A new standard of medicine for the most complex cases.
Book a Free Membership CallThe scale of the problem
You’ve been told your results are normal. We disagree.
I’m Luke Tera. Two decades ago I was the patient no one could explain. Lyme disease, infection, an energy that swung from biking to work one day to not being able to lift my head off the pillow the next — and the strongest pharmaceutical antibiotics failed.
I was studying under some of the best Chinese-medicine and functional-medicine doctors in the country. None of them had a map for what was happening in my body. I was in a no-man’s land, in uncharted territory, without a roadmap.
With my back against the wall, I had to look at the parts of illness most medicine ignores — the cognitive, the emotional, the spiritual. One of my Daoist teachers called these “our life’s curriculum.” That reframe changed everything.
I built the model on myself: clear the hidden loads, rebuild the body’s underlying capacity to adapt, and integrate the lessons the illness carried. I came out the other side stronger than before I got sick.
That model became Integral Medicine — a membership practice for people whose complex chronic illness hasn’t fit anywhere else. It’s the work you’ll see on the rest of this page.
Conditions we take on
Most medicine asks: what is broken? We ask: why is the whole system failing to heal?
The Three Treasures
Adaptive Capacity
Adaptive Capacity is the total ability to adapt to every stressor you meet in a given span of time. Chronic illness isn’t one broken part — it’s a threshold crossed. An injury caused by a thousand cuts.
Any activity develops the qualities and abilities that activity demands — up to the limit of our capacity to adapt to the unique stressors of each activity, and the sum of all activities in a given period.
Tera’s Restatement of Wolff’s Law
Rebuild that capacity, and the system that couldn’t heal starts healing on its own.
Excess modern stressors are like driving with the emergency brake on. Adaptive Capacity is the brake release — and the engine upgrade.
The Five Hurdles
Your nervous system gets stuck in low-grade threat — wired but tired. Nothing else rebuilds while it’s in lock, so we release it first.
The cellular engines that make your energy run down. Fatigue that rest doesn’t fix — a real metabolic state, not a willpower problem.
The largest interface between you and the world, and most of your immune system. Disrupted, it reaches everything — mood, clarity, inflammation.
Latent viruses, Lyme, heavy metals, mold — none show on a standard panel, all quietly drain your Adaptive Capacity for years.
When the life you’re returning to no longer fits who illness made you, the body registers it. Recovery holds only when the direction has meaning.
Labs read through a Daoist clinical lens: sleep, energy, mood, digestion, temperature regulation, movement and musculoskeletal patterns, exercise tolerance, and your full toxin and infection history.
A complete reconstruction of the events that built your current state: illnesses, accidents, surgeries, implants, concussions, infectious exposures, and vaccinations — the timeline a standard intake never assembles.
Purpose and meaning, sources of motivation, spiritual and emotional blocks, neurotransmitter balance, and heart-rate variability — the dimension most systems skip, treated here as co-equal.
The average doctor interrupts a patient after eleven seconds. An Integral Medicine assessment takes about two and a half hours.
130 structured questions31 areas of analysis4 dimensions of a lifeyour full medical timeline
Median time to first interruption in primary-care visits: Singh Ospina et al., Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2019.
See where your own Adaptive Capacity stands.
Once we can see the whole system — the loads draining it, the timeline that built it, and what you’re rebuilding toward — the path stops being guesswork. Here is what the first three months actually look like.
Digestion, detox, mindset, initial botanical protocol.
Protocol refinement, infectious/toxic burden, hormonal and metabolic recalibration.
Optimization of energy, cognition, metabolic power, spiritual clarity.
Clearing the hidden loads and rebuilding capacity is the physical arc of recovery. This is its other half — the part most medicine never names. The illness itself belongs to the healing journey: it arrives carrying a lesson, and the recovery only holds once that lesson is lived.
You will remain ill until you have absorbed and integrated all of the lessons that the illness has to teach you.
— Luke’s Daoist instructor
This is not blame. It’s an invitation. We help you find the meaning in what you’ve been through, integrate the growth it carries, and rebuild the Adaptive Capacity to move beyond symptoms — so the illness becomes the turning point, not the identity.
What the work produces
These are people we’ve worked with — a case series, not a statistic. In many of the clients we assessed, we found an underlying driver earlier care had missed. Here is what that has looked like.
“I woke up and it was like I wasn’t even hurting — I didn’t have that ‘let me kind of move around first’ thing. I just got up and went without even thinking.”
“The very best thing about this diet is I’m becoming a better parent. I’m becoming more present. And my mind is so much calmer — I don’t have the spikes.”
“Just a few hours before, while I was hunting, I was 100% health — nothing wrong with me mentally, nothing wrong with me physically. I’m stronger now than ever in my whole life. I had no limitations.”
“My energy has been really good — sustained energy throughout the whole day. It feels awesome, like I have so much time to do what I need to do.”
“I started calling it ‘can-cure’ instead of cancer. The body that created this cancer also has the means to heal it. In a lot of ways, I feel healthier than I ever have.”
“I’d dealt with gastric distress my whole life — it touched my eating, my emotions, every relationship I had. He didn’t hand me a magic bullet. He gave me a life path toward health.”
The illness is not meant to stay. The wisdom comes with transcending our health conditions.
Pioneer of the Integral Medicine Model. One of the first clinicians to identify and treat Long Covid. Author of Integral Medicine.
Hotchkiss, CO (in-person) plus full virtual membership access from anywhere.
How to Get Your Life Back from Long Covid, Lyme, Autoimmune Disorders, and Other Chronic Conditions in 90 Days.
