Jeremy Steiner, MD, PhD, DAOM

My great-uncle was our pediatrician, and walking into his office never felt like a doctor's visit. He knew our names, our histories, and what worried our mothers before anyone said a word. That's the medicine I wanted to practice.

For years I practiced that way, as an acupuncturist and integrative practitioner with a doctorate in bioelectric medicine, the study of the electricity your cells use to heal. My patients ranged from complex autoimmune disease to executives and athletes who wanted more out of their bodies, and the work was always the same underneath: find what's driving it, and treat that.

One patient had Sjogren's, an autoimmune disease that had shut down her ability to make tears and saliva. The standard answer is a lifetime of immunosuppressants. I worked through what a standard workup skips and found a hidden infection that had been driving her disease for years. We treated it, and the woman who couldn't make tears sat in my office and cried grateful tears of joy.

But I kept hitting a wall. I'd spend a whole appointment explaining why broccoli would do more for a patient than another prescription added on, and they'd nod, thank me, go home, and order a pizza. The advice was right. It just wasn't coming from an MD. And when my treatment brought someone's blood pressure down, I wasn't the one who could lower the medication, so they'd return to a prescriber who had no idea what we'd been doing. The patient was always the one stuck in the middle.

So I went to medical school to do all of it myself. As their physician, I can get them to eat broccoli. And when a treatment starts working, I'm the one who lowers the medication to match.

What I'm building is a practice my great-uncle would recognize: a doctor who knows your whole family and has the time to prove it. I keep it small on purpose, because that's the only way I get to know you the way he knew us. My patients are my family.