Michael Arthur, MD, IFMCP, C-HYP, RTTP
Dr. Arthur is the first doctor in SW Virginia to become fully-certified in functional medicine.
As of 2022, he is also the first doctor in our area to become fully-certified as a hypnotist and RTT practitioner.
Though he grew up in Lynchburg, VA, he considers Roanoke his “hometown”. He and his family have lived in Roanoke since 2004 and have enjoyed the plethora of outdoor activities in the nearby Blue Ridge mountains.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth”
You may be asking what a Robert Frost poem is doing on a medical office web site. Bear with me. The poem is a metaphor of my life in medicine.
For years, I worked and studied medicine at The University of Virginia School of Medicine, followed by my residency at the Carilion Family Practice Residency here in Roanoke. Every year, I kept telling myself that it “was getting better”. But, when I was honest with myself, 8 years of additional education and residency training had left me disenfranchised with my education, with medicine, and the inner workings of our healthcare system.
I was at a real crossroads in my life.
I had traveled as far as I could down the road of traditional medicine. Frustrated that the only tools in my toolbox were pharmaceuticals, I felt more like a drug dealer and less like a healing physician.
Looking at the bend in that proverbial road, I just couldn’t take another step…
“Then I took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear”
America was in the thick of a self-care crisis.
I wanted to do something about this crisis to effect real change, so I opted for the road less traveled by starting in 2005.
With the help of a life coach and the support of my wife and family, I certified as a health coach and personal trainer and became a lifestyle medicine doctor. I even became vegan (which showed me that a one-diet approach to health isn’t wise).
I founded Homebodies Fitness and loved helping my clients adopt better lifestyle choices through lifestyle medicine principles.
By 2010, I encountered more and more clients whose results were limited by gut distress, or by an apparent stalling of weight loss, or by chronic diseases resistant to the very lifestyle changes that worked for the vast majority of the population.
What was going on here? Was lifestyle medicine failing these particular people?
I began to do research. Paper after paper, study after study, I kept crossing paths with this thing called functional medicine.
Functional medicine was just like lifestyle medicine, only better because of its more advanced diagnostic testing and its system approach to healing. And, it had a whole host of nutritional programs to promote, not just a vegan approach.
The research and science couldn’t be denied. Best of all, the results that my clients began to experience with a functional medicine approach couldn’t be denied either.
Using functional medicine approaches,
- We burst through resistant, stubborn weight loss.
- We rid their bodies of gut distress.
- We began to halt disease progression. In some cases, we even began to reverse disease.
Fast-forward
from 2010
to 2014…
Amazed by what my patients were able to achieve with functional medicine, I knew we were really onto something.
I studied voraciously over these 4 years. IFM was like going back to medical school all over again, but this time, I was learning what all doctors should have been learning all along!
In 2014, The Center for Ultra Health was born and the rest is history, or so we thought…
Enter COVID-19…
With the advent of the pandemic, everything changed.
Within a few short months, I was starting to see deep ramifications of this virus. Whether from personal sickness or family sickness, my patients were suffering.
From social isolation and conflicting messages, my patients were showing up with increased stress, darker depression, and accelerated anxiety. IBS symptoms were reappearing for some. Headaches were coming back into existence for others.
Local therapists were overwhelmed with the volume of patients. Functional medicine offered some glimmers of hope, but even with adrenal hormone balancing and treatment plans focused on increased stress-relief, we just weren’t able to meet the demand.
I began to search for answers yet again and found promise in RTT by Marisa Peer. Like functional medicine, her techniques peeled back the layers to reveal the cause, the root, the source of suffering.
To my surprise, the pandemic itself was not the source of most suffering. Rather, the pandemic just magnified underlying and unresolved limiting beliefs. Beliefs that can be interrupted and changed for the better.
As of 2022, I am now a certified hypnotist and fully certified in Rapid Transformational Therapy. I am excited by the promise of this powerful technique and can’t wait to share it with our area.