In an underserved community where the odds favored the status quo, one physician's burnout became the unlikely starting point for whole-person care.

In an average exam room. In an average clinic. In Anytown, USA, a physician sits with a patient. The physician taps away on a keyboard while the patient tries to articulate what is wrong with them.

Then something extraordinary happens. The physician pauses. Not to take another glance at lab values or reach for the prescription pad. Instead, she asks a question. One that takes longer than the system normally allows to answer. And even longer to learn how to ask: What matters most to you right now?

A decade ago, raising such a question would have been dismissed as vague and inefficient. Today, the idea is foundational to a growing program at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, New York. The physician asking it is Kamica Lewis, and the program she helped build did not start where you might expect.

It started with burnout.

When Lewis joined the faculty at Jamaica Hospital, the work initially felt like it was engaging everything for which she had trained. She trained residents and cared for patients, moving quickly through busy days in a demanding clinical environment. Then something shifted. The pace remained the same, but she felt like her sense of resilience did not.

“I was surprised,” she recalls. “I usually felt like I was pretty resilient.” But she found herself facing what felt less like overworked and more like disconnected.

“I felt like I was doing a lot of prescriptions, and not a lot of connection.”

Looking for a balm to soothe this feeling, she enrolled in a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. It was, Lewis says, “life-changing”—not in a sweeping sense, but in the quiet, cumulative way it changed her daily interactions, how she listened. How she spoke. How she showed up in the exam room.

This practice continued to permeate her professional life. She started sharing mindfulness techniques with Jamaica Hospital residents, offering informal sessions to help them with the demands of residency. The response was immediate. She realized that appetite for a different approach to care had perhaps always been there.

At first, the shift was small—a few conversations, a different tone. But as Lewis continued, she recognized a gap, not just in training, but in the healthcare system itself.

Enter integrative medicine. The model of care — which combines conventional treatment with complementary therapies, nutrition, mind-body practices, traditional medicine, and lifestyle interventions — still occupies an uneasy position in mainstream healthcare. It leads with healing, integrating conventional treatment with personalized, whole-person care, but by the nature of its existence, integrative medicine challenges the efficiency-driven structures that define modern clinical systems.

At Jamaica Hospital, those structures were firmly rooted. The institution serves a medically underserved community in Queens — people from over 130 countries speaking 160 languages — where access to resources is limited, and patient needs are often complex. Integrative medicine, with longer visits and a broader scope, could easily have been dismissed as impractical, a luxury the hospital could not afford.

Instead, something unusual began.

Things started, maybe as they often do, not in a clinic, but in a conference room. Lewis proposed a two-day mindfulness retreat for hospital leadership, a group not typically known for embracing experiments in contemplative practice. She expected some resistance or, at least, indifference, but what she got instead was excitement.

“I was shocked,” she says, “They were so enthusiastic.”

“The alignment felt like a synchronicity type of moment.”

This enthusiasm suggested that the institution was not only open to new ideas but also actively seeking them. At around the same time, Alan Roth, DO, chair of the department of Family Medicine, Ambulatory Care, and Community Medicine, had begun exploring integrative medicine on his own. The alignment, Lewis says, felt like “a synchronicity type of moment.”

With this leadership support, the idea of adopting integrative medicine expanded. Lewis was accepted into the two-year, part-time, distance learning Fellowship in Integrative Medicine, offered by the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine (AWCIM), a program that allowed her to deepen her clinical knowledge without stepping away from practice. The online fellowship gave her not only practical whole-health tools for treating patients but also a framework for building integrative care within a hospital system.

Integrative medicine curriculum, it turned out, was the missing infrastructure.

Supplemental residency curricula like AWCIM’s Integrative Medicine in Residency (IMR) are designed to fit inside existing residency programs — giving physicians a way to learn integrative approaches and whole person care without abandoning the clinical demands already on their plate. At Jamaica Hospital, the program became a scaffold that supported not only physician learning but institutional change.

Residents and faculty followed Lewis’ lead, embracing integrative medicine. What started as one physician’s personal quest began to look like a pipeline: medical students and residents becoming integrative practitioners, integrative practitioners becoming advocates, and advocates becoming leaders in whole person care. Data supports the story. Since its inception at the residency in 2019, all Jamaica Hospital residents who have enrolled in the two-year IMR track have completed the program, an exceptional rate for an elective program. Several went on to pursue further training. A growing cohort of faculty emerged with not just new clinical skills, but with a shared vocabulary for integrative practice.

But no matter the numbers, the real lesson is momentum.

Integrative medicine’s biggest obstacle has historically been as much financial as cultural. In a traditional fee-for-service arrangement, it can be difficult to sustain. Many of integrative medicine’s most effective interventions — nutrition counseling, an adaptogen for stress management, and health coaching, for example — are not reimbursed at the same rate as other defined procedures or acute care. In an underserved setting, where patients are not always able to pay out of pocket, the challenges become even more daunting.

“How do we support this?” was the question asked over and over.

As Jamaica Hospital moved toward a value-based care model, prevention stopped looking like an expense and started looking like an investment.

The answer came through shifting incentives. As Jamaica Hospital moved toward a value-based care model — one that rewards providers for keeping patients healthy, not for the volume of services they deliver — the calculus changed.

Prevention had a price tag.

Lewis describes a simple example: a patient at a high risk for type 2 diabetes is provided with resources within an integrative model of care. They adopt regular physical activity and healthy lifestyle habits with support from the integrative team. If diabetes never develops, the chain of consequences - prescription medications, specialist visits, hospitalizations, and the treatment of complications such as kidney disease, vision loss, and cardiovascular events - never begins. Multiply that across a population, and the savings are significant.

With the presentation of this perspective, what had once seemed like an elective indulgence began to look like a financial strategy.

By 2025, the program had grown ambitious enough to warrant a fellowship of its own. Jamaica Hospital licensed the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine’s Foundational Fellowship Curriculum (FFC), a 550-hour program that provides comprehensive training in integrative medicine. The curriculum, which has been approved by the American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABOIM), allowed the hospital to build a clinical, in-person fellowship without starting from scratch. The first fellow enrolled soon after launch.

As part of the health system's broader shift toward integrative care, years of advocacy by Roth culminated in the approval of a new Integrative Health Center serving the Jamaica community. The state-of-the-art facility is designed to expand access to a wide range of evidence-informed services, including an integrative medicine pharmacy and treatments such as acupuncture, osteopathic manipulation, massage therapy, tai chi, yoga, and mindfulness programs. Plans also include community-focused resources such as an exercise education room, a demonstration kitchen, a non-profit green grocery store, and programs that improve access to affordable, healthy whole foods.

For Lewis, the building represents more than expansion. It is the physical manifestation of what she had been imagining for years.

“When they told me it was actually going to happen,” she says, “I couldn’t believe it.”

Even as the program grows, questions remain. Chief among them, how do you measure something that is, by definition, individualized?

Integrative medicine embraces n of 1 research and personalized medicine. Its strength is its adaptability — accounting not just for a diagnosis but for a patient’s environment, habits, preferences, and constraints. That flexibility is a hallmark, and the very thing that makes it difficult to quantify outcomes in the ways that conventional medicine demands.

“How do you turn that into a bar graph?”

Her goal is not simply to demonstrate that integrative approaches are effective, but to show, through data, research, and reproducible models, that they are. When the team at Jamaica succeeds in embedding integrative medicine into their non-profit teaching hospital system, they will become more than a local success story. They become a template for good medicine in U.S. healthcare.

If Lewis, Roth, and the team at Jamaica Hospital serve as a catalyst, everything changes in that Anytown, USA exam room.

A patient returns — not because they were told to, but because they want to. A resident pauses before moving to the next item on a checklist, taking a few slow, intentional breaths. Physicians and nurses stop in the hallway to discuss holistic care plans.

These seemingly small moments are the key. They do not generate headlines, and they certainly do not show up in quarterly reports or fiscal documents. But they build up over time and bring healing to the frontlines.

For Lewis, this build-up is the point. The goal was never to replace conventional medicine, but to expand it and make room for additional whole-person approaches.

“Patients should get good health care. That should be the standard.”

It is a statement that, in much of American medicine, still sounds aspirational. But in one hospital in Queens, guided by the passion of dedicated practitioners, it is becoming real.