Megan Mescher-Cox started planning a career in medicine as a child, when she would follow her father on his rounds at Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo. But once she’d achieved her dream, she found it wasn’t everything she’d envisioned.

“After I started practicing, I got really burned out, because I thought I wasn’t really helping people,” she said. “I was just watching them get sicker and sicker.”

So Mescher-Cox reoriented her practice around wellness. She was trained as an osteopathic physician, a discipline that focuses on wellness and whole-person care, and she was recently certified as a lifestyle medicine specialist.

She specializes in patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, dementia and certain cancers, and she helps them live with their conditions and improve their long-term health.

“It’s about how to keep people healthy and work on healthy habits: how we eat, how we move, how we rest, not too much stress, good relationships, so we can get healthy at the core,” she said. 

Her practice, Identity Medical Group, was acquired last year by St. John’s Regional Medical Center and she now works out of the Oxnard hospital.

Mescher-Cox holds a bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta and a medical degree from the Kansas City University School of Medicine. She is on the board of KidStream, and also started the Ventura chapter of “Walk With a Doc,” a program in which she and other physicians take walks with people and discuss their health.

• Last show/podcast you binged? Grace and Frankie.

• Dream vacation? Costa Rica.