Dr. Sulagna Misra, MD, BCMAS, is the Founding Physician at Misra Wellness™️, a Direct Primary Care (DPC) medical practice specializing in weight loss, men’s health, integrative medicine, primary care, and aesthetic medicine.
With certifications in Integrated Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Aesthetic Medicine, Dr. Misra offers comprehensive medical and aesthetic services. Raised in New York City, she practiced at Mount Sinai Hospital before transitioning to serve as an Integrative Medicine practitioner and Laboratory Director in Midtown Manhattan.
Now based in Encino, California, Dr. Misra is passionate about patient advocacy, bringing the doctor and patient back together, and promoting health and care in healthcare.
She advocates for price transparency and provides personalized consultations, emphasizing patient education and continuous communication, guided by the tagline “Feel, Heal, Reveal,” to support patients on their journey towards optimal health and wellness.
Success Story
Life isn’t always as it seems. Sometimes, it takes twists and turns that you least expect, even when you come from a good family and education.
This was certainly the case for Dr. Sulagna Misra, founder of Misra Wellness, whose journey defied conventional expectations.
Born into an Indian family, Dr. Misra found herself at odds with the predetermined career path laid out before her. Despite her upbringing and educational opportunities, she felt drawn to unconventional pursuits, rebelling against the expectations placed upon her.
However, life had its own plans for Dr. Misra, guiding her through unexpected detours that ultimately led her to a profession she had never envisioned for herself. It was a journey marked by soul-searching, compromise, and unforeseen challenges — one that would ultimately shape Dr. Misra’s path toward her true calling in Direct Primary Care (DPC).
A winding road to medicine
From an early age, Dr. Misra’s path seemed destined to veer from the traditional. She was an artist, a singer, and a dancer but was expected to follow a predetermined career as a biochemist but had different passions percolating inside her creative, free-spirited mind.
“I pushed back because I didn’t want to follow that route,” Dr. Misra recalls of her mother’s preferences. While she explored outlets like art exhibitions and operatic singing, a deeper fascination with venues like the FBI and the Navy also took hold.
After a year of soul-searching and even dabbling in real estate, Dr. Misra found herself almost inadvertently entering a Caribbean medical school. It was an untraditional start — a compromise of sorts with her mother. “I made a deal that I’d give it a shot, and if it didn’t click, I’d pursue my career in music production and singing and explore higher education in other areas,” she says.
The winding journey that led Dr. Misra to that pivotal moment is a testament to her unique spirit. At each turn where her path could have continued its creative course, life seemed to reroute her toward an unconventional yet life-changing detour into the medical field.
It would take life-altering experiences and a tragic loss to solidify why Dr. Misra’s wavering journey into healthcare was actually quite purposeful, after all. Her early meandering was simply laying the groundwork for her to unearth her greater calling.
Catalysts for change
Dr. Misra’s first moment for embracing medicine as her true path came when she was faced with caring for her mother through an ovarian cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, learning the intricate details of diseases like cancer became a necessity rather than an academic exercise.
“I realized I needed to understand the mechanisms of cancer to support her better,” Dr. Misra explains of her mindset shift. “So I stuck with medical school, caring for my mother while juggling my studies, which was a nearly impossible feat I could not repeat. Caretaker exhaustion is very real.”
Tragedy struck again when Dr. Misra’s mother, who was also a physician in New York, passed away toward the beginning of her residency, but it was navigating this traumatic loss within the constraints of the medical training system that exposed its problematic flaws to her. “I faced another challenge when I had to use vacation time for bereavement — a system flaw that left me scrambling to balance work with major personal and community loss,” she recalls.
As Dr. Misra progressed through her residency, more life experiences unveiled the harsh realities pervading the profession she had entered somewhat haphazardly, including the unrelenting culture of having to constantly prove oneself, and the stigmatization and penalization for seeking mental health support as a physician.
“There’s also the bureaucratic hurdles and abuses that were baked into the system from the start firsthand,” Dr. Misra says, “such as replacing physicians with non-physician ‘providers’ which corporations do to try and save money but actually results in spending more.”
“It’s a system that pits us against each other, essentially allowing nurses to practice medicine without the same rigorous training,” Dr. Misra explains, “and the focus seems more on corporate and administrative profit than patient care.”
What initially began as a rebellious detour was now becoming a life’s mission to change the fundamentally broken model of healthcare delivery.
Pioneering a new vision
Faced with the sobering realities of a healthcare system prioritizing profits over patient needs, Dr. Misra decided to blaze a new trail. She established her own Direct Primary Care practice, Misra Wellness, in Los Angeles.
The DPC model allows Dr. Misra to finally achieve the work-life balance and professional fulfillment that was so lacking in her previous roles. Gone are the days of being overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid. Now, she can offer affordable, transparent pricing for quality medical care and patients get direct access to her.
“I’ve seen bills for routine lab work amounting to thousands of dollars, only to negotiate the price down to a fraction of that through DPC — sometimes as low as $150 for an entire men’s health or weight-loss panel,” Dr. Misra explains. The cost discrepancy illustrates how the current insurance-based system siphons away money that could be better spent on patient care.
However, Dr. Misra’s new vision goes beyond just restructuring her own practice model. She has become a vocal advocate for widespread reforms across the industry.
From expanding residency positions and alleviating burdensome administrative tasks to investing time and energy into educating and assisting physician colleagues with restructuring their practices and supporting through burnout, her proposed changes aim to return autonomy and financial viability to the patient and physicians’ side.
Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Misra is championing initiatives that restore the human element to healthcare and allow doctors to practice medicine focused on holistic care versus checking boxes. “We’ve long preached that without health, nothing else matters, yet the reality is starkly different,” she laments. “True healthcare is faltering, overshadowed by a system prioritizing profit over people.”
Dr. Misra’s pioneering vision puts the physician-patient relationship at the center, building trust and open communication to develop personalized care plans. It’s a radical reconceptualization of what a healthcare system should provide.
Redefining wellness
At its core, Dr. Misra’s pioneering vision for healthcare reform stems from a fundamental redefinition of what true wellness encompasses. Going beyond just physical health markers, she advocates for a more holistic approach that tends to the whole person — mind, body, and spirit.
“True wellness encompasses more than just physical activities — it must also include mental and emotional well-being,” Dr. Misra states. She references Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when explaining that superficial self-improvement is often prioritized before addressing basic foundational needs like sleep, nutrition, and safety.
A large part of cultivating authentic wellness is repairing the eroded trust in the doctor-patient relationship. Rather than viewing physicians as salespeople pushing medications or procedures, Dr. Misra wants to restore their role as trusted allies supporting long-term health goals.
“It’s crucial to rebuild this trust and foster open communication between patients and healthcare providers, emphasizing the importance of evidence-based medicine and collaborative decision-making,” she says.
Dr. Misra’s core belief is that sustainable wellness is a lifelong journey, not an instantly gratifiable destination. She is striving to reshape attitudes around self-care from the earliest educational levels.
“We must prioritize mental health and holistic well-being in school curricula, reintegrating activities that nurture intellectual and emotional development,” Dr. Misra argues. “We can instill proactive self-care habits from a young age.”
Driven by her personal mantra of “Feel, Heal, Reveal,” which represents the transformative process individuals undergo, Dr. Misra remains passionate about being a catalyst for cultural change in how society prioritizes authentic well-being over corporate prosperity. Her influential voice urges everyone to embrace ethical, human-centric healthcare.
By reshaping attitudes and dismantling systemic barriers to proactive self-care access, Dr. Misra hopes to create a wellness revolution that begins from within and reverberates outward on a generational scale.
If you would like to get in touch with Dr. Sulagna Misra or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
