Sharon DeMocker

Dr. Sharon DeMocker is the kind of doctor who sits with you long enough actually to understand what's going on. She's board-trained in Family Medicine and Fellowship-trained in Integrative Medicine under Dr. Andrew Weil — but what sets her apart isn't her CV. It's that she spent years working with Veterans whose illnesses defied standard diagnosis, and she got very good at not giving up.

She's also a trail runner, a horse rider, and the founder of her own integrative clinic, which she ran for over a decade before coming to Washington, DC. That biography — rigorous training, years of independent practice, and a track record with the country's most complex cases — shapes how she practices now.

Dr. DeMocker's interest in medicine started with a research project on trauma — specifically, what happens to the body and mind in its aftermath. She was a medical student at the Medical University of South Carolina at the time, and that early curiosity about the places where conventional medicine runs short stayed with her.

Her residency in Family Medicine at the University of Virginia in Lynchburg gave her first exposure to Dr. Andrew Weil's work, which led her to pursue formal training under him at the University of Arizona — the first postdoctoral integrative medicine training program in the country. It was a small cohort, serious training, and it changed how she thought about what medicine could do.

After that, she did something most physicians don't: she built something. She founded an integrative medicine clinic near Asheville, North Carolina, and ran it for over a decade. That kind of practice — community-based, relationship-driven, genuinely long-term — taught her things that no fellowship could.

Before joining GWCIM, she served as Medical Director of the War Related Illness and Injury Study Center at the DC VA Medical Center, one of only three such centers in the country. Her team provided second-opinion consultations for Veterans with chronic, medically unexplained illnesses referred from across the eastern U.S. The work was demanding, the cases were complicated, and it required both research fluency and real clinical patience. She's carried that rigor into everything she's done since.

Dr. DeMocker sees patients for both acute and chronic concerns, with a particular strength in conditions that have been hard to name or treat. Her appointments run longer than a conventional visit — enough time to actually trace what's happened to your health, not just the most recent complaint.

Being embedded at GWCIM means she can draw on the rest of the team without making you manage that yourself. If acupuncture, IV therapy, nutrition support, or somatic work belong in your plan, it's already here. She finds that proximity genuinely useful — not as a selling point, but because integrative care only works when the pieces actually connect.

Off the clock, Dr. DeMocker is usually outside. She's an avid hiker and trail runner — often with dogs — and she also rides horses, kayaks, and gardens. There's probably a throughline between that and her approach to medicine, though she'd let you draw it yourself.