ABOUT DR. JENNIE WALKER
The physician who listens, looks deeper, and helps you find the actual cause.
Board-certified Emergency Medicine physician. Specialized training in Functional Medicine. 25 years of practice across both worlds, brought together to help you understand what is actually going on.
My Story
I came to functional medicine the long way around.
For more than 25 years, I have practiced Emergency Medicine. Long shifts, acute crises, and the full range of what brings people into a hospital in the middle of the night. I am still board-certified, and I still work in the ER. It is work I respect and still enjoy, and conventional medicine is extraordinarily good at what it was designed to do.
What I started noticing, though, was a pattern the system was not built to address. The same kinds of patients kept cycling through: chronic skin conditions that flared no matter what was prescribed, digestive symptoms that never fully resolved, fatigue that everyone agreed was real but no one could explain. They had been told their labs were normal, their tests were fine, and to manage their symptoms with another medication.
That pattern was not a failure of effort on the patient's part. It was a sign that the actual cause of their symptoms had not been addressed. When you are trained to look at chronic conditions through a different lens, you start to see what is driving them. Once you see it, it cannot be unseen.
That is what brought me to functional medicine.
How I Work
The work is built around a simple question: Why is this happening?
Not what should we prescribe to manage it, but what is actually causing it. The body is an interconnected system, and chronic conditions almost always involve more than one part of that system. Your skin, your gut, your hormones, your stress physiology, your sleep, your immune function. These are not separate stories. They are chapters of the same one.
In my clinic, the work looks like this. We start with a focused conversation about your full medical history, what you have already tried, and what is currently happening. From there, we may use advanced functional testing to identify what is driving your symptoms underneath. Then we build a structured plan that addresses the underlying cause, tracking progress over time and adjusting as we go.
I am not anti-conventional medicine. I am clear-eyed about when it helps and when it makes things worse. My patients still see their dermatologists, gastroenterologists, and primary care doctors. The functional medicine work runs alongside that, asking the questions the rest of the system was never designed to ask.
Training and Certifications
The Training Behind the Practice
I completed medical school and residency in emergency medicine and have practiced as a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician for over two decades. That training is the foundation for everything I do.
The functional medicine work is layered on top of that foundation. I completed the Kresser Institute's ADAPT Practitioner Training Program, earned my certification through the Institute for Functional Medicine, and am a Root Cause Dermatology Certified Practitioner.
Outside the Clinic
Mammoth Lakes is part of the practice.
The trails, the lakes, and the mountains are a big part of why I live here. The pace of life in the Sierra Nevada matches the way I think medicine should work. It is slower than urgent care, more careful than checklist medicine, and more attentive to what is actually going on.
When I am not in the ER or in my clinic, you can usually find me outside with my dog Betty.
Start with a Discovery Call.
If you have been managing symptoms for a long time and you are ready for someone to actually look at why they are happening, the Discovery Call is the place to start. There is no obligation and no sales pitch. Just a focused conversation about whether this kind of care is the right fit.