Doctor of Nursing Practice and
Functional and Ayurvedic Medical Practitioner
Dr. Gillian Ehrlich’s mission is to make holistic health our common ground in medicine and improve universal access to primary care. This vision of health evolved over a decade spent working in direct-service positions. Beginning with the Pacific Crest Outward Bound School and other wilderness programs, she shared with adolescents the elements required for healthy living: food, shelter, community, exercise, purpose and competency, joy and fresh air. Onto this foundation, she added a season of growing organic food for 25 families in southwest Ohio and functioning as a teacher and domestic violence counselor on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota.
Health has been the consistent thread and nursing became the venue for the life-long application of these skills and values.
Gillian graduated with a BA/BS degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She promptly returned to Seattle and began a seven-year career at Harborview Medical Center as an acute care general medicine and cardiology nurse. Frustrated with the health care system and devoted to more comprehensive care, she returned to academic life, graduating from the University of Washington’s Doctorate of Nursing Practice program and becoming licensed in Washington State as a Family Nurse Practitioner. She’s logged over 1800 clinical hours, including a six-month primary care residency at the Providence Everett Healthcare Clinic. Her focus continues to be relationship-centered care, innovative health delivery systems and integrating complementary and alternative medicine into public health primary care.
She balances her understanding of allopathic medicine with 1000+ hours of Ayurvedic training with Dr. Vasant Lad in Albuquerque, New Mexico (2000-2001), and Pune, India (2005), as well as training in a number of other modalities including Yoga, Reiki, Re-evaluation Counseling and Functional Medicine. She emerged with sound convictions that health and contentment are possible for each of us, that authentic relationships and attention to a clean environment, both internally and externally, account for much of this, and that we start healing from whatever shoes in which we currently stand.
