My Journey Through Medicine—and What I Discovered

For more than 30 years, I practiced medicine. Early on, I sensed that something was missing. The traditional system worked well in many ways, yet it often fell short of supporting true, lasting wellness. I rarely had the time to connect with my patients the way I wanted to, or to dig into the root causes of what they were facing. Too often, I felt as though I was offering temporary fixes for deeper wounds, and that never sat right with me. I did not become a doctor to manage symptoms. I became one to help people heal.

So in the mid-1990s, I began exploring complementary medicine. I took courses, sought out practitioners who shared my convictions, and started weaving natural, integrative approaches into my practice. What I saw amazed me. Patients responded in ways I had not witnessed before. Even so, I was still working within a system that simply was not built for the kind of care I knew was possible. Eventually, the weight of that mismatch caught up with me. Overwhelmed and burned out, I made the hardest decision of my career. I sold my practice.

Finding Healing—And a New Path

In 2010, I stepped away from clinical medicine and entered the life insurance industry. At Lincoln Financial Group, and later at Principal Financial Group and American National, I finally found the time and space to rest, recover, and heal.

For the first time in years, I was no longer on call or working weekends. I rediscovered simple joys: reading for pleasure, playing bass in a band, and reconnecting with the person I had become too busy to know, the one buried beneath years of professional pressure. Yet even as I began to feel whole again, I realized I was not finished helping people. I simply needed to find a different way to do it.