If a map existed that could show the route Dr. Leland Stillman traveled from conventional medicine to functional medicine, the origin point would be Richmond, Virginia, where he grew up. The route, long, circuitous, and with a few switchbacks, would show Naples as the destination.

As children, Stillman and his sister were frequently sick. Plagued with ear, throat, and nose infections, which included sinus infections, allergies, and constant colds and flus, Stillman’s mother made an indeterminate number of visits to a doctor’s office as well as to the offices of various alternative practitioners.

“My mother tells a story about holding my sister over the emesis basin after she had an ENT procedure for clogged sinuses. As my sister was retching, my mother looked up at the ENT surgeon and asked, ‘We’ve fixed the problem, so we don't have to do this ever again, right?’ The surgeon replied, ‘Oh, no, the holes will heal up, and she’ll have to return so we can operate again.’ At that moment, my mother became disillusioned with conventional medicine and said, ‘There has to be a better way.’ She began a rather eclectic search."

Appointments with naturopaths, dowsers, Oriental Medicine doctors, and numerous types of healers using many different modalities left a lasting impression on Stillman who recalls never being sure of what worked, but fascinated by all of it and positive that it had value. “I kept an open mind because that’s what my mother taught me. If you're not open-minded, you're going to miss out on a lot of value,” quips Stillman.

Years passed, and Stillman’s interest in natural medicine led him to a naturopath who mentored him for 15 years. “I had several mentors over the years. I questioned some of their methodologies and protocols, which eventually led to disagreements and my moving on. I loved learning from naturopaths, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and homeopaths, but couldn’t accept everything they taught me. I did get some good advice to go to conventional medical school and embrace everything from surgery to prescribing pharmaceuticals, so I would have the biggest and best license for practicing medicine. I did that but I disliked how the medical establishment treated trainees, staff and patients. I stuck with it because I didn't see another option.”

Stillman studied Environmental Health at Connecticut College and graduated from the University of Virginia, specializing in internal medicine. After completing a three-year residency at Maine Medical Center, he briefly worked at a clinic before moving on to practice as a traveling physician. For five years, he traveled from northern Minnesota to rural Florida and everywhere in between. After a brief attempt to return to academia, he realized that conventional medicine was too hostile to progress. “Conventional medicine doesn’t want to find out how to get people well. It’s perfectly happy to prescribe outrageously priced drug protocols and ignore the literature that diet and lifestyle make a difference in the diseases they treat,” he says.

Returning to Richmond, Stillman joined the practice of a nurse practitioner. “Her caring approach resonated with me, and when I left, that’s what I took with me to finally start my own practice in telemedicine. My last mentor recruited me to Florida, where I’ve been for four years, and I am now focused on optimizing health with functional medicine.”

Stillman uses a Hippocrates quote to make an important point about symptoms: “Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are the consequence of small daily sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.” He explains that people think their health is optimal when they don't have symptoms. They believe that when they develop a symptom, all they need to do is change their diet and lifestyle, take a pill, or do a cleanse, and the symptom will disappear. This superficial solution doesn’t take care of the underlying problem.

He explains, “There are people who come in thinking they just have a few extra pounds they need to lose, fatigue, and a little brain fog. All they need is a few weeks at the gym, a bit of dieting, and a cleanse. But what we find, based on testing their high-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (CRP) level, is that they have an elevated risk of heart disease. CRP is our best marker for heart disease, and we routinely see that drop by 50 percent or more in the first three to six months of working with them.

“What I do is good medicine, even though it gets dressed up as functional medicine, integrative medicine, natural medicine, holistic medicine, or root cause medicine. It has all those different labels because I might use herbs, bioidentical hormones, supplements, lifestyle medicine, mind-body medicine, pharmaceuticals and cutting-edge biohacking gear. The reality is I’m simply about helping people feel and function at their best. My goal with every patient is, let’s get your health as optimized as possible so you are as far from disease as you can possibly be.”