Hello – and welcome to my website. It’s set up to make it easy for you to find out about me and my work. This website is also a place for you to learn more about the art and science of stress, happiness, and how the two are related. By learning more about how your body, mind, and spirit are connected and constantly communicating, you can move from stress to happiness every day.
Claire Michaels Wheeler, MD, PhD, is a physician, psychologist, author and university instructor living in Portland, Oregon. All of her work is guided by a deep fascination with the relationships between psychological processes (thought, emotion) and physiology – leading to a dynamic interplay of stress and happiness, illness and health.
Claire has lived in Portland, Oregon for eight years. She is currently on the faculty of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, DC; founder of Mind-Body Medicine of Portland, OR; and an assistant professor at Portland State University’s School of Community Health. She recently published her first book, 10 Simple Solutions to Stress, and is available as a lecturer in the field of MindBody Medicine.
Claire’s professional journey began as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley where she attained a bachelor’s degree in Physiology in 1985. While there, she participated in research on the effects of stress hormones on cancer cells and heart muscle at Berkeley and UC San Francisco. At the same time, she discovered the work of Joan Borysenko and Bernie Siegel, pioneers in the field of mind-body medicine.
After college, Dr. Wheeler completed her medical training at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine near Chicago, Illinois. While there, she continued to work on research into the effects of stress on cardiac muscle and focused on surgery and trauma. After an internship in General Surgery at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, Dr. Wheeler worked for several years as an attending physician in Emergency Medicine at hospitals in West Virginia and New Mexico. During those years, she raised two toddlers and explored the world of what was then known as “alternative” medicine – herbal medicine, energy medicine, mind-body wellness, and nutrition with a variety of teachers.
In 1995, Dr. Wheeler embarked on her Ph.D. training in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation research focused on trauma patients and the long-term effects of their injuries on their emotional, psychological, and social health. Her third child was born during those years, and her family settled in Portland, Oregon in 1999 when she completed her training at Michigan.
The research with trauma patients continued in Oregon, at Legacy Emanuel Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center. Dr. Wheeler and her colleagues continued to explore the role of spirituality, social support, attributions, and beliefs in the long-term recovery of people who have experienced major injuries to their bodies. As the work progressed, Dr. Wheeler continued her extracurricular training in other arenas because she saw a distinct gap between traditional, biomedical models of health and illness and what her patients were actually experiencing. Dr. Wheeler is part of a generation of medical and psychological professionals who have had to expand their definition of wellness beyond lab results and X-Ray pictures to include the overall mental, spiritual, social, and emotional state of the whole person.
During these years, Claire completed a year-long Associate Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona under the auspices of Dr. Andrew Weil. She also completed the Institute for Functional Medicine’s course on integrating functional medicine into clinical health care. She was key personnel on a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to Oregon Health & Science University for the revision of medical and nursing school curricula to add integrative medicine. Part of her job under this grant was teaching mind-body medicine to medical students and physicians at a series of Grand Rounds.
When Dr. Wheeler discovered the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, she found a professional and intellectual home. The center provided the framework for all the pieces of the puzzle she had been juggling, and like-minded professionals to work with to bring the philosophy and principles of holism into medicine. She completed the professional training program in 1999 and went on to complete the center’s certification program in 2000. She has since then been a core member of their professional training faculty.
Wheeler ran a private practice, MindBody Medicine of Portland, from 1999 to 2004, where she consulted with patients and clients about stress management, integrative medicine and nutrition to optimize the treatment they received from their primary care physicians. In 2004, she stopped actively practicing to focus on writing and teaching. She continues to create and lead workshops and groups in the wise use of mind-body techniques to combat stress and thrive even in the face of illness. These groups attract people from the general public as well as health professionals. One of Claire’s favorite projects is a program for integrating art with mind-body techniques (“Art & Wellness”) that has been the foundation of several retreats, seminars, and workshops for adults and children.
Currently, Claire teaches part time at Portland State University in the School of Community Health. One course, “Principles of Health Behavior,” is a core course for students in the Oregon Masters of Public Health program – a nationally hailed joint program of OHSU, PSU, and Oregon State University. She also teaches a course on chronic and communicable disease to undergraduate students. Dr. Wheeler is continuing to work with the data collected over 6 years of study with trauma patients and to consult with other researchers in the field of stress and illness.
Dr. Wheeler’s book, 10 Simple Solutions to Stress will be released in February 2007. She is a sought-after speaker in the areas of mind-body medicine, stress and wellness, and the integration of art and healing. She lives in Portland with her significant other, Matt, their five children (ages 6 to 16) and two dogs.
