Internal Medicine
Acupuncture for General Internal Medicine
Internal medicine covers the adult medical conditions that don’t fit in a single box: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid and hormonal issues, digestive and gut complaints, fatigue, sleep problems, lung and heart problems, sinus infections, and the anxiety or low mood that rides along with them. As a medical specialty, it focuses on adult patients and long-term illness rather than one-time fixes, and internal medicine physicians provide comprehensive health care services across outpatient offices, clinics, private practices, and hospital settings. Many internal medicine doctors who work in hospitals are called hospitalists, and most in the U.S. are trained in internal medicine.
At Flourish, we support these internal conditions through integrative internal medicine, pairing the diagnostic thinking of adult medicine with acupuncture, herbs, nutrition, and stress care. When a complex picture calls for outside diagnostic labs or other specialists,
We help coordinate that care, educating and empowering you to find the right care with local professionals and us. Internists may also support patient care in rehabilitation centers and long-term care facilities. It’s East and West, working together on the whole person.
The Best of East Medical Education
Chinese medicine is a complete system that treats the adult body as a single, interconnected whole rather than a collection of separate organ systems.
Unlike family medicine, which serves patients of all ages and includes obstetrics and pediatrics, internal medicine is centered on adult care and often overlaps with primary care for ongoing adult health needs. Many internal medicine residents go on to practice general internal medicine after residency; about half do, while others pursue additional training through fellowships that add two to three more years of extra training. That is part of why general internal medicine physicians and other primary care physicians are often the first point of contact when adults need a trusted healthcare provider.
We support the body with acupuncture, herbs, nutrition, and mindfulness-based practices, plus everyday self-care like hydration, movement, better sleep, and medication management, including, when appropriate, adjusting prescriptions with your healthcare provider to minimize side effects. By seeing the person as an ecosystem, we look for the imbalance underlying your symptoms, whether there’s deficiency and insufficient support, or excess and stagnation.
We ask whether your daily life and stress load are helping you heal or quietly working against you. Balancing these pieces is where prevention and real health promotion begin: not chasing one lab value, but helping the whole body manage and recover over time.
The Best of West Primary Care
Functional medicine, led by our Naturopathic Doctor, Dr. Jen Riegle, addresses the kind of complex, undifferentiated symptoms that internists are specially trained to assess as medical professionals when they involve diagnostic problems across more than one organ system and do not point to a single cause- the fatigue, chest tightness, or everything-looks-normal lab results that leave patients stuck.
By looking at how the body connects, we start to see the links between gut health and hormones, allergies and eczema, chronic inflammation and pain, headaches, mood, and PMS.
Using blood, stool, and saliva testing, functional medicine ties seemingly separate health issues together and treats them as one root-cause problem within the broader medical field alongside Western medicine, so we can diagnose and treat the driver, not just the symptom. Physicians who pursue internal medicine subspecialties complete additional training and often become board-certified by the American Board, a requirement for most hospital employment.
Dr. Jen is our own Sherlock Holmes, investigating what standard workups tend to overlook; that kind of broad, whole-body reasoning is also why internal medicine physicians are often seen as the doctor’s doctor.