About ➜ About Interior Medicine

About Interior Medicine

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 mission, story, and philosophy here, if you’re interested.

About Interior Medicine

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.

How I Fulfill My Mission

While there are incredible resources for healthier design on the commercial 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 people face too often in the “non-toxic” world. I also do it to disentangle eco-friendly from human-healthy, which are commonly confused, and unfortunately not yet the same thing.

I 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, metal bed frames transmitting EMFs, 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.

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!

If someone had described my website to me 15 years ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes. Here’s what changed, in five acts:

I grew up skeptical and relatively conventional, suspicious of organic food, natural cleaning sprays, and anything else that could be considered “fussy.” But, my mind started changing when I saw how invisible molecules could change lives, working at the local pharmacy as a high school student. Specifically, I saw that microscopic chemicals in anti-depressant pills could change people’s moods. To learn more, I read Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert, and I 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.