From emergency rooms to meditation retreats, from hospital wards to bodybuilding stages — one physician’s journey to a medicine without limits
Curator’s Note: Dr. Shiv K. Goel, a board-certified internist and functional medicine practitioner, reflects on his medical journey that spans emergency rooms and bodybuilding stages. Observing the limitations of conventional medicine, he founded Prime Vitality in San Antonio to address the root causes of health issues rather than merely managing symptoms. Through intensive training in holistic and functional medicine, Goel emphasizes treating the whole person with tailored approaches. He advocates for integrating mind, body, and spirit in healthcare, sharing insights from his experiences in bodybuilding, meditation, and writing. His book, “Healing the Split,” calls for a future where medicine embraces holistic healing practices. This inspiring story was written by Dr. Shiv K. Goel, and we curated it for your enjoyment and learning from the insights of this thought leader and practitioner in the medical field.
There is a moment in every physician’s career when the limitations of conventional medicine become impossible to ignore.
For me, that moment did not arrive as a single dramatic revelation. It accumulated — quietly, relentlessly — across thousands of patient encounters, countless hospital shifts, and years of watching people cycle through a system designed to manage disease rather than cultivate health.
I am Dr. Shiv K. Goel — a board-certified internist, functional medicine practitioner, and the founder of Prime Vitality in San Antonio, Texas. But those credentials, while hard-earned, only tell part of the story.
The fuller story involves emergency rooms in New York, operating theaters in Delhi, a bodybuilding stage at age 45, silent meditation retreats, and a growing conviction that medicine — real medicine — must address the whole person or risk healing no one at all.
Where It All Began
My path into medicine started at Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, one of India’s oldest and most rigorous institutions. I trained in anesthesiology and critical care at Safdarjung Hospital. The hospital’s high volume of patients and severe cases required intense focus and resilience. This experience shaped everything that followed.
I came to the United States. My goal was to pursue internal medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Queens Hospital Center in New York. The training was intense. The education was world-class. And the hospital corridors became my second home.
What followed was over a decade of clinical practice across Texas. I served as a hospitalist at Metropolitan Methodist Hospital. I also stepped into the role of Medical Director at Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital. Moreover, I taught the next generation of physicians as an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University Health Science Center in the Permian Basin.
I published research in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, presented findings at the American Thoracic Society International Conference and the AMA Research Symposium, and earned board certifications from the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Association of Procedural Medicine.
By every conventional measure, I had arrived.
And yet, something fundamental was missing.
The Fracture I Could No Longer Ignore
Hospital medicine excels at acute intervention — stabilizing a cardiac arrest, managing sepsis, treating the emergency in front of you. I am deeply grateful for that training. It saved lives, including in my own hands.
But I watched the same patients return — month after month, year after year — with chronic fatigue they could not explain, hormonal imbalances no one investigated, metabolic dysfunction addressed only with another prescription, and autoimmune conditions treated with suppression rather than understanding.
The system was not broken in the way most people think. It was incomplete.
We had mastered the science of keeping people alive. We had not yet committed to the art of helping them thrive.
That gap — between surviving and thriving — became the center of my professional life.
Building Something Different
I began studying functional medicine with the same intensity I had brought to my residency. I pursued certifications in aesthetic medicine, anti-aging protocols, hormone optimization, peptide therapy, regenerative treatments, and procedures ranging from hair restoration to facial rejuvenation.
Not because I was chasing trends. Because I recognized that patients wanted more than disease management. They wanted vitality. They wanted to look in the mirror and feel that their outside matched the energy they still carried inside.
In 2021, I founded Prime Vitality — a holistic functional medicine clinic and medical spa in San Antonio. The philosophy is simple but radical in today’s healthcare landscape: treat the root cause, optimize the whole person, and refuse to accept decline as inevitable.
At Prime Vitality, we do not hand out prescriptions and send patients on their way. We investigate. We listen. We build personalized protocols that address hormones, metabolism, nutrition, aesthetics, and the invisible architecture of wellbeing that conventional medicine often overlooks.
The Unlikely Teachers
The most transformative lessons of my life did not come from medical textbooks.
Bodybuilding taught me discipline. At 45, I competed in the IFBB Pro Men’s Physique division. The process demanded a level of nutritional precision, training consistency, and mental fortitude that reshaped my understanding of what the human body is capable of — at any age. It also taught me that transformation is not about willpower alone. It is about understanding the science, respecting the process, and showing up on the days when motivation has left the room.
Meditation taught me presence. I have completed Vipassana silent retreats, the Art of Living program, and Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering. These were not casual experiments. They were deep, sometimes uncomfortable, confrontations with the noise inside my own mind. What I discovered was that consciousness is not separate from health. Awareness, stillness, and breath are not luxuries — they are therapeutic tools as powerful as any medication I have ever prescribed.
Writing taught me clarity. Translating complex medical ideas into language that resonates with a general audience has sharpened my thinking and expanded my ability to serve. Every article is an extension of the exam room — a chance to educate, challenge assumptions, and offer people agency over their own health.
These three practices — physical discipline, inner stillness, and written expression — are not hobbies. They are pillars of how I practice medicine and how I live my life.
The Book
These converging threads led me to write Healing the Split: Reconnecting Mind, Body, and Spirit in Modern Medicine.
The title captures the central problem I see in healthcare today: we have split the human being into parts — a body for the internist, a mind for the psychiatrist, a spirit for the chaplain — and in doing so, we have lost sight of the whole person.
The book argues that reconnecting these dimensions is not alternative medicine. It is the future of medicine. And it is already happening — in clinics like Prime Vitality, in the growing body of research on mind-body interventions, and in the lived experience of patients who have been told nothing more can be done, only to discover that healing was waiting in a place no one had thought to look.
What I Write About
My contributions to this community will explore the topics that live at the intersection of my training, my curiosity, and my clinical experience:
- Functional and integrative medicine — investigating root causes rather than suppressing symptoms
- Longevity and anti-aging science — the emerging research on extending healthspan, not just lifespan
- Hormone optimization and metabolic health — particularly for men navigating the underexplored terrain of midlife vitality
- AI in healthcare — the extraordinary potential and the ethical questions we must not ignore
- The mind-body connection — how meditation, breathwork, and consciousness practices produce measurable physiological change
- GLP-1 medications, peptide therapies, and regenerative medicine — separating evidence from hype
- Personal transformation — honest reflections on building a practice, reinventing a career, and pursuing wellness as a way of life rather than a destination
Some posts will be short and practical — a few paragraphs on a topic that deserves attention. Others will be long-form cornerstone essays designed to go deep. I believe in writing that is accessible without being simplistic, evidence-based without being sterile, and personal without being self-indulgent.
An Invitation
If you are a fellow physician questioning whether there is more to medicine than what we were taught — there is.
If you are someone navigating chronic health challenges and wondering whether a different approach exists — it does.
If you are simply curious about what happens when a doctor decides to stop treating parts and start healing people — welcome. You are in the right place.
I am honored to be part of the Digitalmehmet community, and I look forward to the conversations ahead.
Dr. Shiv K. Goel, MD, FACP, is a board-certified internist and functional medicine physician based in San Antonio, Texas. He is the founder of Prime Vitality, a holistic wellness center and medical spa, and the author of Healing the Split: Reconnecting Mind, Body, and Spirit in Modern Medicine. Connect with him on Medium, Substack, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Leave a Reply