Physicians of the Future: Doctor-Influencers, Patient-Consumers, and the Business of Functional Medicine

The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.

Physicians of the Future interrogates the hidden logics of inclusion and exclusion in functional medicine (FM), a holistic form of personalized medicine that targets chronic disease. Rosalynn Vega uncovers how, as ＂wounded healers,＂ some FM practitioners who are former chronic disease sufferers turn their illness narratives into a form of social capital, leveraging social media to relate to patients and build practices as ＂doctor-influencers.＂ Arguing that power and authority operate distinctly in FM when compared to conventional medicine, largely because FM services are paid for out of pocket by socioeconomically privileged ＂clients,＂ Vega studies how FM practitioners engage in entrepreneurship of their own while critiquing the profit motives of the existing healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and insurance industry. Using data culled from online support groups, conferences, docuseries, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and TED Talks, as well as her own battles with chronic illness, Vega argues that FM practices prioritize the individual while inadvertently reinscribing inequities based on race and class. Ultimately, she opens avenues of possibility for FM interlocutors wrestling with their responsibility for making functional medicine accessible to all.

Rosalynn A. Vega is an associate professor of medical anthropology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the author of Nested Ecologies: A Multilayered Ethnography of Functional Medicine and No Alternative: Childbirth, Citizenship, and Indigenous Culture in Mexico.