Joseph E. Scherger, MD, MPH, is a family physician of 40 years and an avid runner who has carried over his passion for fitness and nutrition into treating patients.
Dr. Joseph E. Scherger (left) and his son Gabriel attend the Western States 100-mile ultramarathon as spectators.
He achieved this through moving to practicing functional medicine a decade ago.
According to Dr. Scherger, functional medicine “shifts the whole approach [to family medicine], recognizing that people’s chronic diseases, like hypertension and diabetes, are completely reversible, and the reason why is because they’re caused by what we eat and how we live.”
Practicing functional medicine continues to make working exciting for Dr. Scherger, he says.
“Now that I’ve shifted into nutrition and lifestyle, I feel like I’m a healer, you know? I’m not just refilling prescriptions anymore,” he said.
The burden of disease brought about by bad nutrition and our profit-hungry food industry is staggering, explained Dr. Scherger, As such, he encourages his patients to adopt lifestyle and nutritional changes that allow the body to become healthy again.
Dr. Scherger’s shift into lifestyle-oriented medicine reflects his own experiences with healthy living, and how it has impacted his life.
“I’m 70 years old, and I’m still running, and I feel the same as when I was 40 or 50.” He has completed 40 marathons, ten 50K and five 50-mile ultramarathon trail runs, and, although retired from long-distance running, he is currently training for an upcoming 5K Thanksgiving turkey trot with his 6-year-old grandson. “He loves it. He’s faster than I am, I have trouble keeping up with him,” he confessed.
Earlier days of career
“I’ve been very blessed to have a career that kept changing every 5-10 years,” he said. “I’ve been able to evolve in a way of shifting my interests from one area to another,” he said.
Dr. Scherger has held many positions in the medical field, from serving in the National Health Service Corps in Dixon, Calif., as a migrant health physician during 1978-1980, to being chair of graduate medical education at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., from 2009 to 2015. In between, he taught at the University of California, Davis, and served as founding dean of the Florida State University College of Medicine.
Originally from Ohio, Dr. Scherger was born in 1950 in the small town of Delphos. He graduated from the University of Dayton in 1971 before attending medical school at University of California, Los Angeles, for 4 years. He then completed a family medicine residency and a masters in public health at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1978.
A resident of the Golden State for 50 years now, Dr. Scherger describes himself as a “true Californian.” Currently, he is in practice at Eisenhower Health in La Quinta, Calif., where he is a core faculty member in the family medicine residency program. He is also a physician under the health center’s Primary Care 365 program, which offers patients regular communication with and increased access to their physicians, emphasizing on telemedicine. He also founded Restore Health – Disease Reversal, a wellness center in Indian Wells, Calif., that focuses on improving patients’ health through changes in nutrition and lifestyle.
Within his medical practice, Dr. Scherger is seen by colleagues as a doctor who not only advocates for his patients, but also goes above and beyond to solve their problems.
“He’s a leader, an advocate, and he inspires others to do what they do,” said Julia L. Martin, MD, a fellow family medicine practitioner who has been working with Dr. Scherger at the Eisenhower Medical Center for the past 5 years. “Being a physician is a very challenging role. You need to be patient and understanding in trying to investigate what the patient wants and work through that to try to find the solution. Dr. Scherger is really good at that.”