Cheri Dersam, MD

“As a busy mother of 3 running an urgent care, I found myself exhausted by 4:00pm everyday. I was told by traditional physicians that because I was a working mom, fatigue just came with the territory. As I became more tired, experienced joint pains, mood changes and then started losing my hair, I knew this was not normal. It took more than 2 years of insistence to my doctor that further exploration was needed. It was finally determined that I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks the thyroid gland. I felt brushed aside by the medical system. The worst part was that I was a physician myself. Yet, getting to the root cause of my symptoms became almost insurmountable. I realized that if it was that hard for me to get the right answers to my symptoms, then it must be even more difficult for someone who is not medically trained.”

“Meanwhile, I had begun the Integrative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Arizona and started applying some of the lifestyle techniques and supplements to myself. I changed my diet to eliminate inflammatory foods, incorporated relaxation and meditation practices, replenished missing nutrients and healed my imbalanced GI function. I also worked with an integrative physician to find the right combination of thyroid medicines to optimize my system. I started feeling better than I had in years. I experienced first hand how an individualized approach to balancing my own lifestyle choices changed my health trajectory. I knew that this new journey to integrative medicine had not only improved my life, but had changed how I would practice medicine forever.”