Hello,

My name is Christen Pirkle Subbiah, and I am the founder of Astoria. I am also a mom, a wife, and a board- certified internal medicine physician with over a decade of experience. My journey to becoming a physician started at an early age. My youngest brother was born with a rare genetic condition that was extremely difficult for doctors to diagnose. My family found ourselves trying our absolute hardest to navigate a very scary and overwhelming medical system for years to get the answers we needed. We will never forget the doctors along the way that helped us through that process. It was that journey that inspired me to go to medical school. I wanted to be a guide and a dedicated advocate for other people as they made their own healthcare journeys. A Georgia native, I graduated from The Georgia Institute of Technology and then went on to graduate from The Medical College of Georgia. I completed my internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After finishing my initial training, I worked in primary care, the VA system, and hospital settings. I was so excited to be helping people but quickly became disillusioned with our healthcare system. Over the last few decades, doctors have found themselves pressured to see more and more people with less and less time. The result has become fractured care with very poor results. People are given a diagnosis and pills and told to follow up. Lifestyle modification is always mentioned but rarely is there time or resources available to explain what a healthy lifestyle would actually look like. While there is, of course, a place for traditional medicines, I started to realize that most of the medicines we were using just treated symptoms of disease. Little time was spent figuring out what was actually causing certain ailments, and less time was spent trying to prevent these ailments from even starting. So, I started to look for another way. I began to expand my knowledge about holistic medicine. I studied the philosophies of acupuncture, meditation, yoga, functional medicine, and integrative medicine. I decided to practice medicine in a different way. I wanted to start something new.

I want Astoria to be a place where people can find answers and restore their well-being. We all need a safe haven: a place where we can go for relief, serenity, and a little bit of contentment. A place where we can be our true selves and feel heard. I hope that Astoria is that for you.

With love and gratitude,

Christen Subbiah