Women In Wellness: Dr Jessica Cho On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Practice every morning 3 things — 3 gratitude lists and 3 small things which bring you joy and happiness– it can be even something like “having my coffee in my bed for 5 minutes to set my intention for a day”!
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jessica Cho.
To Dr. Jessica Cho, wellness goes beyond an absence of disease. Wellness is a life of happiness, health, and vitality. In 2000, Dr. Cho founded Wellness at Century City, located in the heart of Hollywood’s entertainment business, creating a practice that reflects her years of experience and knowledge. Her background as an internal medicine physician along with her integrative philosophy grants her the unique ability to treat patients as a whole.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I believe wellness goes beyond an absence of disease. My mission is to educate and help the patients re-create wellness, enabling a life full of happiness, health, and vitality. Together, we must uncover the root causes of your health problems to achieve long-term wellbeing.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
For more than 25 years, I am honored and humbled to have the privilege of doing what I love every day: practicing medicine. But my journey didn’t start this way. Growing up in Korea, I was expected to become a concert pianist. When I came to the US, I initially studied bioengineering until I fell in love with the wondrous dynamic of the mind and body, working together in perfect synchronicity. Becoming a physician aligned my actions with my heart’s passion and mind’s curiosity.
Fresh out of medical school, I was ecstatic to start practicing internal medicine: the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness. Then, a storm hit me during my first few years of practicing. I struggled with sleepless nights, thyroid storm, spiking sugar levels with precarious moods, and unbalanced hormones, losing all my hair and wearing a wig as a cover-up. My specialty doctors couldn’t help me, and the medications I was given caused more side effects than relief. As I faced the isolating emotional repercussions of my health problems, I felt like I had become a shell of my previous self. I lost myself. I could no longer see myself as a wife, as a mom, or as a woman.
Out of my despair came my quest to repair and to heal. I sought to broaden my knowledge beyond conventional Western medicine. After years of re-educating and re-training in integrative & anti-aging medicine as well as Eastern medicine, I discovered how to use all the complementary tools in healing, not only pills and prescriptions.
I am grateful for the life I have lived to get me to this point. My own health experiences helped me become a better physician to my patients, immersed in more empathy and purpose as a partner in healing, as I understand their frustrations and worries on a personal level. Today and every day, I become more inspired to help others heal from within, to achieve long-term wellness, not a quick fix. This is my divine calling and my driving force behind what I do and why I practice medicine every single day.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
During one of my first on-call shifts of my internship, my attending doctor tasked me with taking care of his ICU patients overnight. I remember feeling dead on my feet, yet relieved, after 30 consecutive hours. The next day, I found out that one of the patients I was responsible for suffered warfarin-induced brain hemorrhage. I had made a dosing mistake that could have been fatal. The patient luckily made a full recovery, but over 24 years later, I remember how sick to my stomach I felt waiting for news from his surgery. This experience ingrained in me a deep respect for the responsibilities of being a physician. In my work, every small detail, whether it be a piece of history, an offhand complaint, or medication dosage, can make all the difference to each patient. This has been my grateful mistake that has been an eternal blessing, reminding me a humility and respect for what I do for each patient.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I started Wellness at Century City with a unique, integrative approach to medicine that blends Western Medicine with Eastern medicine. My personal value of empathy and service to others is what I want my practice to embody as my philosophy. And it should be an extension of what I do in my life. This has been reflected in long years of global medical missions to serve marginalized communities all over the world. Over the past decade, I have served Romani, repressed Kurdish communities in the remote Turkey countryside, Syrian refugee efforts in Greece, and indigenous Amazonian tribes and more on my mission. In my local community, I began a yearly tradition of hosting free clinic days at my office every November in the spirit of Thanksgiving. My medical mission is what has been so fulfilling personally, which has illuminated my purpose and passion.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
- Deeper, more REM sleep which will reset, restore, and replenish you and more & dietary restrictions of gluten and simple carbohydrates.
- Practice every morning 3 things — 3 gratitude lists and 3 small things which bring you joy and happiness– it can be even something like “having my coffee in my bed for 5 minutes to set my intention for a day”!
- Incorporate HIIT exercises for 5–10 minutes daily. Even taking a walk 10–15 minutes can do much more than you think.
- Practice intermittent fasting by fasting for 12–16 hours in between your mealtimes whenever feasible.
- Cultivate & optimize your gut microbiome by taking prebiotics and probiotics. Your gut microbiome is the most frontier of the latest anti-aging recipe. Gut restoration yields anti-aging effects by improving your digestion, inflammation, metabolism, immune protection, and brain health.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
If I could start a movement, I would revamp the American healthcare industry. At a time when the current healthcare landscape is forcing physicians to sell their practices or depersonalize care with extended wait times and rushed appointments, I too am challenged to maintain a high level of patient-centric care and service. I believe patients deserve their physician’s best, which is impossible under insurance restrictions and quota mandates. At my practice, I protect and foster the patient-physician relationship by ensuring each visit has enough time, so I can truly understand my patients, their backgrounds, and how these complex dynamics affect their health today.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Don’t be pressured to know your passion in your life. You don’t have to know what it is exactly, however, engage fully your mundane daily life. Embrace all your disappointments, failures, and rejections and even anger. Your passion and purpose are being carved out of your daily life when you take one day at a time.
- You must stay authentic and true to yourself: you must find answers from within.
- You will gain perspective from rest. When you slow down and take a moment for yourself, you will be able to reflect and gain inspiration to forge onward.
- Learn to live in the present.
- It is simple: Let yourself choose happiness and laugh.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Mental health is dearest to my heart. As someone who has been treating successfully mental health for the past 24 years, I cannot emphasize how important it is in your overall physical health. I have embraced this new era of speaking openly about mental health and understanding mental health as an illness. It has been my great honor to have the privilege of listening to each of my patients’ intimate, personal, even traumatic life stories. As a physician, I approach mental health the same way I might approach calcium or Vit D3 deficiency of your bone as it simply represents the deficiencies and imbalanced harmony of your brain neurotransmitters, which also affords the natural remedies to balance and replenish when you understand it in such fashion. It is okay to talk about it and seek help, which truly represents your strength and kindness to yourself.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
I often write about newest medical discoveries and the innovative clinically proven treatment options for common health problems in my blog on my website. I am also active on Instagram, where I enjoy sharing more about my daily life and providing free, accessible health education @jessicachomd and Facebook at Wellnessatcenturycity.
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Dr Jessica Cho On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.