Our primary purpose is to get sick people well, and the way we feel this is best done is within the framework of Integrative Family Medicine. We believe medicine is much more than just dispensing pills and we take care of each patient as we would want our own family members to be treated. Many issues face us in our goal of leading a productive healthy life. We are living longer due to the improvement in public health, nutrition, and modern medicine. Yet in many ways we have become less healthy. Obesity, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autism, are consuming the population. Much of what we suffer from is self inflicted and based in a lack of discipline. We have been tricked into valuing the momentary pleasure instead of long lasting health. Our health is an amalgam of the air we breathe, food we eat, thoughts we think, which put another way would be, “Health is what we do for our body minus what we do to our body.” Some people come to the doctor looking for the magic pill or to be fixed blaming doctors when they don’t get better, going through a long list of treatments they have done, yet are still smoking, not exercising, eating junk food, and overweight. This brings to mind the joke when a Zen Buddhist opened up a hot-dog stand and his first customer paid with $20 dollars. After waiting, the customer demanded, “Where’s my change?” “Sir,” replied the Buddhist, “change must come from within.” Unless we make certain changes in our life disease will find us again. Of course using homeopathy, acupuncture, and manipulation it is possible to produce what most would call miraculous results, but it is still imperative that we are doing something for our health on our own. Most of us know that our bodies were designed to heal, if we get a cut most likely we aren’t going to bleed to death and in a lot of cases it will heal without even evidence of what happened. Most of our sickness is simply a defense the body has put up to protect itself as the “check engine light”, and most often in conventional medicine the symptoms are treated, which would be like sticking a piece of tape over the light. The problem is still there you just don’t notice it for now until it is too late and you have to replace the engine. Over the years, we have observed inflammatory bowel diseases go into remission, HA1Cs brought down from 13 to 6, women with PCOS begin regular pain free cycles, and 20 year chronic intractable pain all relieved with alternative therapies which previously had failed conventional treatments. Thus far, it has been our experience that conventional treatments are well suited in the acute setting but are often lacking when it comes to chronic conditions. Bottom line, we want to find what works and does the least amount of harm, whether it is a conventional or alternative method.