Yun-Ching Chen, MD, FAARFM, ABAARM
Dr. Chen is a board-certified practicing general internist with specific interests in the areas of hormone balancing, metabolism, nutrition, and preventive medicine. She utilizes an integrative, holistic approach and regards each patient as an individual with potentially differing presentation and needs. She values the advances that both conventional medicine and technology has brought us, but also realizes their limitations specifically for preventing disease. Dr. Chen feels that conventional and alternative methods can often be complementary when integrated to treat the whole patient. This is in-line with her system thinking when looking at individuals, which propels her to see the big picture.
A large portion of Dr. Chen’s practice involves working with patients with signs and symptoms of hormone imbalance. A hormone imbalance in women or men of any age can severely disrupt the quality of life with loss of vitality and energy, can affect the entire body, and result in disease. Restoring optimum health requires a doctor with expertise in hormone balancing, proper testing and interpretation of test results, and knowledge in the use of different types of hormones, esp. bio-identical hormones. Dr. Chen treats each patient on an individual basis and formulates a plan specific to each patient’s situation. Her customized approach to hormone balancing yields superior outcomes compared to the one-size-fits-all conventional approaches and drugs to suppress symptoms.
The topics of metabolism and nutrition are also areas of interest to Dr. Chen, and she sees them as inter-related. A solid nutritional foundation is paramount to starving off aging and disease, and poor nutrition frequently leads to disorders in metabolism. But with the myriad of books and diet programs that are part of the billion dollar a year diet industry, it is easy to see why consumers get confused as to what is a good nutritional program, and why their metabolism seems to get slower despite eating less and exercising more. Dr. Chen works individually with patients to analyze their nutritional status before making practical recommendations. Unlike strictly conventional practitioners, she does not feel that the triad of low fat diet, exercise more, and eat less is the answer to everyone’s situation, and unlike a strictly alternative practitioner, she does not feel that simply pumping someone full of hundreds of dollar worth of natural supplements will solve all the problem either.
Of all the short-comings in conventional medicine, the area of prevention of disease is the most apparent in Dr. Chen’s opinion. Early detection of disease now masquerades as prevention of disease. Once disease manifests itself in symptoms, the onslaught of polypharmacy to suppress symptoms begins. Dr. Chen takes the approach that the body is generally quite good at taking care of itself when given the proper care, and that manifestation of symptoms is a real clue to us that something is off-balance. Such symptom-clues should be examined closely and addressed properly in relation to everything else in the body rather than simply suppressed with medications.
