Your Team for Comprehensive, Personalized Medicine

Primary care is the foundation of health care. We are your medical home over the course of your life. Our team of practitioners partners with you to prevent illness and achieve your health goals. We designed our clinic to support you in preventing illness, and reversing chronic conditions if possible. If conditions arise that require specialist care, we help to coordinate your treatment plan and serve as a central reference that you can trust. We are experienced providers that have good working working relationships with local specialists. Over the years, we have helped to legitimize an integrative approach to primary care in the local community. 

We base our approach on current evidenced-based medical science and clinical experience. The foundation of our practice is a personalized lifestyle plan for each patient. Over 30 years of research has demonstrated that a comprehensive lifestyle is the most effective way to prevent or reverse chronic conditions from heart disease to diabetes. It also improves quality of life, and recently has been shown to slow markers of aging. Since life is a process of change and discovery, we continually work with you over the course of your life to craft a sustainable, enjoyable lifestyle that fits your needs and goals. 

Well… Things happen. We provide urgent care visits for the bumps, bruises, strains, colds, and other things that disrupt our lives unexpectedly. We deliberately arrange our schedule to provide same or next day urgent care visits for our members. We can suture (stitch) your cuts, evaluate your weekend warrior injuries, and help you with that sinus headache won’t go away. We try to offer natural options when available and coordinate with local providers when you need additional help. We have negotiated discounts with collaborating practitioners, labs, and imaging centers to decrease the cost of diagnosis and treatment for our members. 

Integrative Medicine can mean different things to many people- especially in Asheville. 

Ultimately, we want to be a good fit for you and have a long term health care relationship. This section provides a little history to answer common questions. (You can skip to the last two paragraphs if you want the punchline.)

Western medicine has not always been hospitable to other modalities. There has been a slow process of realizing the efficacy of a collaborative approach. First there was the term ‘Alternative Medicine,’ and then ‘Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.’ These implied a hierarchy with Western Medicine at the top or in the center. Andrew Weil coined the term ‘Integrative Medicine’ to describe an evidenced-based approach to coordinating modalities on an equal playing field as to best meet the patient’s needs with as little harm or toxicity as possible. Since then, the term has become ubiquitous and has become a large umbrella under which everything that is evidence-based and sometimes not has come to reside. In some ways the term has lost its definition based on fluid interpretations in different communities. But… we put the term in our name.  So what do we mean??? 

Since we opened our clinic, different terms and styles of practice have emerged and matured. ‘Holistic Medicine’ means looking at the big picture- the whole person in the context of their whole life- and seeing how various interdependent influences promote health or disease in individuals and communities. Since most chronic illness arises over a long period of time due to the interaction of multiple factors, this perspective is the most effective for preventing and reversing these conditions. The National Institute of Health (NIH) recognized this fact and created the Center for Systems Biology to study the complex interactions underlying chronic disease. This is basically evidence-based Holistic Medicine. In an effort to translate Systems Biology into clinical practice, Jeffrey Bland and his colleagues created Functional Medicine as a style of ‘applied systems biology.’ This provided a framework to analyze, discuss, and address complex systems behavior in a clinical setting. This approach proved effective for many hard to treat, complex conditions, and has yielded effective comprehensive treatment plans for challenging conditions such as Alzheimers Dementia and Multiple Sclerosis. The Cleveland Clinic now has an applied research division looking into the efficacy of Functional Medicine on a larger scale. Curiously, the style of practice for Functional Medicine sometimes differs wildly from the research at the Cleveland Clinic. Some people equate Functional Medicine with an approach that aims to order many labs tests in an effort to measure and quantify anything can be measured in an attempt to maximize performance. The seasoned practitioners of Functional Medicine that we personally know have repeatedly told us that the longer you practice, the fewer test your order. While it may tempting to measure everything that can be measured, that is not the initial intention of Functional Medicine as developed by Jeffrey Bland and his colleagues. That is more the style of (oh no… more terms) ‘Anti-aging Medicine,’ ‘Bio-hacking,’ or the ‘Quantified-Self’ movement. You can see that since we opened our clinic the environment and information on the internet has become much more complex. It is confusing to many people. 

We differentiate ourselves from Functional Medicine practitioners that incorporate a lot of specialized testing. This approach can be very useful for complex conditions that eluded previous diagnosis and treatment, but is not appropriate for everyone and would make our services too expensive for many. Instead, we developed our clinic to address the foundations of health in an accessible, supportive way. By doing so, we hope to make a high quality of personalized care available to more people. 

So, we explained all of this in order to tell you what we actually do!

We offer a holistic, integrative approach to primary care that begins with the foundation of a personalized, comprehensive lifestyle program. We listen to you and apply clinical expertise in combination with appropriate testing to address your health concerns. We know you in the context of your whole life, and our team works with you to develop a plan that you can sustain and enjoy. We work well with local integrative practitioners when needed and have developed collaborations to make these modalities more accessible to our members.

We call our approach ‘Integrative Primary Care’ and differentiate ourselves from the ‘deep-dive specialty testing’ approach which refer to as ‘Integrative Specialty Care.’ We have excellent working relations with our specialty colleagues in the community, and often share clients with us managing their primary care needs and them spearheading the episodic deep-dive investigation.

We consider ourselves your medical home and partner with you to sustain optimal health throughout life’s changes. 

Lifestyle Medicine has it’s roots in common sense and age-old wisdom. It is small things that we do everyday which impact our health over the course of our lives. Our actions bear fruit. 

Many ancient healing systems from Europe to India held this understanding as their foundation. In the past 30 years, modern science has begun applying it’s methods toward understanding how this might work. We now know with repeated studies and scientific certainty that a comprehensive lifestyle program is the most effective means for preventing and reversing many chronic condition such as hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease. More recent studies have shown reversal of early stage cancers as well as changes on genetic expression and markers of aging. Just as importantly, we see improved quality of life and community health. 

Our team partners with you to work on nutrition, fitness, stress, and relationships to cultivate a healthy life. Curiously, the research has shown that we when you leave one element out, you do not get the dramatic results. Somehow these elements work together to achieve the impressive effects such as reversing diagnosed heart disease or early stage prostate cancer. This is why we have developed our care team to support you in a comprehensive approach to your lifestyle program.  

To put things in perspective, the U.S. spends about $3 Trillion per year on these chronic conditions and does not have a medical system designed to prevent nor reverse them. We developed our clinic as a practical example of what can be done differently. From the ground up, we designed the clinic with the singular goal of supporting our members in optimal health over the course of their lives. Years later, we have a diverse team of practitioners successfully coordinating care with excellent results. We regularly collaborate with other clinics in the mission to transform our health care system, and are grateful for our members that have been part of the journey. 

Health coaching provides support for you to identify your personal health goals then and create a success-oriented plan for establishing new, healthier habits. In short, health coaching takes what feels challenging and makes it less so.

Change can be challenging. This is especially true when old habits are comfortable, in spite of being out of alignment with your goals for health and well-being.

A Health Coach can be compared to a personal trainer, except the focus is on your whole self, and you create the roadmap for change. The coach supports you by exploring what is most important to you in your life and health. in By connecting a desire for change to your life values and vision of optimal health, motivation increases.  In partnership, your coach helps you identify obstacles to change and create strategies for moving forward toward your goals, one step at a time. The coach supports you in monitoring your progress and holding you accountable to your commitments.

We encourage all of our Integrative Life Members to have at least one Integrative Health Coaching session. In this “micro-session,” we move through an abbreviated health coaching process by exploring what your optimal health would look and feel like, what values are important to you, and more. This “check in” is not driven by anyone’s agenda other than your own. For those who want to go deeper into the process, a full health coaching cycle lasts three to six months. Following the introductory session are several one hour appointments then bi-weekly thirty minute follow ups until the desired goal has been reached.  

What are appropriate topics for health coaching? Each coaching process is unique. Any concern that feels like it is in the way of realizing your optimal health or desire to cultivate habits that would contribute to your optimal health, is the perfect subject with which to begin coaching. Common topics include reducing stress, losing weight, cultivating a regular exercise routine, developing new eating habits, and more.

Imagine feeding yourself the right fuel on a regular basis to improve energy levels, mood, productivity, focus, athletic performance, body image, sleep, and more, all while reducing pain and inflammation. With supportive nutrition education and coaching this process can be expansive and exciting rather then restrictive.

Who benefits from nutrition coaching? People often seek nutritional support when they experience a change in their physical or mental health; however, anyone can benefit from the coaching process. Proper nutrition can support a variety of challenges including weight management, diabetes, digestive issues, mental health conditions, inflammation, headaches, fatigue, food allergies and sensitivities, sleep issues, addiction, skin issues, and more. Fueling the body properly will also help with the prevention and management of health conditions and create a foundation for optimal physical and mental health. You may even see benefits in areas of your health that were not related to your initial concerns.

Our Nutrition Coach, Katherine Wilson, MSHN, specializes in the connection between the gut and the brain and how they influence each other for physical and mental well being. In addition to other conditions previously mentioned, she also provides nutrition support for those seeking guidance with blood sugar regulation, disordered eating, hormone health, mental health, prenatal nutrition, label reading/shopping, sports nutrition, sugar education, and weight management.Through implementing nutritional, wellness, and lifestyle changes, patients can become empowered active participants in changing the course of their individual health and the health of the community.