David M. Ferriss, Jr., MD, MPH

David Ferriss, MD is a board-certified preventive medicine physician with a special interest in the role of a healthy lifestyle in the prevention and reversal of chronic disease.

Dr. Ferriss completed his medical training at Tulane University School of Medicine where he was awarded a full-tuition Hawthorne scholarship. He completed his family medicine residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and his preventive medicine training at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he completed a Master of Public Health (MPH) and he completed his fellowship training at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. In addition to his board-certification in preventive medicine, he is also board-certified in lifestyle medicine, the use of lifestyle interventions – diet, exercise, mind-body medicine – to prevent and reverse chronic disease.

Following a number of years of practice as a primary care physician and in a variety of senior medical leadership roles for a number of large healthcare organizations, he was introduced in 2008 to lifestyle medicine while he was the Medical Officer for Clinical Program Development for a national health services organization. He saw firsthand the huge impact that intensive lifestyle change could have on chronic disease, and he was hooked on helping individuals make significant lifestyle changes in order to improve their health and well-being.

While leading an intensive lifestyle change program for 200 participants, a lifestyle medicine colleague introduced him to functional medicine, a systems biology approach to the patient that focuses on finding the root causes of disease and dysfunction in order to bring about healing rather than simply treating the symptoms of the dysfunction, a model for which lifestyle medicine is the therapeutic foundation. He immediately began pursuing training in functional medicine through the Institute for Functional Medicine and quickly became convinced of the benefit of such an approach.

Dr. Ferriss has served two terms on the board of directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and was a founding board member for the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, the first international certifying body for lifestyle medicine, on which he served from 1995-2021. He is also a Fellow of both the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and the American College of Preventive Medicine.

Dr. Ferriss is passionate about taking a whole-person approach with his patients, understanding their uniqueness and how he can work proactively and in partnership with them to improve their health and well-being.