctors rather than inviting curiosity.

Is this really our healthcare system?

It's certainly not the kind of medical career I wanted for myself - or my patients.

After all, patients are often hurting, vulnerable and confused, and they're coming to us for help!

This is a tremendous honor that we should never take lightly.

But the health care system is so siloed into specialties, so preoccupied with masking symptoms with drugs, and so financially driven by the number of codes that can be attached to the greatest number of patients that it is altogether incapable of providing what these patients need.

My "Why?"

So I stuck with family medicine. I kept my training broad because I wanted to be able to help my patients across all of their body systems. And I also learned about functional medicine - which is predicated on the integration of body systems.

The more I applied these things to my patients, the more we connected the dots, and found our way out of the health crises they were in - not by adding more and more drugs and specialists, but by identifying and resolving the underlying root causes - the more joy and satisfaction I found as a physician.

The hope and relief I get to see in my patients' faces when we uncover what their body is telling us is one of the greatest blessings to me. Then, after just a few months of therapy, when I hear them say, "Doc, I didn't know I could feel this good again," well, it doesn't get much better.