The Transformative Power of Taking a Leap of Faith in Medicine:Integrative Medicine Functional Medicine Lifestyle Medicine

The Transformative Power of Taking a Leap of Faith in Medicine

How Getting "Bitten" by Integrative Medicine Changed Everything — and Why It Still Hasn't Let Go

Yoon Hang Kim, MD, MPH

Board-Certified in Preventive Medicine | Integrative & Functional Medicine Physician

Sometimes the most profound journeys begin with a single moment of clarity — a realization that the path we're on isn't leading where our heart knows we need to go. My own transformative journey into integrative medicine began with just such a moment in 1999, during my third year of family medicine residency, alone in a national forest in northern Wisconsin, fasting and meditating until a message I didn't expect arrived with a quiet authority I couldn't ignore.

Twenty-seven years later, that moment still shapes every clinical decision I make, every page I write, and every conversation I have with the people who trust me with their health. This is that story — not the polished version, but the real one, with the martial arts and the chemistry labs and the financial ruin and the stubborn refusal to go back to a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

The Tao Before Medicine

I first took tae kwon do in elementary school. Even at that age, I was fascinated that a smaller person could overcome a larger, seemingly stronger opponent by mastering proper technique and developing a resilient spirit. My first teacher, Master Bae, was versed in several martial arts. While I was drawn to the fighting, he guided me toward something deeper — the spiritual qualities of the practice and the meaning of the Tao. Fighting, he taught me, represents a failure of conflict resolution. A true student of martial arts would naturally choose non-violence whenever possible, because fighting is unpredictable and both parties risk injury. Non-violence assures the survival of both.

Master Bae often said that the study of martial arts should result in a situation in which one can run away from an assailant without fear. At first I found this perplexing. Gradually I came to understand. The martial arts weren't about defeating opponents. They were about developing mind, body, and spirit — and learning the least violent forms of conflict resolution. Master Bae also taught me that mindfulness is a form of mental technology applicable in almost all situations. I would lean on that teaching more times than I could count in the decades ahead.

From tae kwon do I moved to aikido, and eventually, on my aikido instructor's recommendation, to tai chi. I began studying the short-form Yang style developed by Professor Cheng Man Ching — a tai chi master who was also a physician, painter, and poet. I was fascinated to learn of a martial arts master who was also a healer. When I discovered Professor Cheng had passed away in 1975, I set about finding someone who had studied directly with him.

My search led me first to a teacher named Patricia who lived nearby. This seemed too convenient, so I kept looking. I finally settled on William Chen, a master who had studied under Professor Cheng and was highly regarded — but who lived in New York, nowhere near me. By then I was in medical school. Despite limited time and money, I made regular trips to New York to learn from Master Chen. He found it curious that I managed to improve even though I only showed up every few months. When I explained I was using vacation time to travel, he recommended a tai chi teacher he knew in my area. Her name? Patricia.

The experience taught me a lesson I've never forgotten. Had I gone with Patricia from the outset, I would have saved considerable time and money. My desire to find a "true master" had blinded me to what was right in front of me all along. My journey took me far from home but returned me to the place where I started. In tai chi, this principle is called investing in loss — allowing your opponent to attack without resistance, drawing their force away so it becomes ineffective, and making your counter even more powerful. Without knowing it, I had invested in loss. And the fact that Master Chen explicitly recommended Patricia was itself a great honor. She proved to be an outstanding instructor and connected me to my next teachers in California.

Tai chi taught me something that would become the philosophical bedrock of everything I practice today: the concept of wu wei, which translates as non-action or not doing. This is commonly misinterpreted as passivity. In reality, it refers to acting so in sync with the natural way that the effort appears effortless — like a river flowing to the ocean. There is nothing forced about it, and yet there is movement. I think of wu wei as spontaneous achievement. When your life is flowing in its natural course, when you are one with the Tao, even the hardest work can feel effortless. When you're fighting your own nature, even easy tasks become a struggle.

Chemistry, Curiosity, and the Seed

At Beloit College, where I studied chemistry as an undergraduate, we were encouraged to express intellectual curiosity and to reinvent ourselves through exploration and self-discovery. The faculty went the extra mile. I found two fields most appealing: physical chemistry, which deals with interactions and transformations of materials through thermodynamics and kinetics, and biochemistry — particularly photosynthesis and the citric acid cycle, the complementary processes that sustain life on Earth.

Studying biochemistry revealed something that connected my scientific training to the Tao I'd been practicing since childhood. Photosynthesis and the citric acid cycle form a balance — plants use light energy to create carbohydrates and oxygen; animals use those products to create usable energy, releasing carbon dioxide and water back to the plants. In Taoist philosophy, plants are yin and animals are yang. The biochemistry of life is the Tao, expressed at the molecular level. Nutrition provides biochemical pathways with raw materials, and nutrition can influence those pathways — eat foods that cause inflammation, and inflammation of biochemical pathways naturally follows.

This understanding became a cornerstone of how I practice medicine to this day. But it also did something else: it connected the "soft" philosophical training I'd received from Master Bae and my tai chi teachers to the "hard" empirical rigor of science. The two were not in opposition. They were describing the same reality from different angles.

My passion for biochemistry led me to invest two extra years in medical school performing research, which resulted in the Howard Hughes Fellowship — a prestigious award given to promising scientists. During the fellowship I focused on pharmacology, the science of how medications influence our biochemistry. Pharmacology was a natural fit because it integrated chemistry, biochemistry, and medicine. It also gave me a strong foundation for understanding how supplements, vitamins, and herbs can support healing — and, more importantly, how we can better harness the power of medications rather than relying on them as blunt instruments.

When the Safe Path Feels Like a Trap

When it came time for residency, I chose family medicine because it offered broad training. I knew that what I really wanted — a residency in integrative medicine — didn't exist. I chose primary care so I'd be capable of providing care in hospitals, emergency rooms, and clinics, building a generalist foundation I could later build upon.

The training was immensely valuable. But the tide of medicine was turning from care to commerce. Patient visits became transactions. Everyone was visibly stressed, especially the office staff drowning in insurance paperwork. The profession was caving to the profit motive. I was consistently averaging more than 80 hours a week, and the inconsistencies were obvious: if physicians believed in promoting wellness, our own lifestyles did not reflect it. I had worked on factory floors before medical school. I knew what it felt like to trade hours for wages in a system that didn't care what you thought or felt, only what you produced. I hadn't survived organic chemistry and anatomy labs and overnight call to end up on a different kind of assembly line.

By August 1999, as I advanced to my final year of family medicine residency, the conflict was acute. I had a vision of how I wanted to practice medicine, and I was frustrated in my efforts to align myself with that vision. Every day felt like a struggle. Completing the residency would lead to a relatively well-paying job, but at a high cost — to me and to my family. I could see that if I continued, I would end up like many colleagues, compromising my ideals and taking the path of least resistance.

The Tao Te Ching asks: "Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?"

I took three months off to reflect.

One Month in the Northwoods

I spent one month in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I meditated. I practiced tai chi. I fasted.

During one meditation session, I experienced an intense spiritual awakening — the enormously comforting sensation of being connected with the universe. And then a message came, brief and powerful: preventive medicine.

Until that moment, I was not aware that the field of preventive medicine existed. I ended my meditation and fasting and went to a library to research it. I discovered that preventive medicine is a specialty recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties — and to my surprise, that there was a residency program run jointly by the University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University.

I felt drawn to San Diego in a way I couldn't explain rationally. Months earlier, I had visited the city for a conference and fallen in love with it. Walking on a beach at sunset, I had prayed for an opportunity to live and work there. I had no idea then what form the answer would take.

One of the interviewers for the UCSD-SDSU program turned out to be a physician who had previously trained with me. My research background, especially the Howard Hughes Fellowship, tipped the scales, and I was offered early acceptance. At the same time, I was accepted to the Medical Acupuncture for Physicians course at UCLA. While waiting for the preventive medicine residency to begin the following year, I immersed myself in Chinese language, Chinese medicine, tai chi, qi gong, and meditation. And I reconnected with Vena.

The Valley Before the Mountain

I should be clear about the cost. Leaving family medicine was not a clean exit into a better life. Vena and I barely survived financially for months. She was completing her master's degree in accounting. I took a job as an insurance medical examiner to help pay the bills. We counted grocery money. There were mornings when the path I'd abandoned looked like a warm house seen from outside in the cold.

But here's what I've learned about those moments: the warm house only looks good when you're shivering. Once you walk back inside, you remember why you left. The ceiling is low. The windows don't open. And the thermostat is set by someone who doesn't live there.

What sustained us was twofold. Vena believed in what I was doing even when I couldn't fully articulate it. And looking back, I feel fortunate that we had this space and time — painful as it was — because it gave us the chance to reconnect. Our relationship had suffered from the relentless years of medical school and residency. This respite allowed us to rediscover one another. It was an investment in loss that would pay dividends for the rest of our lives.

The Residency That Changed Everything

When the UCSD-SDSU preventive medicine residency began under Dr. Linda Hill, I found it reminiscent of my undergraduate experience at Beloit — a place that valued intellectual curiosity and discovery. We were given clear goals, objectives, and guidance. And Dr. Hill made a promise that was revolutionary in its simplicity: meet your core competencies, and every project can focus on integrative medicine.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was that no two preventive medicine physicians do the same work. In this world, you have to invent your own career. It's not for everyone, but I loved every minute of it.

It was a very busy two years, but it felt effortless — unlike family medicine. I didn't experience the same stress because I was being positively stimulated. My life was flowing in a natural way, the result of being one with the Tao. I created acupuncture programs at two community institutions. I learned to design and conduct clinical trials. I honed my medical scholarship as I worked on my thesis evaluating evidence for treating cocaine addiction with acupuncture, which was later published. I worked two outside jobs and pursued a Master of Public Health degree full-time. The workload exceeded my family medicine training — but here's the difference that matters: I loved every challenging moment. Not because it was easy, but because for the first time the difficulty was in service of something that felt mine.

Meeting the Masters

Through Dr. Hill's program, I met Dr. Vincent Felitti during a seminar at UCSD. Felitti directed Kaiser Permanente's Positive Choice Wellness Center in San Diego — a state-of-the-art institution dedicated to helping people achieve weight loss through programs integrating psychology, nutrition, fitness, and biofeedback. I consider Felitti a visionary who correctly predicted the obesity epidemic and whose landmark Adverse Childhood Events (ACE) study is one of the most consequential pieces of public health research in the last fifty years.

When Felitti lectured about ACE findings, I remember sharing with him that his observations, while groundbreaking in the scientific community, were widely acknowledged among traditional healers. He didn't dismiss me. He invited me in.

Felitti recommended I initiate a pilot program with the center's most difficult clients — people who had experienced multiple failures trying to lose weight. My methods were restricted to group therapy only, no other healing modalities. I was dealing with, as I came to understand, professional patients who were highly skilled at defeating program protocols. Veterans who knew how to manipulate the system.

I knew the conventional medical approach would fail. But I also knew I would learn enormously from these people. I drew on all my past training to meet the challenge. In the end, it was my martial arts training — specifically, the aikido concept of randori, defending against multiple simultaneous attackers through relaxation and mindful neutralization — that provided the solution.

I began by changing the group's name. They had been given the unfortunate moniker "Losers." I renamed them the "Survivors." Then I shifted the entire focus from weight loss to wellness. Instead of weighing in at every meeting — the standard practice — participants were weighed once a month. The purpose was to evaluate their overall wellness rather than fixate on pounds gained or lost.

This was, in the tradition of Zen, a kind of koan — a riddle answered not intellectually but intuitively. I wanted the Survivors to ask themselves: Where is my wellness?

In the third week, one participant exploded. Frustrated and angry, he complained that I wasn't helping him lose weight. But I didn't need to defend my methods. The group responded, reminding him that they were supposed to be letting go of the weight obsession and focusing on wellness. At that moment, I recognized something I've carried ever since: even though I was the physician in the room, they were the experts. Their addiction to food had overcome every medical and surgical protocol. If that same resilience could be redirected toward cultivating wellness, imagine the possibilities.

Significant weight loss emerged naturally from this approach. Nobody was counting calories. Nobody was punishing themselves on a treadmill. They were healing, and the weight followed.

The program eventually ended. I believe it represented a threat to the mainstream medical system because there was no product to sell — no supplements, no powders, no pills, no medication. The idea that a purely mental and relational approach could succeed where material technologies had failed contravenes conventional wisdom. But the lesson stayed with me: the symptom is almost never the whole story. The person who can't lose weight isn't failing at willpower. The person in chronic pain isn't exaggerating. The person whose labs are "normal" but who feels terrible isn't imagining things. When you slow down and listen — truly listen — the real picture emerges.

Another pivotal connection came through a fellow resident whose spouse was a naval surgeon, introducing me to Dr. Richard Niemtzow — a brilliant physician acupuncturist who developed Battlefield Acupuncture for the U.S. military. These weren't just professional introductions. They were windows into a medical philosophy that treated the whole person.

Getting Bitten

It was Dr. Bernie Siegel — the pioneer of integrative oncology, whose books on the healing power of love and connection had reached millions — who first told me about Dr. Andrew Weil's fellowship at the University of Arizona. Bernie said it would propel my career. He was right.

I was one of four physicians selected from more than a hundred applicants. When I applied, I felt something I couldn't logically justify: no doubt about acceptance. Not arrogance — but a deep, quiet knowing that this was where I was supposed to be. This confidence came from a realization I've since given a name to. I had been "bitten" by integrative medicine.

Being "bitten" means discovering something so essential to your being that you need it like air to breathe or water to survive. Once bitten, you become hooked — not in an addictive sense, but in the way a musician becomes hooked on creating music or an artist on painting. The bite isn't about excitement. Excitement fades. The bite is about alignment — the feeling that your work and your purpose have finally found each other.

At the outset of the fellowship, we were introduced to the work of cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien and her Four-Fold Way: the Way of the Warrior (show up, choose to be present), the Way of the Healer (pay attention to what has heart and meaning), the Way of the Visionary (tell the truth without blame or judgment), and the Way of the Teacher (be open to outcome, not attached to outcome). At the time, I had no idea of the deep impact these simple principles would have on my life. Learning to integrate them harmoniously became one of the most difficult and crucial lessons of the fellowship.

Andy Weil proved to be a sincere person who embodied the three treasures of the Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. I was especially impressed by his down-to-earth demeanor and his modesty. He was always willing to learn from others. We hiked together, cooked, and engaged in thought-provoking discussions. Until I met him, I didn't understand the power of a community with a shared vision. Of all the lessons he taught me, that may have been the most important.

I had gone to Arizona with the goal of gaining further knowledge, but it wasn't exactly as I'd expected. A faculty member said something that affected me profoundly: "You came here to seek a master, but you're already a master, and you have to be your own apprentice." After that, I began focusing on inner development — hiking and meditating in search of my true self, rather than collecting more clinical techniques.

During the fellowship I visited prominent integrative medicine programs across the country, spending days at each facility studying their business models, strategic planning, and operations. After visiting and studying many programs, I began to see a recurring theme: all of them were losing money. The people who ran them suffered under the misconception that because they were promoting a virtuous form of medicine, the funding would come. I saw it differently. For integrative medicine to survive, it would require a balance of good medicine and good business practices. Andy Weil was fond of saying that the first step of a revolution is to create a counterculture. My difficulties had always been related to my desire to go against prevailing norms. The answer might lie in creating an alternative model with its own set of values.

The Decade in Georgia — and the People Who Made It

In 2007, I found myself in Georgia, stranded without a job. It was an extremely difficult time. With limited financial resources and a family to support, I needed to find a source of income that would use my talents and experience. But I wasn't simply in search of a job. I realized I had the opportunity to pursue something more lasting and meaningful.

When I made the decision to leave my corporate position, a group of more than two dozen people — mostly clients and tai chi students who felt they had benefited from my assistance — met to discuss how they could keep me in the area. That support was priceless, and it demonstrated the need for the kind of services I was hoping to provide.

We started in my home, in a live-work community that supported residents who wished to work where they lived. One treatment room. Three people: me, Jeanne, and Nola. We weren't sure how we were going to work together, but right away we started building our community, sharing time and space, our dreams and ideas for what would become Georgia Integrative Medicine.

From the outset, my intention was to create a space that was different from every integrative medicine facility I had visited. They all had one thing in common: they were institutions based on the American corporate model. While their techniques were innovative, the structures housing them were not. I kept returning to the parable from Luke: no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Integrative medicine needed a new wineskin — an integral organization whose mission was not to return the highest profit to shareholders, but to create the highest good for team members and clients.

That decade in Georgia became my crucible. The clients who found us had already been everywhere — conventional physicians, specialists, alternative healers — and nothing had worked. They came as a last resort. Some were desperate. Some were skeptical. All of them taught me something.

Jeanne, our clinic manager and director of operations, was earth and fire — loyal to her core, with an enthusiasm that helped bring new clients in the door. Nola, our food-as-medicine specialist and homeopath, was earth and water — a listener of extraordinary patience whose gift for hearing what people actually needed exceeded that of many trained counselors. Vena joined as CFO, bringing her accounting expertise and her steadying presence. And Dorothy came first as a client — a registered nurse with thirty years of experience and severe chronic pain from a catastrophic auto accident, who had been through more than 185 provider visits before walking through our door.

Dorothy's story embodied everything we were trying to do. She had endured years of escalating medications, twelve spinal injections, twenty-three prolotherapy injections, three years of physical therapy, two surgeries — and the premier pain clinic in Atlanta had sent her home, saying there was nothing more they could do. When she arrived at our clinic, I told her one word: Grace. Nothing else. Relax. Let your body heal itself. Get out of its way. Then I said: "Mrs. Carey, you are an RN, are you not? A good one? Good. I want you to meet your new patient, Miss Dorothy."

She became the most important patient of her own life. Through acupuncture, an anti-inflammatory meal plan, tai chi, and the slow work of letting go, Dorothy healed. She went on to become a team member, a volunteer, a mentor — and one of the most eloquent witnesses to what integrative medicine can accomplish when the system stops fighting the person's own capacity to heal.

Jeanne, who was knowledgeable in Native American healing traditions, gave me a name that stuck: "the badger medicine man." The badger, she explained, never gives up. It fights for its clients no matter how difficult the terrain. I took that as the highest compliment I've ever received in medicine, because it captured something I'd felt since that month in the Northwoods — a stubbornness in the service of healing that I couldn't turn off even if I wanted to.

Our secret ingredient? Tea sharing. I had learned the ceremonial art from qi gong Master Ken Cohen, who took me to his favorite teahouse in San Francisco. At Georgia Integrative Medicine, we had tea sharing several times a day — whenever there was a lull between clients, whenever we needed to reconnect, whenever the work demanded that we slow down and remember why we were doing it. Where other clinics would spend downtime catching up on paperwork, we caught up with one another. If you asked any of us the key to our survival through the Great Recession and beyond, the answer would be those shared cups of tea.

During those years, I watched team members grow into their own callings. One medical assistant went on to become a physician. An intern followed the same path. Jeanne pursued training in mental health counseling. Nola earned her homeopathy diploma and nutrition certificate — funded by the clinic, even when we had to borrow money to pay for the courses, because investing in people was never optional. I discovered that servant leadership — pouring into the people around you — was not separate from good medicine. It was the same impulse expressed in a different direction.

The experience led to my first book, Tao of Healing: A Story of Georgia Integrative Medicine, which chronicles not just my personal evolution but the community we built and the philosophical principles — Taoism, tai chi, servant leadership, the integration of ancient and modern — that made it work. Writing that book was the beginning of another dimension of my work: the realization that clinical practice and clinical writing are two expressions of the same drive to help people understand what's possible.

The Personal Stakes

I should be honest about something many physicians keep private: my clinical passions didn't develop in a classroom. They developed in my own body and in the lives of people I love.

I am a chronic pain survivor. There was a period when medication, physical therapy, injections, and surgery couldn't help — and I was told to accept it. I didn't accept it. Through the integrative approaches I'd been studying and practicing, I found my way to a pain-free life. That personal experience informs every conversation I have with clients living with pain, because I know what it's like to be told there's nothing left to try when there actually is.

Family members of mine are cancer survivors. Others have reversed allergic conditions by treating root causes, modulated their immune systems for better autoimmune control, and solved a mystery illness that turned out to be mold toxicity. These weren't abstract clinical cases. They were the people I sit across from at dinner. Their health journeys are why integrative oncology, mast cell activation syndrome, autoimmune disease, and environmental illness became not just my specialties but my personal missions.

The Institutional Years — and Their Limits

The Georgia chapter led to institutional roles that tested a different set of muscles. I served as Medical Director of Integrative Oncology at Miami Cancer Institute and Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Kansas Medical Center. These positions gave me the chance to build programs at scale, to publish peer-reviewed research, and to learn how large systems adopt — or resist — integrative approaches.

But institutions have ceilings. After years inside corporate healthcare, I began to feel the same tightness I'd felt on that metaphorical train in 1999. The visit lengths were too short. The documentation demanded more time than the clients did. The system measured throughput when it should have measured trust. I had spent my career arguing that new wine needed new wineskins. Now I was watching the wine go flat inside another old wineskin, no matter how prestigious the label.

I didn't leave institutional medicine with bitterness. I left with clarity — the same kind of clarity I'd found during that month of fasting in the Chequamegon-Nicolet Forest. I knew what I was for, and I knew what I couldn't do inside a system that wasn't designed for the work I needed to do.

Twenty-Seven Years Later: Still Bitten

Today, I run www.directintegrativecare.com — a membership-based, insurance-free telemedicine practice deliberately capped at a small number of active clients. The cap is the point. It's a promise that everyone who joins gets the time, attention, and access that the conventional system cannot deliver. No rushed visits. No insurance intermediary deciding what's covered. No fifteen-minute ceiling on a conversation that needs forty-five.

This model is the new wineskin I've been working toward since Arizona. It's the practical expression of everything I learned from Master Bae about non-violent resolution, from Professor Cheng's lineage about investing in loss, from Dr. Felitti about treating the person rather than the symptom, from Andy Weil about building communities of shared vision, and from my Georgia team about the power of tea, patience, and showing up every day for the people who trust you.

The clinical work has expanded into writing in ways I never planned. After Tao of Healing, I published the LDN Primer and LDN for Clinicians, Researchers, and Empowered Patients — books born from founding and moderating the LDN Support Group, now over 9,000 members strong. Then came Epidemic in Plain Sight, a client empowerment book on mast cell activation syndrome, and Sick Care System, which confronts the structural dysfunction of American medicine head-on. More than 20 peer-reviewed articles sit alongside these books. The writing isn't separate from the clinical work. It's how I reach the people I can't see one-on-one.

For over a quarter century, the bite has sustained me. I haven't experienced the burnout that plagues so many colleagues — and I don't think that's because I'm tougher or more resilient. I think it's because I've been fortunate enough to practice medicine in alignment with why I entered the field in the first place. When the work matches the calling, the energy doesn't run out. It regenerates. The Tao Te Ching has a phrase for this: when your life is flowing with the natural way, even the hardest work feels effortless. Wu wei. Spontaneous achievement. It sounds mystical until you live it.

Your Own Leap of Faith

My personal motto is, "Luck favors the prepared bold." I believe that. But I also believe the boldness comes first. You prepare because you've committed to the leap, not the other way around. Waiting until you feel ready is another way of saying you're never going to jump.

My leap into integrative medicine wasn't just a career change. It was an alignment with purpose — a commitment to treating the whole person rather than isolated symptoms, to sitting with complexity rather than rushing past it, and to building a practice that serves the people in it rather than the system around it. Everyone, I believe, is an artist, and their life reflects the art. Too many people are limited by their perception of reality, trapped in jobs by steady pay and benefits rather than pursuing a vocation based on their true calling. That epidemic of misalignment manifests as addictions, psychological suffering, and chronic illness. Part of what I do — in the clinic, in my books, in my community — is help people find their own flow.

Whether you're a healthcare professional feeling that same tightness I felt on the train in 1999, or someone looking for a physician who will actually listen, I want you to know: the leap is worth it. The valley is real, and the mountain is on the other side.

If you're ready to explore what integrative medicine can offer, I invite you to reach out through our secure contact form. Sometimes the most important journeys begin with a single conversation.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, nor does it establish a physician–client relationship. Readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding their individual circumstances.

About Dr. Kim

Dr. Yoon Hang "John" Kim is a board-certified physician with more than 20 years of experience in integrative and functional medicine. He completed his fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona under Dr. Andrew Weil and holds board certification in preventive medicine along with certifications in medical acupuncture (UCLA) and integrative and holistic medicine. He is an IFM Scholar and has served in leadership roles across multiple health systems, including as Medical Director of Integrative Oncology at Miami Cancer Institute and Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

Dr. Kim specializes in low dose naltrexone (LDN), autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, integrative oncology, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and mold toxicity. He is the author of five books — including Tao of Healing, LDN Primer, LDN for Clinicians, Researchers, and Empowered Patients, Epidemic in Plain Sight, and Sick Care System — and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles.

Professional: www.yoonhangkim.com | Clinical: www.directintegrativecare.com

Dr. Andrew Weil and. Dr. Yoon Hang Kim MD