Dr. Emily Roedersheimer, DO, FMCP-M

I didn’t set out to build a different kind of medical practice.

I’m Dr. Emily Roedersheimer, DO, FMCP-M. I spent more than 15 years practicing family medicine before founding Balanced Living Functional Medicine, but my interest in why people get sick started long before medical school.

I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was 10 years old. For years, medications and injections were simply part of my life. So by the time I became a physician, I understood medicine from both sides of the exam table. I was grateful for the care that helped control my disease, but I also carried a question I couldn’t quite let go of: why had my immune system become so dysregulated in the first place?

That question eventually changed the course of my life and my career.

I started learning functional medicine for myself first.

I came across functional medicine at a time when I was still very much practicing traditional family medicine. What caught my attention was the idea that symptoms and diagnoses can be the end result of things that have been building in the body for years. Instead of only asking how to suppress inflammation, functional medicine asked why it might be there in the first place. What’s the root cause(s)?

I wanted to understand more, so I began training through the Institute for Functional Medicine and eventually became an IFM Certified Practitioner. But before I started changing how I cared for patients, I started with myself.

I paid much closer attention to the things that hadn’t been a major part of my own medical care before: what I was eating, how I was sleeping, how much stress my body was carrying, how I was moving, and what patterns in my everyday life might be contributing to inflammation. I started practicing what I was learning and was quite surprised.

Over time, my body changed. I eventually reached remission and was able to come off the medications and injections that had been part of my life for years.

I don’t tell that story because I think everyone’s path will look like mine. I tell it because it completely changed the way I thought about medicine. I had experienced firsthand what could happen when we stopped looking at a diagnosis in isolation and started asking what else might be contributing.

Eventually, I knew I needed a different kind of practice.

As I learned more about functional medicine, I started seeing my years in primary care differently. I had always cared deeply about my patients, but there were so many visits where someone would tell me they were tired, foggy, gaining weight, not sleeping well, or simply didn’t feel like themselves, and I didn’t have enough tools to help them understand why.

Their routine labs might be normal. There might not be a diagnosis that explained how they felt. And in a 10- or 15-minute appointment, there was very little time to step back and ask what else might be contributing.

Functional medicine gave me a much broader way to think about those situations. I was learning to look for underlying contributors, to ask more about nutrition, sleep, stress, movement, digestion, inflammation, and the patterns that develop over years rather than focusing only on the symptom in front of me.

The problem was that I was learning all of this inside a practice that wasn’t really designed for that kind of work.

Traditional primary care had its own rhythm and expectations. Most visits needed to stay focused on the immediate medical issue, and many patients understandably came expecting the kind of care they had always received there. I was developing skills that required more time, deeper conversations, and much more participation between visits, but I rarely had the space to use those skills the way I wanted to.

That became increasingly frustrating because I could see possibilities I hadn’t been able to see before.

I had built a successful and profitable practice, so leaving was not an obvious decision. But eventually I knew I wanted to create a place where I could slow down enough to understand the whole story, look for root causes and underlying patterns, and help people make meaningful changes in their everyday lives alongside whatever medical care they needed.

I didn’t want functional medicine to become another version of rushed care with more expensive tests and a longer supplement list. I wanted enough time to listen, think, and work with people in a way that felt thoughtful and personal.

That was the beginning of Balanced Living Functional Medicine.

My version of functional medicine is intentionally balanced.

Functional medicine can be incredibly powerful, but I don’t believe it needs to mean doing every test available or taking a long list of supplements.

Testing is useful when it helps us answer a meaningful question. Supplements can be helpful when there is a clear reason to use them. Sometimes we absolutely need both.

But I have also seen how much can change when we pay closer attention to what is happening in someone’s actual life.

How are you sleeping? What happens to your meals when work gets busy? Are you exercising in a way that supports your body or depletes it? What happens to your symptoms during periods of stress? Are there habits you’ve been working very hard to maintain that may not be serving you in the way you thought they were?

Those details matter.

That’s one of the reasons health coaching is such an important part of the way we care for people at Balanced Living. Your medical history and testing can give us valuable information, but so can the patterns that show up in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

Our job is to bring those pieces together and help you decide what is actually worth your attention.

I want Balanced Living to feel like a safe place to be honest about how you’re really doing.

A lot of people come to us after years of trying to figure things out on their own. They may have seen multiple doctors, collected years of lab results, tried different diets, bought supplements, and spent countless hours researching what might be wrong.

By the time they get here, many are tired of managing all of it.

I want this to be a place where you can put the whole story down.

You don’t have to come in with all the answers. Tell us what you’ve been experiencing, what you’ve already tried, and what still doesn’t make sense. We can start there.

I want you to feel heard. I want you to feel understood. And I want us to have enough time and space to look at what may actually be getting in the way of healing.

Sometimes that means medical treatment. Sometimes it means testing. Sometimes it means changing something small in your day-to-day life that no one had thought to ask about before.

Most often, it is a combination.

This work is personal to me.

I know what it is like to have a health concern that takes up too much space in your life. I also know what it feels like when you begin to trust your body again and realize you are no longer organizing so much of your life around not feeling good. 

That is ultimately what I want for the people we care for at Balanced Living.

Of course I want your symptoms to improve. But I also want you to have more energy for your family, your work, your relationships, and the things you enjoy. I want you to understand your body well enough that every new symptom doesn’t send you back into hours of research. Most of all, I want you to feel confident knowing how to care for yourself, so your health becomes something you can tend to without it becoming another full-time job.

That is the kind of medicine I wanted to practice.

Balanced Living is the place I built so I could.

A little more about me

Outside of work, I’m a mom of two boys, an animal lover, and the host of the Push Pause to Heal podcast. I love good food, good conversation, traveling, reading, and spending time in nature. I’m also endlessly curious about the places where health intersects with stress, relationships, identity, and the way we actually live.

I’m still fascinated by medicine and the human body, but after all these years, I think the best care is both scientifically thoughtful and deeply human. I don’t think we should have to choose between the two.

You don’t have to know what kind of support you need before you begin.

Balanced Living offers several ways to start, from ongoing wellness support to personalized health coaching and physician-led functional medicine care.

Start with where you are now. We’ll help you decide what makes sense from there.