I didn’t leave traditional medicine because I stopped caring about patients.
I left because the system made it harder and harder to actually take care of them.
Before COVID, I was working in urgent care. On the surface, it looked like medicine. Patients came in. I evaluated them, made a diagnosis, and treated them. But underneath that, something else was happening — something that had nothing to do with patient care and everything to do with documentation, coding, and the endless manipulation required just to get paid by an insurance company.
I was spending more time justifying my decisions to a billing department than making them.
And then I started noticing something I couldn’t unsee: most of what was walking through the urgent care door didn’t need to be there. The conditions were manageable. The care was deliverable. What wasn’t working was the location — and the system propping it up.
That realization became Mobile Med — a mobile urgent care that came to the patient, not the other way around. No waiting rooms. No insurance treadmill. Just care, delivered where you actually live.
When Dr. Bethany Recker joined us in 2022, she brought a clinical insight that took things a level deeper.
Most patients ending up in urgent care, she pointed out, didn’t need urgent care. They needed a primary care doctor who actually knew them. Continuity. A relationship. Someone who could manage the thing before it became urgent.
The urgent care system isn’t just inconvenient — it’s a symptom of a broken primary care model. When people don’t have a doctor who knows them, urgent care becomes their default. And urgent care becomes their default because primary care appointments are impossible to get, rushed when you get them, and filtered through an insurance system that incentivizes volume over depth.
Dr. Recker added primary care to our model — and suddenly we weren’t just solving the access problem. We were solving the relationship problem.
Growing a practice means growing revenue, and we saw an opportunity that made clinical sense: medical aesthetics.
Not as a vanity add-on. As an extension of the same philosophy — helping people feel confident, healthy, and like the best version of themselves. We brought in Maggie Howard, FNP-C, who practices aesthetics the same way we practice medicine: anatomy-first, patient-first, results that look like you — not like someone else.
We bought our equipment, built out the aesthetic side of the practice, and launched Harmony Wellness & Body alongside Mobile Med.
Two entities. More overhead. More complexity. But at the time, malpractice insurance wouldn’t cover aesthetics and primary care under the same umbrella — so we did it the right way.
When the malpractice landscape finally changed and we could operate as one unified practice, we had a decision to make: what do we call this thing?
Dr. Recker and I landed on Retro — and not because we’re nostalgic.
Retro is a return to how medicine was and should be. Before a patient became a billing code. Before care was dictated by what an insurance company would approve. Before a 15-minute appointment became the standard for a 45-minute problem.
It’s the kind of medicine where your doctor knows your name before you walk in the room. Where aesthetics and primary care and functional wellness aren’t three separate tracks — they’re one conversation about how you want to feel and look and live.
Classic Medicine. Functional Solutions. Beauty Redefined.
That’s not a tagline. That’s why we built this.
If you’re looking for a practice that treats you like a person — not a patient number — we’d love to meet you.
Memberships are open to new patients. Aesthetic consultations are available for both members and non-members.
