She’s been on the front line twice.
Once in a war zone. Once in a hospital at the height of COVID. Both taught her the same thing: people don’t break because they’re weak. Systems break them.
Dr. Remina Panjwani, DO, is an internal medicine physician, a U.S. Air Force veteran and the founder of a renowned concierge functional medicine practice in Dallas–Fort Worth. She deployed to Baghdad in 2004 with Air Force security forces, then used her military service to put herself through college and medical school. Her first job out of residency, as a hospitalist, began at the onset of COVID. What she saw there led her to leave insurance-driven medicine and create Dr. Remina’s DEPLOYMENT METHOD™, a physician-led approach to burnout, hormones and resilience. She is a TEDx speaker, the author of Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within, and the host of the Dr. Remina Panjwani Show.
A promise made in a bunker.
She enlisted in the Air Force at 18, signed up for a desk job, and was told she would probably never deploy. A few months in, the unit needed someone to fill a slot. She went to Baghdad International Airport with security forces. She was still a teenager.
Rocket fire was routine. One day a rocket hit a bank of gas tanks close by, and the explosion sent her into a bunker ringed with sandbags. She remembers exactly what she promised.
“Help me get home safely. And when I get home, I'm not going to play small anymore. I have a dream of becoming a doctor, and I won't let anyone stop me.”
She also learned something she didn’t have words for yet. Under sustained pressure, the strongest-looking people weren’t always the ones who held. The ones who held had something to hold on to: a routine, a community, a way to write it down and keep going.
She kept the promise.
The Air Force was the first place anyone told her she was fast, sharp and capable. When superiors told her to slow down, she didn’t. She used her service to pay for a B.S. in nutrition at the University of Texas at Austin, an M.S. in medical science at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, and medical school at the University of Pikeville Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine.
“People told me to slow down, to dim my light. I didn't argue. I earned my degrees and let the work speak.”
She trained in internal medicine, the specialty that sees the whole adult patient, and she became the first in her family to finish college.
The second front line.
Her first job out of residency, as a hospitalist, began just as COVID arrived. She cared for patients on the hospital floors and in the ICU while the rules changed week to week.
“In the military, you had a weapon and you knew what you were fighting. In COVID, you didn’t know what you were up against.”
The medicine was hard. What she couldn’t accept was the system around it: decisions about care made by people who had never practiced medicine, metrics built to move patients out, and doctors pushed past their limits with no one asking what it cost them.
She built what the system couldn’t.
She recognized the pattern from Baghdad: people run past their limits, patched up and sent back in. American medicine is superb at the emergency, the heart attack and the stroke, and has almost no time for the years of strain that lead to them.
“Where is modern medicine fundamentally wrong? Letting insurance drive everything.”
So she stepped away from insurance-driven medicine and built a concierge practice with time to look at the whole person: advanced labs, hormones, sleep, stress, history, trauma and environment. That work became Dr. Remina’s DEPLOYMENT METHOD™: Recon, Deploy, Return. No blind deployments, safety before intervention, and no one left in the field.
See how the Method works →“Burnout isn’t a weakness. It’s a system problem.”
Exhaustion is information. The question is what’s producing it, not how to push through it.
“We’re not machines. Recovery is where the body recalibrates.”
Performance that lasts is built on recovery, not in spite of it. That goes for people and for the organizations they work in.
“Most physicians aren’t trained in trauma. They don’t recognize it, and most won’t admit it.”
Untreated trauma shows up in the body. Her care starts with a trauma-informed assessment, and she refers out for specialized therapy when it’s needed.
443K
Followers across socialTEDx
Speaker1 BOOK
Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within32 EPISODES
Dr. Remina Panjwani Show- Board-certified in internal medicine
- Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, University of Pikeville Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine
- M.S., Medical Science, University of North Texas Health Science Center
- B.S., Nutrition, The University of Texas at Austin
- Functional medicine training, Institute for Functional Medicine
- U.S. Air Force veteran, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Baghdad, 2004
- Dropping Bombs with Brad Lea
- The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
- TEDx
She’s a mom first when the clinic closes. She grew up on the basketball court, where she regularly beat the boys, and she still believes in practice, teammates and showing up. She’s based in Dallas–Fort Worth, where she builds community with physicians and entrepreneurs who are doing medicine differently.
Brands she can stand behind.
Dr. Remina partners with a small number of brands and sponsors whose products she uses, recommends and would put in front of her own patients. With close to half a million followers across social, a podcast and a growing speaking calendar, she is selective by design. Every partnership is held to the same standard as her medicine: evidence, integrity, and alignment with the principles she practices by.
Partnerships are always disclosed.
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