Physician reflections: 5 things I’ve learned about healing as an integrative doctor

And how the art of healing taught me unlearn urgency

Healing has taught me to unlearn urgency. Not only in my own practice, but in my own life.

Practicing integrative medicine taught me that being aggressive about fixing our bodies is the best way to hinder healing. Social media wellness “biohacking” tools & tricks that force you to fight your body, rather than work with it, often, in my opinion, only worsen stress and overload your nervous system - leading to higher cortisol levels and impeded healing. Ask anyone who’s tried aggressive & fad diets in the past and see how it worked out for them. Eventually we all must learn that our bodies respond best when we “stop peddling upstream” and instead work with them.

Integrative medicine made me more respectful of how much the body already knows how to do.

Here are five principles I return to again and again…..

1. The nervous system sets the pace.
You cannot heal in a state of constant threat. No supplement, diet, or protocol works well if the nervous system doesn’t feel safe enough to receive it. Fad diets, quick fixes, aggressive protocols only worsen this perceived threat.

2. Healing is not linear.
Progress rarely moves in a straight line! There are advances, pauses, regressions, and recalibrations. Setbacks don’t mean something isn’t working or that your body is “wrong”. Plateaus are often part of the process.

3. The body knows how to heal itself.
Most symptoms aren’t evidence of failure but rather they’re signals that happen at times years before disease sets in. Our job isn’t to override the body, but to remove obstacles and guide it back toward equilibrium. Integrative medicine is founded on the principle that the body knows how to heal itself. Our job is to remove the barriers to healing.

3. Healing happens through small, repeatable actions.
Not dramatic changes or perfect protocols. But rather in boring, consistent steps practiced over time. Consistency looks like nothing is changing until one day everything changes. That includes our physiology.

5. Environment is your medicine (or poison).
Light, food, stress, relationships, toxins, rest, all these shape our microbiomes, immune system, and nervous system every single day. Healing doesn’t happen in isolation from the world we live in.

I’ve learned that healing is quieter than we expect.
Slower. More relational. Less dramatic.

And when we respect that pace, the body tends to meet us there.