About Bryant Ward, MD
I'm a native North Carolinian, I grew up in Hendersonville where I spent my youth enjoying Western North Carolina’s forests, becoming an Eagle Scout. I moved to Chapel Hill for my undergraduate degree in biology and met my wife. After UNC we moved further east and completed medical school at Brody School of Medicine (East Carolina University), which is renowned for training primary care doctors to work in rural medicine. My residency was at the Mountain Area Health Education (MAHEC) in Asheville, NC which is known for training physicians in broad-spectrum family medicine. After my residency, my wife, who is a doctor of public health and I moved to Togo, West Africa where I worked at a small mission hospital with Samaritan’s Purse.
We moved to Boone in 2017, where I’ve worked as a hospitalist (a doctor employed by the hospital to take care of people while they are admitted to the hospital) at Watauga Medical Center (UNC Appalachian).
The Ward Family: Bryant, Rachel, Jasper, Peter, Laurel and Joseph
Foundations for Valle Health
A traditional medical education involves a lot of “basic science,” followed by two years of clinical rotations. At that point you become a doctor. Finally, it culminates with a residency (training) program in a particular specialty. The idea is that we learn the reason for doing things, then we learn how to apply that knowledge correctly.
I am the first healthcare provider in my family. I didn’t grow up around lots of doctors. My parents took our doctors’ at their word. I was an eager learner in medical school, and I mostly did the same with my professors. I did very well, graduated in the top of my class and entered the specialty and specific training program of my choice. I worked hard and saw lots of fruit from my labor. I helped a lot of people get better.
Through the COVID pandemic I watched people who would not have previously been categorized as particularly vulnerable die. I realized that my conception of “sick” and “well” was lacking. Obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance - even without known diabetes were such powerful predictors for severe COVID infections. I started to read more from what was considered the fringes of medicine about nutrition, lifestyle medicine, and longevity. I discovered a new layer of knowledge that can change my patients’ lives - alter their trajectory from a life shortened by premature death and worsened by chronic disease.
Concurrently I became more serious about my personal diet. I confronted my sugar addiction and the abundance of processed food in my diet. I was astounded by the result. This snowballed into a passion for learning all that I could about wellness and longevity.
My job as a hospitalist was to care for people already too sick to survive outside the hospital. Unfortunately most people leave the hospital still debilitated and with all the same risks for having another serious illness in the near future. The most common reasons for admission to the hospital: heart attacks and strokes are decades in the making. The acute event that brings patients to the hospital is really just a symptom of a chronic disease. A heart attack represents one artery that became critically blocked, but many more are in similar disrepair.
I want to shift my focus to preventing those acute problems. I believe there are reasonable and reliable ways to markedly decrease the risk of the major causes of death. The process is one that begins to pay dividends immediately - with more energy, strength, mental clarity and peace of mind.
“I discovered a new layer of knowledge that can change my patients’ lives - alter their trajectory from a life shortened by premature death and worsened by chronic disease.”
— Bryant Ward, MD, Valle Health