Melissa Chen, MD
ICC Clinical Director
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science
Dr. Chen is an internist keenly interested in upstream health care: Acknowledging the social determinants and disparities that fundamentally affect patient health, and advocating for lifestyle modifications that can affect health more than many medicines/interventions. She is Clinical Director of the Interprofessional Community Clinic, RFU’s student-led pro bono clinic and has over 10 years experience as a clinician for the underserved at HealthReach, Lake County’s only free clinic. She is faculty at Chicago Medical School and has integrative medicine experience as a Faculty Scholar at Northwestern Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

At least 6 in 10 adults has one chronic medical condition, with 7/10 deaths attributable to chronic disease, accounting for 1.7 million lives lost each year (CDC). The morbidity and mortality of chronic conditions is attributable to the healthcare provider’s fixation on symptomatic disease management rather than the prevention-based model. This is partly due to the lack of provider training related to coordinated, team-based care that allows for a unified, evidenced-based message delivered to the patients across all healthcare professions. An emerging field, lifestyle medicine (LM), has…