Mita Lodh, PhD, FSA, AD combines ancient healing wisdom with modern language and science to create a framework for daily self-doctoring in her clinic and book, Butterflies Method for Health: Daily Self-Doctoring (available here). She has a unique combination of qualifications and experience not only on the clinical side of the U.S. healthcare industry but also on its on financial side. This helps her identify and share some of the many ways in which person-level and industry level transformations can drive better health outcomes as well as lower healthcare expenditures.
Mita’s initial qualifications included B.Sc. in Operations Research (Bombay University), PGDBM in Financial Management (Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad), M.S. in Applied Statistics (Ohio State University, Columbus), Ph.D. in Bayesian methods which underlie artificial intelligence (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh), and Actuarial Fellow (Society of Actuaries, U.S.A.).
Her actuarial experience includes designing financial equivalents of clinical efficiencies with sub-teams of doctors and pharmacists, certifying various programs and initiatives by state governments worth billions of dollars annually, modeling care and disease management programs, helping physician practices, and advising hospital-based health plans. She also received recognition as volunteer, mentor, thesis advisor, author, chairperson, and speaker.
Her work as a healthcare actuary as well as her own personal experience as a patient within the healthcare system made it very evident to Mita that the fragmented and very expensive healthcare system in the U.S. leaves the patient wanting. She therefore pursued further studies and completed the Ayurvedic Doctor program (Alandi Gurukula, Boulder) while concurrently exploring other natural approaches to healthcare. Today she finds satisfaction helping others through her clinic. She credits the authoring of her book to those who benefited from the Butterflies Method and urged her to share her method with a larger audience.
She presents in a simple format how to use foods and activities as personalized medicine for sickness prevention as well as symptoms mitigation. Her techniques appeal to common sense and are based on both centuries-old and current practices that have remained consistent across the millennia.
Mita states that more important than any of her qualifications will be your own soon-to-be-acquired expertise in caring for your health. At first, you might absorb her book’s concepts only at the intellectual knowledge level. Next, implementing the recommendations and experiencing the outcomes will register the concepts within you at the experiential knowledge level. Thereafter, repeated readings of the book and implementation of its concepts will instill this approach deeply at the intuitive knowledge level.
Just as she balances left-brain and right-brain careers in the actuarial and natural medicine fields, Mita also pursues hobbies that similarly balance her life: bridge tournaments, swimming, camping, poetry, woodwork, leather arts, screen printing, growing vegetables, and spending time in kitchens – the one at home, as well as those on pickleball courts where she tries to perfect slices and nutmegs and hopes for falafels from friendly opponents.