My professional life has been a series of commitments to patient care and to advancing the healing profession. As a Chiropractor, I was trained as a non-prescribing primary care provider. This foundation gave me a keen diagnostic lens focused on lifestyle habits, sound nutrition, and effective supplementation. In the year 2000, I was introduced to a leading edge laboratory that was testing hormone levels in an innovative way. The health results that my patients experienced as a result of this new diagnostic framework and treatment were impressive. I could not get enough of this new information! I flew to San Diego for in depth mentoring and training in Functional Medicine and was in the first wave of practitioners certified in Functional Medicine. Upon graduation, I was hired by Functional Medicine industry leaders to consult, mentor and clinically advise medical and natural practitioners who wanted to start applying the Functional Medicine clinical framework within their practices. During this season, I also opened up my own chiropractic office with a focus on Functional Medicine.
After a few years of practice as a Functional Medicine Chiropractor, my scope of license became a limiting factor in giving my patients all the care and tools that they needed for health and healing. Some conditions needed the best of medical care and natural interventions. Unfortunately, case management between traditional medical physicians and myself was often clunky or discouraging. While I did not agree with many aspects of traditional medical school training, I was motivated to bring change from the inside out. For this reason, I enrolled in Osteopathic Medical School and learned the best of the traditional medical model.
During those seven years, I maintained my role as a clinical consultant in Functional Medicine. You can only imagine what my residency years were like as I was training in traditional Family Medicine while trying to influence the model towards Functional Medicine protocols! Part of what I love about Functional Medicine is that it demands a practitioner’s nimbleness of thinking and draws them deeper into the mechanisms of health built into the human body. The “how” and “why” of the human body fuel my quest to keep pressing in and innovating. Unfortunately, many others seek thin solutions or throw up their hands and merely prescribe. This traditional treatment may offer quick solutions to put out fires, but few treatments are more effective at restoring health than establishing healthy habits of eating, exercise, sleep, and managing one’s daily stress. When combining this approach within a clinical paradigm that utilizes state of the art laboratory testing and a full scope of license, I am now able to remove road-blocks that prevent patients from recovering their health. This combination of technology and deep partnership with my patients provides immense vocational satisfaction. It further excites me that new solutions are emerging each year. As a member of the Institute for Functional Medicine and as a clinical advisor within Functional Medicine, I pledge to stay on the edge of advancement.
Why Cornerstone Health Community?
Patients often experience frustration when trying to combine and navigate treatment through natural and traditional medicine. Determined to meet the cries from people who are suffering, stuck, and confused about how to proceed, I had to make a better way. There needed to be a bridge integrating natural medicine and traditional medicine. That alone is a challenge. Now add in billing insurance! Functional medicine allows a partnership that validates the need for natural and traditional medicine while utilizing insurance for covered services. Having earned an undergraduate business degree, and doctorate degrees in chiropractic and osteopathic medicine, as well as having worked in a variety of private practice settings, I was poised to create a new model and innovate patient care within the industry.
Cornerstone Health Community opened for this purpose: to create hope in the healthcare industry. Hope, when held fast, is a powerful force, one that propels great accomplishments. God has instilled in me the hope that our vast medical system, broken and maligned as it is, can provide genuine healing, and health that changes futures. Here, under one roof, our community allows patients to receive the best of Functional Medicine, Primary Care, Functional Nutrition, and IV therapy to reverse chronic conditions, activate healing, and usher in hope.
The Partner Plans that we create together restore the sacred trust of doctor-patient relationships. We combine unrushed consultative encounters, individualized care plans, effective and leading-edge medical solutions, environmental and genetic testing, transformational nutrition counseling, and detox-orientated lifestyles, to support the natural healing of the human body. Functional Medicine practiced in this setting, reflects the noblest values of the health care profession and is my life passion! I am called and devoted to a lifetime of learning and contributing to health transformation and so is the amazing team at Cornerstone Health Community. You will never meet a stronger tribe of professionals who want to serve you well from the front desk, to the back office, to your clinical encounter.
We hope to see you soon!
~ Dr. Christopher Mote, DO, DC
