A Journey from Surgery to Integrative Medicine

Hi! I’m Mary Ella Wood, DO, welcome to my website! A lot of you might have followed my medical school blog, MOD x MED Blog. I wrote about the medical school journey, how to get through it… and also posted about sustainable travel, global health, and a whole lot more. After medical school I took a hard and contemplative look at social media and ultimately decided to delete EVERYTHING. The blog, Instagram, the perks of the followers— all gone in one clean sweep. I re-activated the blog with archived posts if you want to read more about this decision. Ultimately, I wanted to take a long hiatus to really examine myself and my life… and to figure out what I wanted out of a career in medicine.

If you followed my blog towards the end of my medical school journey, you might know that I did not match into OB/GYN as originally planned. However, this ended up being the best thing that has ever happened in my career, and here is why. 

After not matching, I decided to SOAP into my second specialty of choice, which was General Surgery. During my general surgery residency at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, I realized a lot of things. First, I actually fell in love with medicine again. I was so focused on ONLY women’s health during my last few years of medical school… but in general surgery you truly have to know a little bit of everything. The second thing that I realized were the flaws in the medical system stemming from how medicine is done in the ICU or the operating room (more on this later). Last, I learned that while I LOVED being in the operating room, I missed a life outside of the hospital. Surgery residency truly requires 100 hour weeks and 6-10 years of residency/fellowship. So I decided to switch specialties and reapply to Family Medicine— the jack of all trades specialty that allows you to do pediatrics, adult medicine, emergency medicine and women’s health with advanced procedural training. I ended up matching to my #1 program, West Suburban Medical Center in Chicago, IL. I chose this program because it is an inpatient-based program that provided extensive training in the ICU, high risk obstetrics and provided the option to do a fellowship in order to do c-sections. 

During my time in family medicine residency— the flaws that I noticed during my time doing general surgery resurfaced. The extensive training in the ICU taught me how medicine is actually learned and done. As doctors we read a studies that conclude that one type of fluid decreases mortality by a mere 1-2%… but only after we tack on a bunch of exclusion criteria in the study to make it statistically significant. But is that truly clinically significant? While this is the best system we have at the moment, it is flawed and left me wanting more and asking more questions. 

I wanted to go back to the physiology, back to understanding why… not just following guidelines based on studies that contradicted each other. As I watched patients hooked up to life-support machines… only kept alive by the machines breathing for them and the medications that were keeping their heart pumping… I wondered if this was truly life? We would wait for families to decide to pull the plug and then the person would die… so were they really actually living towards the end of their life?

Ultimately these questions lead me to dive so deep into all of the medical literature out there, including new studies on topics that we considered ‘alternative’ medicine in the past. We are starting to prove that these ancient medical systems actually have more to offer than we would think. Not all of them are turning out to be efficacious, but a lot are. This lead me to the specialty of Integrative Medicine— which is a new specialty of medicine that combines evidenced-based alternative medicine with traditional western medicine. The key here is that it is an evidenced-based specialty and fills the niche for people looking to try alternative therapies but under the supervision of a board-certified medical doctor. Top medical systems are pioneering this new approach including Harvard, John’s Hopkins, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, UCLA and UCSF. 

I pursued further training in residency in this field— and ultimately landed my DREAM JOB as an Attending Integrative Primary Care Physician at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern in Chicago, IL. I will be working as an attending physician while I do my fellowship with them to also get board-certified in integrative medicine. 

Within the field of integrative medicine, I have found my niche in psychedelic medicine. During residency I did psychedelic medicine research and will plan on continuing this research at Northwestern. Additionally, I got my registered yoga teacher certification and I have a lot of exciting things to offer. 

On this website you can learn more about integrative medicine, psychedelic medicine, spirituality and a whole lot more. I also have a podcast and YouTube channel where I will be sharing more. Additionally— I am coming out with a lot of other offerings including courses, events and a few other surprises. Sign up to join my mailing list to stay in the loop!

xoxo - Mary Ella