Dr. Daphne Miller
Author of The Jungle Effect: The Healthiest Diets From Around the World
Daphne Miller, MD is a family physician, writer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. In 2000 she founded Whole family MD, San Francisco’s first integrative primary care practice, where she still cares for patients across the lifespan.
Part clinician, part ecologist, and part anthropologist, Miller approaches medicine with the idea that opportunities for health and healing are found not only in the medical system but in such unexpected places as home kitchens, school gardens, community organizations, spiritual centers, farms, and nature trails. Throughout her career, her teaching, writing, and advocacy work has reflected this perspective.
In her latest book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing (William Morrow, 2013), Miller discovers how learning from sustainable farmers can make her a better doctor. Her first book, the Jungle Effect (Harper Collins 2008), a Northern California Bestseller, chronicles her voyages to areas around the world that are still relatively free of modern chronic diseases. Miller is a regular contributor to the Health section of the Washington Post and has been interviewed and profiled in a wide range of publications and media outlets, including the New York Times, O Magazine, Harvard Medical Magazine, Vogue, the Michael Krasny Show and the Dr Oz
Show. She has spoken in such venues as Google Headquarters, the Yale Ideas Festival, the Commonwealth Club, Chubu Hospital in Okinawa Japan, and PINC in the Netherlands.
Miller is a nationally recognized leader in the Healthy Parks, Healthy People initiative, an effort spearheaded by the National Parks Service to build linkages between our medical system and our park system in order to reintegrate human, environmental, and ecological health. Her 2009 Washington Post article “Take a Hike and Call Me in the Morning†is widely credited with sparking “nature prescriptions,†a concept that is rapidly gaining traction across the United States.
A graduate of Brown University where she majored in Health and Society, Miller received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency and NIH-funded research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She was a Bravewell Fellow at the University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine, where she continues to teach as a visiting professor. She also serves as an advisor to a number of non-profits, including the Institute of the Golden Gate, Education Outside, and the Edible Schoolyard Foundation.
Miller lives in Berkeley, California, with her architect husband, Ross Levy, and two teenagers, Arlen and Emet. Most days after work she can be found walking in Claremont Canyon or tending to vegetables and fruit trees in her garden.
