Meet Dr. Jandes
Anastasia Jandes, MD, PharmD, IFMCP
Medical Director | Physician
Dr. Jandes earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry, graduating with honors from Western Kentucky University. She went on to earn doctorates of both medicine and pharmacy at the University of Kentucky, graduating with honors from both programs. After earning her Doctorate of Pharmacy degree, she went on to complete a clinical pharmacy practice residency at The Medical University of South Carolina, where she focused on Infectious Disease clinical research and clinical pharmacy practice. She then returned to her home state, Kentucky, to complete her Doctorate of Medicine degree and subsequently attend the internal medicine residency at the University of Kentucky. This training was followed by a research fellowship with the Department of Anesthesia, which began her research in pain management, addiction, and opiate-sparing techniques.
Dr. Jandes pursued further subspecialty training and certification through The Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) and was the first Kentucky physician to receive the IFM Certified Practitioner distinction. The combination of allopathic medical training, pharmacy education, and experience with functional medicine principles has helped to improve wellness and clinical outcomes in all her patients and programs. She focuses on restoring healthy function by identifying the root cause of illness and balancing the mental, physical, and emotional health of each patient. Her care plans are customized to the specific needs of each person, utilizing nutrition and lifestyle changes as primary interventions alongside medication management, behavioral therapy, counseling, and nutritional supplementation. She now practices as a functional medicine consultant, helping practitioners create treatment protocols that get to the root cause of the problem while simultaneously increasing the patient’s vitality and quality of life. She is a consultant in the pharmaceutical, laboratory, nutritional supplement, and functional medicine industries, and is a public speaker on a wide range of medical and wellness topics. She has participated in multiple research projects and has authored several publications in the areas of addiction, laboratory analysis, and functional medicine.
She is a practicing medical director of behavioral health and addiction medicine as well as a practicing hormone management physician. Her current research and clinical practice interests are in the interplay between the environment, inflammation, and stress and their combined effect on the endocrine system’s ability to produce hormones, such as testosterone.
Dr. Jandes has a strong belief in the global community of health. She lived in Asia as a child and saw first-hand the great medical need of the underserved areas of the world. She has given her time as a medical volunteer internationally, especially in underserved countries, and has also provided medical care in the United States as a Salvation Army volunteer physician. She takes particular pride in helping veterans get the type of functional care they deserve after serving our country.
Her Story
Background
I had traditional training obtaining 2 doctorates. One in pharmacy (PharmD) and one in medicine (MD). Near the end of my medical residency I was hit with the realization that I couldn’t help my mother who was dying of adenocarcinoma of the lung. Nothing modern medicine could do, nothing I did, nobody that I referred her to, could help stop the inevitable. I spent countless hours researching and reading about alternative treatments, lifestyle approaches, genetic differences in specific cancers, and how they can be modified through different lifestyle approaches. I took care of her and made sure that every possible thing I was trained to do I did for her, but she died within the year.
Grieving
My mother was my everything. My best friend, my role model, and the woman I aspired to be. In the process of getting back on track, I became pregnant with my 2nd child and received the diagnosis of autism for my 1st child all within 8 months of her death. Again, what was modern medicine to do? What was I to do? Nothing. I was a highly trained medical doctor and pharmacist in despair with no answers. I felt helpless with nowhere to turn. Pediatrics couldn’t help with my son’s Autism diagnosis, so we took everything into our own hands.
A different approach
My research into my mother’s cancer left so many unanswered questions about healing. We took my autistic son to a biomedical physician who offered us a little hope in terms of alternative solutions, possible answers, and a more systems-based approach to the things that could be biologically lacking in autism. That was my first purposeful move onto the path of functional medicine and getting to the root cause. I was starting to realize how much I was missing, the glaring hole in my training, and how everything that I had been taught had been in a square box that had high walls around it that did not include learning about anything outside of western medicine.
Reality shattered
The things that had been tried, true, and vetted over thousands of years in the eastern world were automatically dismissed because they weren’t part of the RCT (randomized controlled trial), they weren’t part of western, modern medicine, and they weren’t part of, unfortunately, the pharmaceutical-driven model that modern-trained Doctors (myself included) were taught and continue to learn and practice in today. My reality was completely shattered as if I had been living in a dream and finally woke up and saw the truth of things. It was at that moment that I decided it was time to learn in a broader perspective. I’ve never wanted to forget what I know, I’ve never wanted to undo my training, I just wanted to add to it and be more well-rounded in my perspective.
A new path and renewed purpose to help patients
To quote Shakespeare “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This has become the core of my daily perspective. These hard life experiences were the key to unlocking my path forward. Through my interactions with patient after patient I realized that I can learn just as much, if not more, from their life experiences than I can teach them. This has taught me to understand the limitations of my training; that I am not willing to be limited in how I help my patients, my family, my community, or my world. There are plenty of other approaches in healing and I am in the process of learning as many of them as I can to build a best-practices model that provides the most well-rounded, comprehensive approach to healing based on what is available in the world. Over the course of four years I studied to become a certified functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for Functional Medicine and continue learning each day how to optimize our perfect human creation in an imperfect world.
If you are a patient of mine, let me thank you for entrusting me with your care. I appreciate each and every one of you!
If you are not a patient of mine and would like to be, please shoot us a text to find out how to be added to our waiting list.