Physicians of the Future

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

By Rosalynn A. Vega

University of Texas Press

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.

A superb, richly ethnographic work in the fascinating field of functional medicine. Physicians of the Future offers vital insights that may help the US population move toward greater understanding and better health. Carole H. Browner, UCLA, editor of Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives

Original and well-crafted, this very accessible book ethnographically traces the emergence of functional medicine in the US. Physicians of the Future makes a significant contribution to our understandings of illness narratives and biosociality, as well as to the fields of medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). Carlos Novas, Carleton University

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.