Your Integrated Care Team

Each member of the team focuses on a different part of your health — helping you understand medical decisions, supporting how your body is functioning, calming and regulating the nervous system, guiding day-to-day habits, and keeping your care organized and coordinated. Rather than working in isolation, the team collaborates continuously to share observations, align strategies, and adjust care as circumstances evolve. This integration reduces fragmentation and helps patients move through complex medical decisions with greater clarity and stability.

Matthew Lederman, MD

Dr. Matthew Lederman is a board-certified Internal Medicine physician who specializes in helping individuals navigate complex and high-stakes medical decisions, particularly during serious or life-altering illness. He works with patients to synthesize competing recommendations, interpret evolving data, and align treatment strategies with their values and long-term goals. Dr. Lederman combines evidence-based medicine, lifestyle strategies, and nervous system support. He understands that ongoing stress and relationship strain can affect the immune system, sleep quality, metabolism, and a person’s ability to think clearly when facing important medical decisions. He is also a Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC)—one of the few physicians in the United States with this certification— and helps patients and families communicate more clearly, make difficult decisions together, and reduce conflict and stress during challenging medical situations.

Medical Strategist & Care Quarterback: Fear can narrow how we see our options, and decisions made in that state can sometimes lead to regret later. Dr. Lederman works directly with you to break down staging and pathology clearly, compare treatment options objectively, map survival versus quality-of-life tradeoffs, prepare structured oncology questions, sequence decisions strategically, review labs and records as variables shift, and protect you from hype or unvetted claims. As a board-certified internist and Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC), he also helps you recognize the values, fears, and needs shaping your decisions so your medical strategy reflects what matters most to you. He supports difficult conversations with loved ones—including children—and helps reduce the stress that can build within families during serious illness. When decisions become clearer, stress in the body often settles as well. This approach helps people avoid unnecessary treatment, panic-driven decisions, or regret that can arise when choices are made under overwhelming pressure.

Alona Pulde, MD

Dr. Alona Pulde is a board-certified practitioner of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and a Family Practice physician with expertise in integrative, lifestyle, and nutritional medicine. She brings together Traditional Chinese Medicine and evidence-based Western care, using a whole-systems approach that looks at metabolism, hormones, inflammation, and how chronic stress affects the body. Her work focuses on helping the body return to a more stable state so medical treatments and lifestyle changes can work more effectively. She also has particular expertise in women’s health and in how relationships influence health and healing, helping people reconnect with their body’s signals and their deeper needs, express them clearly, and maintain a grounded sense of autonomy while staying connected to those around them. Across decades of clinical practice, she has observed that when the body’s stress systems settle, the body becomes more stable, relational strain softens, clarity increases, symptoms often ease, and people regain a grounded sense of agency in their health.

Internal Terrain & Biological Stabilization Specialist: Cancer develops within a complex biological environment inside the body. Dr. Pulde focuses on strengthening that environment by stabilizing the systems that influence healing — including inflammation and nutrition, blood sugar regulation, sleep depth, movement, hormonal balance, and recovery cycles. As both a Family Practice physician and a board-certified practitioner of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, she bridges Traditional Chinese Medicine with evidence-based Western care to understand how stress, metabolism, inflammation, hormones, and relationship strain interact within the body. Rather than chasing individual symptoms, she helps restore stability across the body’s systems while also supporting patients in reconnecting with their needs, communicating them clearly, and maintaining healthy boundaries during medically challenging periods. As inflammation settles and sleep improves, the body’s defenses strengthen, treatment tolerance often improves, energy stabilizes, and the body’s capacity to heal increases — a process she refers to as terrain recalibration.

Mark Ideta

Mark Ideta is a Trauma and Connection–Focused Life Coach who helps individuals navigate emotional pain, relationship strain, and the stress responses that arise during difficult life circumstances. His work focuses on helping people develop a healthier relationship with their emotional experience so that fear, grief, anger, and shame no longer create inner conflict or paralysis. Instead of suppressing difficult emotions, he helps clients understand and move through them in ways that restore clarity, resilience, and self-compassion. Mark integrates approaches such as Internal Family Systems, Coherence Therapy, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Hakomi, somatic awareness, and Nonviolent Communication to support emotional healing and relational repair. He holds a degree in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Nervous System Regulation & Emotional Integration Specialist: Unprocessed fear, grief, anger, and relationship conflict can keep the body stuck in survival mode — increasing stress hormones, disrupting sleep, raising inflammation, weakening immune function, and making it harder to follow through with treatment plans. Mark helps people calm and regulate their nervous system while learning how to safely process difficult emotions rather than pushing them away. His work supports clients in moving through trauma, reducing inner conflict, stabilizing emotional responses, and navigating relationship stress more skillfully. As the nervous system settles, people often experience greater clarity, steadier energy, and a stronger ability to carry out the decisions and health strategies they’ve chosen. Nervous system stability is a critical foundation for healing.

Lisa Rice

Lisa Rise is a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBHWC) with advanced training in Traditional Chinese Medicine, nutrition counseling, yoga instruction, and plant-based culinary arts. Her work focuses on helping people turn health recommendations into sustainable daily habits, especially through food systems that support stable blood sugar, balanced inflammation, steady energy, and overall resilience. Drawing on her combined background in coaching, nutrition, and culinary education, she helps clients build simple, nourishing routines that support the body’s healing and are realistic to maintain during challenging periods of life.

Food Systems & Implementation Architect: Knowing what to eat is not the same as being able to do it consistently. During cancer, being told to overhaul your nutrition can feel overwhelming while you are also managing appointments, treatment side effects, fatigue, and uncertainty. She helps translate the health strategy into daily routines by building practical food systems that support stable blood sugar, balanced inflammation, steady energy, and recovery. She guides clients in organizing their kitchens, simplifying meal preparation, adapting nutrition during treatment side effects, and overcoming real-world obstacles without losing momentum. When life already feels full, she breaks change into manageable steps so the strategies that matter actually happen. A well-supported kitchen helps the body stay steadier during treatment, and consistent daily habits strengthen the internal environment of the body where healing takes place.

Jessica Maruri

Jessica Maruri brings nearly a decade of experience supporting physicians and patients within complex clinical environments. She previously worked for eight years alongside Drs. Alona Pulde and Matthew Lederman at the Whole Foods Market Medical & Wellness Center, where she served as a Department and Clinical Assistant supporting patient care coordination, clinical workflow, and communication between providers and patients. A graduate of Brandeis University, Jessica has worked in the medical field since 2016 and most recently served as a Medical Assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. Through these roles, she developed deep experience managing medical records, coordinating follow-ups, tracking clinical information, and helping ensure continuity of care. Her work focuses on maintaining clear communication, organized systems, and reliable follow-through so that patients and care teams can navigate complex medical situations with greater clarity and support.

Care Coordination & Continuity Specialist: Cancer can quickly overwhelm a person’s ability to keep track of everything. Jessica helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks. She tracks labs, imaging, and follow-ups, coordinates communication across the care team, captures emerging concerns between sessions, routes questions to the right provider quickly, and keeps information organized during fast-moving periods. When emotional overwhelm makes it hard to stay organized, she helps maintain continuity so important details are not missed. In many ways, she serves as the connective tissue of the team — helping everything stay aligned and moving forward. When the logistical burden is reduced and care remains coordinated, stress often decreases and patients can focus their energy on healing rather than managing complexity.