Do you frequently find yourself confused by the myriad of new fad diets, supplements, workout plans, or “longevity” medicines that offer to improve your health through a “one size fits all” model? Does a visit to your primary care provider feel rushed and cursory, leaving you unsatisfied? Unfortunately, this is all too common in traditional Western medicine models.
Dr. Mike Stone believes that when it comes to something as significant as your health, receiving standard, generalized care based on population statistics as opposed to your unique situation is not enough.
Dr. Stone spent 20 years working as an emergency physician before developing his Conscious Medicine practice, which left him limited in his scope of personalized care by only addressing the tip of the iceberg for most of his emergency room patients. Where he felt he added value for 5-10% of the individuals, “the other 90% of patients, most of the time, what I was seeing was an acute exacerbation of a chronic, poorly managed illness.”
“While I have no regrets about my time in emergency medicine, it became increasingly frustrating,” he shares, averaging less than five minutes with patients throughout a typical shift. “I got frustrated with not having the time to form a deep connection with patients, not having the time to feel like I was addressing the root cause and the underlying issues that were bringing them into the emergency department.”
It’s no surprise that “there’s an epidemic of moral injury and burnout among healthcare providers because the system is built to make you move like that,” he says. “The system is quite broken.”
Five years ago, in a serendipitous moment, Dr. Stone made the switch to a telemedicine practice doing precision medicine, recalling, “At that moment, I knew that was the direction I wanted to go.” He is now the Chief Medical Officer at Wild Health.
But he didn’t stop there. In 2023, he founded Nexus Medicine, taking his personalized care one step further with what he calls Conscious Medicine. “For me, Conscious Medicine is all about connection and communication with the patient. It’s having the passion and time to get to know someone deeply, and to hear them and have their best interests in mind. The way I do it is through a very holistic approach.”
The approach? Holistic allostasis, a “comprehensive system to encourage prescribed periods of stress and periods of recovery to support adaptation and help clients reach their full potential,” he says.
You may be wondering, what can patients expect with this treatment? Dr. Stone breaks it down:
“In our approach, nutrition, sleep, social connection, joy, contemplative practice, stress, resiliency, physical training, community, all of those things are equally and vitally important,” he says. “Allostasis is the concept of adding a deliberate stress or sprint to one area, giving yourself time to recover from it appropriately, and allowing the system to adapt so you can handle more of that kind of stress in the future.”
For example, when an individual does resistance training with weightlifting, they go about their session with a specific weight load, let’s say 135 pounds, and perform a specified number of repetitions. The next day, the muscles will be sore, because during those reps, microtrauma to the muscles has occurred. To recover, you allow a few days before returning to the gym, and you’re now able to use a higher weight and/or perform more repetitions.
“What you’re doing is stress, recover, stress, recover. You can do that across multiple areas of health,” he discusses, whether it’s nutrition, connection with others, or spiritual health.
Whether it’s an emotional or physical form of stress and recovery, Dr. Stone believes “We’re built to be in tune with nature and to have these periods of stress and recovery. And that’s this holistic approach to intentional allostatic load, a key component to how I work with people.” His holistic allostasis method incorporates a three-pronged approach: 1. Living in full presence 2. Communication and connection with patients, and 3. Medicine as a community event—all things that aid in creating a health-oriented community.
This method requires tailoring the correct type and frequency of stress and recovery to each individual patient, a core component of precision care.
Dr. Stone also works with a health coach, Trei Tackett, who helps to get the “rubber on the road” by helping patients implement their personalized plan. “Helping somebody make a change in their life involves motivational interviewing, habit formation, compassionate accountability,” he says, and “Ultimately, taking a data-driven approach.” His Conscious Medicine approach tracks laboratory data, epigenetic data, imaging and body composition, muscle mass, fat mass, sleep, heart rate variability, and more.
“Let’s say you and I are working together. You want to improve your sleep. We can look at your sleep data over a two to three-week period. We can see what it looks like, then we can try some interventions and see what happens to your sleep data, both data-wise and also from your own subjective experience,” he says, rather than giving it our best guess. This is in stark contrast to the traditional executive physical model where your doctor provides you with a plan and then sends you out to execute that plan on your own.
“People are really lost in those 364 days between executive physicals or primary care checkups. It’s waiting until you get sick, as opposed to working on an iterative, ongoing basis from a place of real connection to help people reach their goals and optimal potential.”
Dr. Stone’s personal, conscious approach to healthcare gets even better.
He and his team host patient retreats that incorporate healthy strategies such as cold plunge, breathwork, contemplative practice, or hiking with a weighted backpack. “Having a healthcare team that engages in healthy living with their patients is something that doesn’t really exist in traditional Western medicine,” he emphasizes.
“If you were to ask my patients, what the best part of working with me and Trei is, they would say the relationship where they feel they can reach out at any time. They’re always seen, they can bring any problem, big or small, and they have a crew of people who really care about them,” Dr. Stone concludes.
Holistic, personalized care is paving a new path amongst traditional healthcare systems. To learn more about Dr. Stone, visit the Nexus Medicine website, or click here for the Wild Health website.
