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About Meg
Hi! I’m Dr. Meg Christensen. I founded Interior Medicine in 2021. My mission is to help prevent disease by promoting healthier home environments.
I am a licensed, board-certified Naturopathic Physician, have been WELL AP credentialed, hold a Healthier Materials and Sustainable Buildings certificate, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry and Biophysics.
I’m as serious about humor, balance, and perspective as I am about non-toxic materials, research, and transparency.
You can read a little (or a lot) more about my philosophy, story, and mission here, if you’re interested.
Interior Medicine is a mission-driven, woman-owned wellness company dedicated to preventing disease by promoting healthier home environments.
The average American spends 90% of their time indoors. We tend to think we’re separate from our homes, but the opposite is true: we constantly inhale, ingest, and absorb the air, light, water, and materials around us.
This near-constant contact makes the built environment a powerful but overlooked part of preventive medicine, and through Interior Medicine, my goal is to change that.
About Interior Medicine
How I Fulfill My Mission
While there are incredible resources for healthier design on the commerical scale, like through the International Well Building Institute, International Living Future Institute, and others, few high-quality resources exist for residential spaces— AKA, people furnishing their own homes.
I find healthier design for the home, then for many items, I rate them using consistent scales that keep me unbiased. I do this to reduce the overwhelm, misinformation, and healthwashing that consumers face too often in the “non-toxic” world. I also do it to disentangle eco-friendly from human-healthy, which are often confused. Learn more about this here.
I have learning resources about healthier homes, and link to research articles on nearly every page in my shop to give you the highest quality, evidence-based information that often debunks popular myths (like plants purifying the air or PEVA being super toxic, for example).
Finally, I make sure that my approach is balanced, practical, and optimistic. I believe that being perfectionistic, rigid, or stirring up unnecessary fear causes people to shut down and tune out— and I want to achieve the opposite of that.
If someone had described my website to me 15 years ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes. Here’s what changed, in five short acts.
I grew up in a skeptical and relatively conventional household, where we were generally suspicious of organic food, natural cleaning sprays, and anything else that could be considered “fussy.” I started to understand how invisible molecules could change lives as a high school student when I was working at the local pharmacy— specifically, I saw that microscopic chemicals in anti-depressant pills could change people’s moods. I read Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert to learn more, and was hooked. Until then, I had thought I wanted to be an Interior Architect, but I decided to major in Biochemistry and Biophysics instead. Spending four years learning about tiny molecules is likely what makes the abstract “toxins” more life-like for me to this day.
My Story
While in my last term of undergrad, I learned in an environmental medicine class about pet birds dying when people cooked with non-stick Teflon pans. Teflon is made of PFAS, and when PFAS were released into the air, the birds inhaled them and died early. It was thought, even back then in 2007 (!), that PFAS may also be carcinogenic to humans (which of course, now we know they are). Just after graduating, while shopping for groceries one evening, I saw a non-stick Teflon pan with a pink Breast Cancer Awareness sticker on it, the pan company promising to donate some amount of the cost to cancer research. I was shocked, and did the stop - head tilt - brow furrow sequence. That was when I understood that most companies don’t consider our health when they make products, and that some deliberately mislead customers into thinking their products are healthier than they are. I didn’t know what to do with this new information in the moment, but it felt like a bookmarked memory I’d eventually figure out.
At that same time, I was studying for the MCAT and working as a clinical research coordinator at the hospital. After a short conversation with an elderly patient recovering from a stroke in the ICU (he was widowed and mostly ate frozen dinners) the physician I was with prescribed Plavix, a blood thinning medication. Which is good!! But for weeks afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about the patient’s loneliness and his microwave meals, both of which are stroke risk factors. I thought that drugs just weren’t enough, and this experience slightly opened my mind about naturopathic medicine (then I learned that Naturopathic Doctors were licensed and board-certified primary care physicians that could prescribe a full formulary of medications, which was the ultimate mind-changer.) I wanted to find a way to prevent strokes from happening, and learn a more holistic way to treat them if they did, so I applied to NUNM and became a naturopathic doctor.
After graduating, I was working in oncology at another hospital, this time helping people donate their bone marrow and stem cells to strangers with cancer. While there, I learned that early-onset cancer was becoming more and more common, and that researchers were finally warming up to the idea it might be related to environmental toxins. I also learned that less than 10% of cancer research funding in the US is used for prevention trials. When I was curious if we could participate in the few that did exist, I learned the trials generally didn’t pay well— focusing on new immunotherapies and chemotherapy combinations brought in more money. I get it, we all have bills to pay, even hospitals, but that concept made me so mad. I’m not “anti-Big Pharma” — it saves lives. A full range of treatment options, and innovation, are incredibly important. But, I imagine if we invested as much into cancer prevention research as we did treatment, we’d save a lot of lives that way, too.
In the evenings during that time, I was taking online classes in Architecture and Interior Design. It was 2020 and lockdown gave me time to wonder about my Ghost Ship— the alternative life where I was an Interior Architect. It was fun, but while choosing materials for one of my design projects, I noticed that stain-proof couch upholstery was made with PFAS, just like that Teflon pan was. I wondered if I could more effectively do my small part to help prevent cancer by choosing a couch made without these carcinogens for my (imaginary) client, rather than waiting for preventive research to become more lucrative. The more I learned, the more I was convinced I might be on to something. I started Interior Medicine in early 2021 as an evening hobby. Since then, it’s become a (more than) full-time endeavor— thanks to people like you— and I plan to keep improving and growing it as long as possible.
I take the role of the environment’s impact on health very seriously, and I think that environmental toxin avoidance is now part of a healthy life. At the same time, I do not fear toxins, I don’t think that avoiding them is the solution to every problem, and I don’t think that every single one will harm you.
I approach nutrition and exercise the same way, and maybe you do, too: it’s important to eat healthy foods as often as you can, and move your body regularly, but a “perfect” diet or exercise regimen are not only unattainable, the stress of aiming for perfection also ends up causing harm to your health.
The only difference between these examples and toxin avoidance is that regular exercise and healthy nutrition are long-established pillars of health, whereas the problems around environmental toxins are still relatively new. We’ve only been in this situation for a few decades — PFAS were invented in the late 1930s, and we only started suspecting they weren’t good for us in the early 2000s. In 2023, we finally reached a fever-pitch around how bad they are, and it’s generated both fear and its equal and opposite reaction— “oh, relax.”
I genuinely believe that most unhealthy products — like a couch with PFAS-coated upholstery — will not, on their own, cause you irreversible harm. However, too many products and materials use this line of reasoning— “levels of X are low enough that it will not cause harm.” When everything in your house has a low level of something harmful, it adds up. I believe our bodies are resilient and have effective detoxification systems, but they are overloaded by exposures to harmful products in our homes and indoor air pollution, just as they are by the PFAS in our waterways and the smog in the air outside of our homes.
I walk the line between “oh, relax” and “toxins are terrifying” daily, and carefully — I want to convince skeptics that this stuff matters, and feel it’s important to raise awareness. At the same time, I don’t want to generate excess fear amongst those who are already concerned. I aim to strike a similar tone to the major institutions, universities, and research groups that are taking environmental toxins seriously — they generally have a level-headed approach that doesn’t veer into fear or extremes. I think there is a rational, “Middle Way” of addressing the toxin situation we’re in until it becomes as standard as good nutrition or exercise. I think this can often be best done with a little humor, and I aim to embody a kind, humorous, balanced way both on my website, and in every interaction I have.
My Philosophy is Balance
About My Language
A quick word about how I use the terms non-toxic, chemical-free, and toxin:
I understand that there is no agreed-upon definition of the term non-toxic, and that everything, even water, is made of chemicals, so nothing is truly chemical-free. Likewise, I’m aware that toxin refers to a natural substance like a plant poison or venom, whereas toxicant is a more accurate term for the chemicals in products that have a negative health impact. I choose to use these words anyway because they are currently the most culturally agreed-upon, descriptive, and accessible terms that allow people to find the information they are seeking. Some people really care about this terminology, so I’m letting you know!
