The Consilience Partnership

Unity Through Wisdom

The Consilience Partnership is dedicated to creating meaningful behavioral change. Our core group Monique Class ANPC, Susan Buell, Courteney Suiter MS, Michael Stone MD and Joseph Lamb MD) are actively engaging in the creation of programs and educational materials to promote sustainable lifestyle change programs. Check out our upcoming events page to attend one of the Functional Medicine Wellness Retreats.

We recognize that wellbeing is more than the simple absence of disease and that health is a journey to a state of optimal wellness and not a simple destination. To measure one’s progress on this journey, defining wellness by measures other than disease risk factors and biomarkers is necessary. Health can be described by exploring five areas of functionality: metabolic, physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. Indeed, an individual’s behaviors are the outward expression of an inward integration of the metabolic, physical, emotional, and cognitive functions in a fully actualized mind, body, and spirit.

Creating wellbeing entails facilitating lasting behavioral changes. Yet, many practitioners and patients have had the experience of making lifestyle changes, perhaps even recognizing the benefits, yet witnessing the return of old patterns of behavior. Despite one’s best intentions, many journeyers find challenges to successful long-term implementation of change. New behaviors must compete with established needs for energy, time, and resources. External demands, cultural and societal messages, and life events, all may create threats to the ego’s strong yearning for the status quo. Or perhaps desired results may not have been enough or new behaviors left us unsatisfied; so, old behaviors called, and we responded.

We have found that a major obstacle to achieving full wellness is the brokenness of the connection to the self and of the self to the community and the environment. Young children, when asked, express their dreams of being an astronaut, ballerina, quarterback, president, nurse, doctor, teacher, scientist, stockbroker, soldier, or movie star; they dream large. It is unlikely that any child ever wished to be the unknown, fifth row back, fourth cubicle over, in a grey, sullen workplace.

Programs aimed both at defining an individual’s authentic self and providing patient education using Functional Medicine’s unique philosophy can facilitate a patient’s creation of a lasting vision that is the work of successful behavioral change. Our research and clinical work, incorporating components of Jim Gordon, MD’s work at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, values the importance of exploring an individual’s meaning and purpose in life as a basis for meaningful change and community.

Our work is dedicated to the themes of growth and service. Let’s Connect.