I didn’t always know I wanted to be a doctor. As a kid I loved dinosaurs and space and anything science, and I devoured any and all literature from a very early age. I was trained from a very young age to always seek finer shades of grey and reject absolutes, which led to very broad interests. As a young man I spent four years in art school, three as a philosophy major, and two studying education before I realized I wanted to teach folks to live well. I did my medical prereqs in a calendar year with the aim of entering a chiropractic program. Three months from matriculating, I discovered osteopathy and bowed out gracefully to pursue osteopathic medicine.

But I still needed a degree. With a newly minted—by which I mean myelinated—prefrontal cortex, I decided that if I was going to pursue osteopathy with purpose for nearly a decade prior to practice, I should spend the next two years getting an English lit degree. My focus while doing so was on pre- and post-colonial marginalized voices critical of the dominant paradigm.

I did osteopathic medical studies at Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, graduated in 2014, and pursued an unopposed family medicine residency at a high-acuity tertiary care center on the Georgia/Alabama border. Our population was much sicker than average, with a town of 125,000 supporting eleven full-time nephrologists: I didn’t once spend a full half day in clinic without seeing at least one patient on dialysis. Graduating from Piedmont Columbus Regional Family Medicine Residency in 2017, I spent the next year in osteopathic neuromusculoskeletal medicine fellowship at Eastern Maine Medical Center before settling in to practice osteopathic family medicine and old-fashioned, new-fangled osteopathy in Central Maine.

After eleven years of training and practice as an osteopath, however, I became fed up with the way our medical system seems built to get in the way of good patient care. I opened River Mill Osteopathic as a Direct Primary Care practice to help solve the problem of patients and physicians becoming cogs in a machine that profits from disease rather than proffering health. Here I get to practice full spectrum prenatal to grave care with a focus on structural stability and food as medicine. Special areas of interest and training include osteopathic neuromusculoskeletal medicine; medical ethics; evidence-based natural birth and development; the neuropsychiatric roots of trauma; obesity, metabolic disease, and weight loss; and addictions medicine.