Sara Sentell

I started my career as a social worker—a lens I've held onto ever since. We all have our individual battles, but I firmly believe that we must always consider the systemic backdrop against which those battles are taking place. Working with teenage girls in residential treatment centers, I discovered two important things: my deep interest in questions related to body image and eating disorders, and the ways in which mental health is expressed through our bodies. Medication could only go so far, and it was obvious to me that in order to heal, we needed to establish a dialogue with the body.

My path then took me through physical therapy school before landing in graduate and doctoral programs for Chinese Medicine and Naturopathic Medicine. There, I fed my desire for an integrative understanding of the human body that considers mind, body, and spirit and how these are woven into and through the world at large.

Eventually, my curiosity went even deeper and my tools felt ill-equipped to meet the challenges my patients were facing. I began to struggle. I was burning out professionally, going through a divorce, and being called to medicine that could go deeper with me.