Dr. Akil talks to us about how he was trained in functional medicine and Ayurveda, how he integrates the two in his clinical practice, and what we can practically take away for our own health. We talk about the highest leverage tools from functional medicine and Ayurveda, his opinion on wheat, protein, and wheat, as well as the key role of toxins in creating autoimmunity. I hope you enjoy!

Akil Palanisamy, MD, is a Harvard-trained physician who practices integrative medicine, blending his conventional medical expertise with holistic approaches including functional medicine and Ayurveda. “Dr. Akil” attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in biochemical sciences. He earned an MD from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and completed family medicine residency training at Stanford University. He then graduated from a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona, and received certification in mind-body medicine from the Georgetown University Center.

Dr. Akil is the Department Chair for Integrative Medicine at the Sutter Health Institute for Health and Healing (IHH). He also serves as IHH Physician Director for Community Education and leads their educational initiatives and programs. Dr. Akil has been a consultant with the Medical Board of California for many years. 

A widely known speaker and educator, he is the author of “The Tiger Protocol” (his latest book) and “The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease”.  As he has done for two-plus decades, Dr. Akil sees patients and conducts clinical research studies in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, traveling, and spending time with his wife and daughter.

I'm proud to present Dr. Christian Kessler as the inaugural guest for Activating Ayurveda! I chose Dr. Kessler as the first guest because he's run a number of groundbreaking studies testing Ayurvedic treatments in rigorous clinical trials, with several of those studies showing that Ayurveda performs better than conventional Western medicine. He's published studies on osteoarthritis, IBS, rheumatoid arthritis, and more. We talk here about how he entered Ayurvedic research, one of his prominent studies on osteoarthritis, and his perspective on IBS. He tells us about how IBS is caused from an Ayurvedic perspective, as well as giving us three pieces of advice / information from Ayurveda that every IBS patient needs to know.

PD Dr. Christian S. Kessler, MA, MSc is research coordinator and senior physician at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Outpatient Clinic for Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Immanuel Hospital. He has broad experience in creation of new clinical research strategies integrating non- pharmacologic interventions such as diet and lifestyle changes into complex clinical trials with patients suffering from chronic diseases. A specific focus of this work is research on traditional systems of medicine. More than 20 randomized trials focusing on prevention and treatment by non-pharmacological therapies have been successfully conducted in the last 10 years under his scientific supervision. The facility is a renowned clinical trial center with a complete clinical research infrastructure, investigators, study nurses, biologists, nutritionists, bioinformaticians, and other research assistants.