Photo by Erin Nelson.
Aesthetician Shannon Powell uses the SkinPen device as she does a microneedling treatment on Sheri Lurie at Vulcan Wellness in Vestavia Hills.
Dr. Thomas Lewis said he’s always been the heavy kid.
“That goes from being embarrassed to take my shirt off at 12 years old onwards,” he said.
His entire adult life — including in medical school — he was taught that weight management was about putting down the fork and exercising more.
And that’s part of it, he said. “But if it were that simple, there wouldn’t be overweight doctors.”
Thomas Lewis said he’s not been alone in that struggle. He and some fellow physicians work at a hospital that was hit hard by COVID-19, and in late 2022, all of them were looking for help managing their weight.
“That was around September or August of last year, right around when some of the innovation in the weight loss space started to happen, and we started to reset some things for ourselves,” he said.
Their efforts got him at a normal weight for the first time in decades.
“It worked out great for us,” he said, “so we thought, ‘Do we try to bring this to other people too?’”
They soon knew the answer was yes, and he and his wife Katherine, a registered dietician, and four other partners — Brytney Cobia, MD; Carson Rowell, MD; Erin Rowell, MD; and Shannon Powell, a licensed aesthetician — opened Vulcan Wellness & Aesthetics at 2015 Kentucky Ave.
“We built a clinic around concierge weight loss,” Thomas Lewis said. “We’re bringing the new stuff into the mix.”
A typical first appointment at Vulcan Wellness involves sitting down with a physician and talking about what a person’s weight loss struggles have been, where they want to be and what their time frame is.
“We walk them through what options are out there from a medical standpoint,” Thomas Lewis said.
A lot of weight loss struggles are hormonally based, so Vulcan Wellness staff looks at medical hormone management if needed, he said. They offer FDA-approved pharmacologic therapies.
From there, “if we’re successful, people in their late 30s and 40s will have wrinkles they didn’t have before from the weight loss, so that’s why we brought in aesthetics.”
Katherine Lewis said her personal story prompted the addition of the hormone treatment component.
“I had a hysterectomy in my mid-30s, and after struggling for a while, I came to my husband and said, ‘I can’t live like this anymore,’” she said.
He began researching hormone treatments, and what he discovered “made a big difference for me personally,” she said.
She said the same goes for the other two women physicians at Vulcan Wellness — both struggled with the weight gain of having three children and having their hormones “all over the place” and not having the time to deal with it like they should.
All of them tell their stories on the Vulcan Wellness & Aesthetics Facebook page with before and after photos, Katherine Lewis said.
“Exercise has proven time and time again to help with weight maintenance but not losing weight,” she said.
New treatments help tell a person’s stomach when it’s stored enough fat, she said. “It’s a miracle.”
Thomas Lewis said he feels the same way, saying that his perspective on hormone treatments changed after he treated his wife and she felt amazing. He loves seeing the change that both of them have felt and being able to pass that along to others.
“It’s fulfilling as a doctor to be able to say this person has lost 40 pounds and because of that is living a better life,” he said.
For more information, visit vulcanwell.com.
