It’s a pleasure to meet you.
In my practice, I aim to first understand your health goals and then bring a pragmatic, data-driven, technology-forward approach to meeting them. I practice primary care “Medicine 3.0” with expertise in preventing cardiometabolic diseases in the pursuit of a long and healthy life. I evaluate cutting-edge research daily and adapt my treatment protocols frequently. I am absolutely obsessive about the details and take your health as seriously as it deserves.
My clinical interests and training include clinical informatics, lipidology and preventive cardiology, menopausal health, improving fitness and body composition (“weight loss”), sleep optimization, geroprotective therapeutics, and evidence-informed supplement use.
My story.
Combining the art and science of medicine
I began taking pre-med classes as an architecture major at Yale. After graduation and brief diversions as a helicopter flight instructor and a year of backpacking with my wife, we settled in Seattle where I attended the University of Washington School of Medicine, committed even then to primary care. At that time my wife began her training as a naturopathic doctor which, in hindsight, has helped me appreciate less conventional approaches to health and healing. These eclectic experiences have spurred me to think creatively and complemented my naturally scientific nature.
Informatics training
At the University of Washington, I pursued a concurrent PhD in biomedical informatics as well as an NIH fellowship in translational science (i.e., how to take basic science and translate it into clinical medicine). I focused on leveraging machine learning to predict health complications from patient data and then intuitively presenting this information to clinicians—a nod to my design roots. This led to board certification in Clinical Informatics and, more recently, explorations into how generative AI (eg, ChatGPT) could enhance my medical decision-making. I am actively using AI in my practice for a variety of programming, research and clinical decision support tasks.
Residency and early practice
My training continued at UCSF in San Francisco, completing a primary care internal medicine residency with a focus on Quality Improvement and Leadership. I was drawn to continue in academic medicine for its intellectual rigor but certain tradeoffs began to weigh on me:
“Twenty years from now, the only people who will remember you worked late are your kids.”
I decided not to continue as faculty at UCSF, instead pivoting to community-based primary care. I spent several rewarding years at Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), before starting my Healthspan practice.
Journey to Medicine 3.0 +
My time during and shortly after residency was marked by a staunch adherence to evidence-based medicine (“Medicine 2.0”). My perspectives broadened after encountering “Medicine 3.0“, which combines thorough evaluation of traditional and novel sources of evidence with deep mechanistic understanding and an emphasis on personalized “N of 1” experimentation. I found the “Centenarian Olympics” and “Horsemen” compelling frameworks on which to develop long term health goals centered on prolonging healthspan. My approach to chronic disease was transformed—beginning with rigorous prevention strategies early in life (which my juice-deprived children can attest to). Coming to understand the foundational importance of metabolic health—and the critical role and ability of sustained lifestyle interventions to impact it—helped me get in touch with the roots of primary care medicine.