Fifteen years into her medical career, Dana Neacsu, M.D., had become frustrated with the way she and colleagues were treating patients.
“I started noticing how certain patients kept coming back,” she says. “You give them medications and the medications work for a while, but they still have the same problem down the road or sometime it’s even worse because they are having reactions to the medicines.”
Concerned that conventional medicine often had to do more with treating symptoms than getting to the root of the illness or teaching patients how to care for themselves, she decided to try a new approach. She left her position at one of Atlanta’s most prestigious hospitals for a fellowship with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona. The Harvard-trained Dr. Weil is widely considered the father of integrative medicine – a field that combines complementary and alternative therapies with conventional medicine.