Karyn Shanks, MD

Dr. Karyn Shanks’ work is inspired by the revolutionary science of Functional Medicine, body-mind principles, and wisdom gleaned from the care of thousands of clients over her twenty-five-year career.

She founded The Center for Medicine and Healing Arts in Iowa City in 2001, a practice dedicated to the comprehensive care of clients with chronic complex illness. Karyn and her team partner with clients from all over the world to help them heal from a broad spectrum of illnesses, many of them “mystery” illnesses that have eluded diagnosis. They routinely treat autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, gut dysfunction, tick-borne and environmental illnesses, chronic pain, mood and neurological dysfunction, and a wide range of metabolic and hormonal disorders.

Karyn completed her residency training in internal medicine in 2004, became board certified in internal medicine, and later became a fellow of the American College of Physicians. She pursued further training in integrative medicine and became one of the founding diplomats of the American Board of Holistic Medicine (now the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine). She began her formal training in Functional Medicine through The Institute for Functional Medicine in 2001 and became IFM certified in 2015.

Karyn believes that everyone, at their core, understands that ultimate healing comes not from treating symptoms, but by addressing the foundational underlying causes, though this gets lost in the rigors and mindset of conventional medical training and practice. The focus of her mentoring work with healthcare professionals is to reignite the curiosity and provide the necessary tools they need to get to that root cause understanding of health and illness, and to revive the reason most of us went into medicine in the first place—to know, understand, and love people. She gets great satisfaction out of helping colleagues discover their strengths and recover their joy for practicing medicine while learning about tools and treatment approaches that greatly improve their clients’ outcomes.