Author Event! Lucy McBride, MD with Elise Loehnen

If you’ve ever left a doctor’s appointment with a prescription but no plan, a stack of “normal” lab results but no answers, or the feeling that no one actually listened, you’re not alone.

In Beyond the Prescription, Dr. Lucy McBride explains why: Modern health care prioritizes transactions over relationships, screens over stories, and data over context. Into that void has stepped a massive wellness industry offering seductive promises of control—“optimize,” “detox,” “biohack”—often without evidence and with real risks.

McBride refuses the false choice between conventional medicine and wellness culture. Instead, she offers a practical middle path built on health agency: the capacity to make informed decisions aligned with your values while advocating effectively for support. This book isn’t prescriptive or perfectionist. It’s a framework to help you navigate uncertainty, misinformation, and the realities of your life.

At the center is a five-step process that moves you from redefining health on your own terms, through mapping your full health ecosystem and understanding how you personally approach care, to asking for help more effectively and making peace with what you cannot control.

The result is a practical, evidence-based guide for anyone navigating the question too rarely asked in health care: Are you okay?

Lucy McBride, MD, is a primary care physician and co-founder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington, DC. For over twenty-five years, she has practiced evidence-based, relationship-centered medicine. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Medical School, with a master's degree in Pharmacology from Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed her internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She writes the weekly newsletter Are You Okay? and hosts the podcast Beyond the Prescription. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today. She has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, advocating for a holistic, patient-centered approach to health. A native Washingtonian, she lives in DC with her husband and is the proud mother of three grown children. You can find her work at lucymcbride.com.

Elise Loehnen is the host of Pulling the Thread, the author of the New York Times bestseller On Our Best Behavior, and co-author of True and False Magic: A Tools Workbook with Phil Stutz. She has co-written twelve books, five of which were New York Times bestsellers. She was the chief content officer of goop, and co-hosted The goop Podcast and The goop Lab on Netflix. Previously, she was the editorial projects director of Condé Nast Traveler. Elise lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.