INSIGHTS

Clinical perspectives, research commentary, and practice philosophy from Dr. Rowena Chua and the Meliora Integrative Medicine team.

Functional Medicine or Integrative Medicine? What to Ask Before You Choose a Doctor

He handed me a printout with three practices on it and asked which one was the right kind of doctor. The labels turned out to be the least useful thing about them.

The label on the door tells you less than what happens in the room.

A man came to see me because his wife made the appointment. She had found three practices while looking for someone who would take a proper look at him. One called itself functional medicine. One called itself integrative medicine. The third said holistic.

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The label on the door tells you less than what happens in the room. — Misha Media Photography

Four low results, one shared step. Everything on that panel has to cross the same wall.

You Can Take the Supplement and Still Not Absorb It

When several nutrients are low at once, the problem is usually not your diet. Here is what that pattern actually points at, and why "fix the gut first" is not the universal rule it is made out to be.

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A TSH result reads the order going out, not the work getting done.

Clinical

Your TSH Is “Normal.” That Doesn’t Mean Your Thyroid Is Fine.

TSH is a signal from your pituitary, not a measure of how you feel. Here is what a full thyroid picture looks like, what I look at when the panel comes back normal, and why the order we deal with things in matters as much as what we find.

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Illustrative: stress does not show up in a box marked stress — it shows up in the systems it borrows from.

Educational

Why I Don’t Test Cortisol — and What Stress Actually Does to Your Body

Stress is a load your body is carrying, not a mood I am treating. And it leaves marks in places most people never think to look. Here is what it actually does, and how I read it.

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Illustrative: the useful question is not which infusion, but what is actually causing the fatigue — and whether anyone has looked properly.

Clinical

IV Nutrient Repletion: What It Can and Can’t Do

An IV can correct a real deficiency, and when it does, the difference is worth having. It cannot make you younger, and it cannot answer a question nobody has asked yet. Here’s how I decide.

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Illustrative: the five pillars of the Meliora Method — five ways of reading one connected system, not five separate treatments.

Practice

Why We Teach You Your Own Physiology

Most medicine hands you a conclusion — a label, a prescription, a “your labs are normal.” We do something different. We teach you how your own body works, because a patient who understands her own physiology makes better decisions every day than any single appointment ever could.

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Illustrative: two people can lose the same number of pounds and be in completely different metabolic health — one losing fat while holding lean mass, the other losing both. The scale reads the same either way.

Clinical

GLP-1 medications: what they do, what they don’t, and who they’re for

They are the most effective weight medications we have ever had, and they are being handed out like vitamins. Here’s what these drugs actually do in the body, the one thing they don’t do that matters most, and why we look before we prescribe.

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Illustrative: hormone levels swing through the reproductive years, grow erratic through perimenopause, then settle low in menopause — a single blood test catches only one point on a moving curve.

Clinical

Perimenopause can begin years before your period changes

Fatigue, brain fog, weight that won’t move, sleep that fell apart — and a doctor who says your labs are normal. Here’s why standard testing misses early perimenopause, and what “optimal, not normal” means for your hormones.

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The narrow band of "optimal" sits inside the wider band of "normal" — most patients land in the gap between what labs call fine and where you actually feel well.

Clinical

Why your "normal" labs aren’t actually normal

A doctor told you everything looked fine. You don’t feel fine. Here’s the gap between “normal” and “optimal” — and why it matters more than most physicians explain.

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Clinical

What happens when your doctor has an AI teammate?

Google DeepMind's AI co-clinician research, the rise of triadic care, and what it actually looks like at Meliora.

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