Meet Dr. Eric Udell

Dr. Eric Udell has been in practice since 2002, working almost exclusively with complex chronic illness, much of it autoimmune — Hashimoto's and other thyroid conditions, lupus and connective tissue disease, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis — along with chronic migraine. Most of the people who find him have been sick for years, have seen a long line of specialists, and have been told that managing their symptoms is the best they can hope for.

He started out like so many of his patients. Severe asthma, allergies, and psoriasis. No one ever told him those conditions were permanent; no one had to. Every treatment he was offered quietly assumed it.

Getting himself well took him to Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, and then into a post-doctoral fellowship as the first — and, as far as he knows, the only — Clinical Teaching Fellow in Homeopathy in the United States.

What he found there became the premise of his practice: Nature doesn't make mistakes. A symptom is not a malfunction — it is an intelligent adaptation, the organism prioritizing survival under unfavorable conditions. Change the conditions, and the adaptation is no longer necessary.

That premise asks for a different kind of medicine. His practice is deliberately small and entirely online. First visits run three hours. Patients stay for years, not appointments, and the work is as much theirs as his. He would rather teach someone to read their own body than have them depend on him to read it for them.

His patients tend to be people who have already been successful at something difficult, and are willing to turn that same intensity on themselves. They want to know why, not just what. They understand that changing the conditions means changing how they conduct their lives. They are prepared to be wrong about things they have believed for a long time, and to look at what they would rather not. And they are not in a hurry.