About Karyn Shanks MD

Physician Author Teacher

You may have arrived here after months or years of searching. You have symptoms that do not fit neatly into a diagnosis, or a list of diagnoses that still does not explain why you feel the way you do. You may have done everything asked of you and still feel tired, unwell, overwhelmed, or unlike yourself. Somewhere along the way, you may have begun to wonder whether your body has failed you – or whether you have failed at healing.

I want you to know something before I tell you anything about me: I do not see you as broken.

I see a whole human being whose body has been responding, adapting, protecting, conserving, and doing its best within the conditions of a life. Your symptoms are real. Your suffering matters. And beneath both is an intelligent living system with a story worth understanding.

The question is not only, What is wrong with me? It is also, How has my body organized itself to protect me – and what conditions would allow it to organize differently?

I Know This Territory from Both Sides

I am a physician who has spent more than three decades caring for people with chronic, complex illness. I have also been the patient sitting in the uncertainty.

For years, I lived with recurrent injuries, pain, profound fatigue, and a body that did not behave the way medicine expected. I trusted that my doctors had the answers. When they did not, I concluded that I must be the oddity – the person who did not fit, the body that was somehow wrong. Eventually, I recognized a deeper pattern: hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, with its connective-tissue vulnerabilities and low blood pressure, was the story behind many of the seemingly unrelated problems I had experienced for years.

That understanding mattered medically. It also changed my relationship with myself. I was not a collection of inexplicable failures. My body made sense when I understood the larger pattern and the conditions that had shaped it. I learned that expert guidance can be invaluable without replacing our own observation, discernment, and authority. I learned to listen differently – to my body, to the science, and to the stories medicine tells about us.

My own experience did not make me less rigorous as a physician. It made the questions I ask more rigorous. It taught me how easily people can disappear between specialties, diagnostic categories, normal test results, and treatment protocols. It deepened my commitment to finding the coherent story beneath the fragments.

The Way I Practice Medicine

My work brings together internal medicine, Functional Medicine, integrative and holistic medicine, systems biology, nutrition and lifestyle medicine, and trauma-informed care. I work with people whose health stories are rarely simple: persistent fatigue, pain, autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, tick-borne illness, metabolic and hormonal concerns, nervous-system activation, and symptoms that have resisted conventional explanations.

I begin with the whole person. That means understanding physiology in depth while also asking about the terrain in which that physiology lives: nutrition, sleep, movement, stress, trauma, relationships, environment, meaning, belonging, and the accumulated demands carried across a lifetime. These are not side notes to biology. They are part of biology.

I do not use a universal protocol or ask people to surrender their knowing to mine. My role is to listen closely, think across systems, recognize patterns, and help each person build a more accurate and useful understanding of what is happening. We use that understanding to create a thoughtful, individualized path forward – one that is medically sound, workable in real life, and respectful of the body’s pace.

Good medicine must be able to hold complexity without making a person feel like a problem to be solved. It must know when sophisticated testing or treatment is necessary and when more intervention simply adds burden. It must make room for uncertainty, revision, collaboration, and the truth that healing is never reducible to a laboratory value or a checklist.

What I Have Come to Believe

My years as a physician, patient, teacher, and student of human resilience have led me to a different understanding of chronic illness. The body is not a machine with defective parts. It is a living system continually organizing itself in response to perceived danger, available resources, and the conditions of a life.

Symptoms can be painful, disabling, and in need of direct medical treatment. They can also reveal protective biology at work: immune activation, energy conservation, heightened vigilance, altered fuel allocation, and hormonal adaptation. This does not romanticize illness or imply that suffering is chosen. It gives us a larger and more compassionate frame in which to understand it.

When we ask only how to suppress a symptom, we may miss the assignment the body is giving us. When we understand what the body has been protecting, what loads it has been carrying, and what resources it has lacked, we can begin to change the conditions around it. That is where new capacity for repair, resilience, and vitality can emerge.

Healing is not becoming someone new. It is creating the conditions that help us return to relationship with the intelligence and wholeness already within us.

My Work Beyond the Exam Room

I am the author of UnBroken: Reclaim Your Wholeness, as well as Heal and The Wisdom of COVID-19. Through my writing and teaching, I translate complex science into a humane, whole-person understanding of why we become ill, how our bodies protect us, and what supports meaningful change.

I am also the creator of Your Living Map and The UnBroken Sanctuary, a free digital refuge for people living with chronic illness, persistent symptoms, overwhelm, or disconnection. The Sanctuary grew from a conviction at the heart of all my work: people need more than information. They need places where information is offered without pressure, blame, surveillance, or the demand to perform healing. They need room to breathe, recognize their own wisdom, and take only what feels useful.

The Sanctuary is the public expression of what I have tried to offer throughout my career – a coherent framework, compassionate scaffolding, and deep respect for each person’s authorship of their own life.

Training and Professional Background

I earned my medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and completed my Internal Medicine residency at the University of Iowa. I am board-certified in Internal Medicine and Functional Medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, and a founding diplomate of the American Board of Holistic Medicine, now the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine. I completed the Institute for Functional Medicine certification program and professional training in Compassionate Inquiry, the trauma-informed approach developed by Dr. Gabor Mate.

I founded and directed the Center for Medicine and Healing Arts in Iowa City for more than two decades and now practice in Middleton, Wisconsin, working virtually with clients across the United States and internationally. Over the years, I have taught medical students, physicians, Functional Medicine clinicians, and community audiences; developed integrative clinical programs; and written and spoken widely about chronic illness, healing, resilience, and human potential.

The Human Being Behind the Work

I live in Wisconsin with my husband and our English Doodle, Jasper. I am the mother of two grown sons. Outside my clinical and creative work, I am restored by long walks, meditation, gardening, strength training, and the daily companionship of the natural world. Much of my time at home is spent caring for our prairie and oak savanna – removing invasive plants, making room for native life to return, and watching what becomes possible when the right conditions are restored.

That landscape keeps teaching me the same truth I encounter in medicine: life is always moving toward relationship, adaptation, and renewal. We do not force a prairie to become alive. We reduce what overwhelms it, restore what has been missing, and support the intelligence already there.

This is how I understand healing. And it is the spirit in which I welcome you here.

Selected Credentials

MD, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine

Board-certified in Internal Medicine

Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner

Fellow of the American College of Physicians

Founding Diplomate, American Board of Holistic Medicine

Professional training in Compassionate Inquiry

More than three decades in clinical medicine

Author of UnBroken: Reclaim Your Wholeness, Heal, and The Wisdom of COVID-19

Creator of Your Living Map and The UnBroken Sanctuary

Website: www.KarynShanksMD.com
Instagram: @karynshanksmd
Facebook: Karyn Shanks MD