The Courageous Renegade Providers of Healthcare
It’s people like Mark Sivieri, who after working very hard for a Georgetown MD degree, could not heal his own sports injury and was inspired to leave it all behind, becoming Chief Resident for a man, not quite so well known at the time, with a white beard named Andrew Weil.
It’s also more famous people like Peter Atia who left a career as an ER doc in the midst of his family and friends thinking he was out of his mind, in order to pursue an intuition that, as he put it, ‘it became time to stop pulling people out of the river and understand why they are falling in it in the first place’.
10,000-20,000 of such professionals are practicing in the US alone, depending on exactly what categories we include. But we’re not talking about people who did a 6-week online program and now try to give us advice on our health. We are talking about people, many of them mid-career, who worked very hard to get where they were, and then had the courage to walk away from it all. Imagine being in your late 20s or 30s or wherever the peak of whatever your career is, and then having the courage to walk off into the unknown, following an intuition that something else is the answer.
These are the integrative medicine (aka functional medicine, holistic medicine) practitioners - some of them MDs, some DOs, some chiropractors, some coaches, some nurses and NPs, or with other credentials, who then added further training on a different mind/body/spirit approach to healing people. Many of these people are entrepreneurs, though many are also bad at that part. What most of them do have in common, is an insight into how the healthcare system is not working, and how they can use a more holistic approach to try to understand the root cause of chronic disease and help those who suffer from it to live even slightly more comfortable lives. The millions of those suffering from chronic disease that hit a wall with traditional healthcare often end up at the doorsteps of one of these local practitioners.
And what these people do really matters. Not only does it matter to those who suffer; not only does it matter to inform traditional healthcare as it sometimes acts as its innovation arm; but it matters in the broader progress of humanity. Chronic disease is often the portal into a deeper awakening, where one learns to surrender, to drop from the mind and into the body, to understand, perhaps for the first time, what intuition means, and to deepen an awareness of what healing feels like when the nervous system relaxes into its parasympathetic mode.
While the suffering that was involved in my own journey with IBS and digestive issues was useful for me, transcending the lows of those physical ailments was also instrumental in helping me move into a more thriving way of being. I wish the same for you if you struggle with chronic disease. I do believe that working with a functional provider is foundational in that journey and I wish you access to one. Let me know if I can be of any help to you in that process.
Supporting these integrative medicine practitioners, their work, and the entrepreneurs who are turbocharging them, is important to us here at Manifestations Capital. This “body” pillar to our thesis continues to be an important one and we are excited to be working with many entrepreneurs who are deep in the integrative medicine space
I will be offering a 6-session zoom meditation series over 3 weeks, every Monday and Tuesday, 7:30 am to 8:00 am EST during the first 3 weeks of August. Please let me know if you are interested in joining.
Repeat announcement that is still relevant: one of our partners, Choose Your Horizons, has done a great job at providing broader access to psychedelic solutions, in a responsible approach with a healing intentionality. Mark and Rob have been exemplary operators in scaling the company and are now accelerating towards the next level. If you have an interest in participating in an upcoming fundraise for them, please let me know.