Healing Beyond the Clinic: A Conversation with Beth Ricanati, MD
Where science meets tradition: a modern approach to healing outside the clinic.
From her earliest days in medicine, Beth Ricanati, MD (MED ’97), has challenged the boundaries of what it means to heal—blending science, compassion and innovation to impact lives in unexpected ways. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, she began her medical journey driven by a deep desire to advance women’s health. As an internal medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia and Cleveland Clinic, she saw firsthand that true healing often takes place beyond clinic walls. At Cleveland Clinic, she spearheaded the transformative Lifestyle 180 program, deepening her conviction that nutrition, stress management and chronic disease prevention are fundamentally intertwined.
Today, Ricanati’s approach to wellness fuses her medical expertise with the restorative tradition of bread making, guiding others to pause, reflect and discover well-being through intentional self-care. While she continues to provide essential care as a weekly volunteer at the Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles—a leading community health center and one of the nation's largest clinics for the underserved—she has also become a celebrated author.
Through her award-winning memoir, Braided: A Journey of a Thousand Challahs, and her upcoming book, The Braided Prescription: Seven Practices for Living Well from the Ancient Ritual of Making Challah (set for release September 1, 2026, and named a Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist), she has transformed the kitchen counter into a space for healing, teaching others how to "put their oxygen mask on first" through intentional self-care.
We caught up with Ricanati to discuss her journey from clinical leadership to community-focused healing, and how her CWRU education laid the foundation for her evolving career.
How did your CWRU education help shape you and your career?
As an undergraduate, I became fascinated with women’s health and the realization that I could participate in helping women, not just as a bystander at the rallies and marches that I attended, but as a hands-on change-maker. Deciding to pursue this goal by attending medical school, I chose CWRU because of its novel curriculum, which allowed me to work with a pregnant patient in my first year and later enabled me to personalize my curriculum during my third- and fourth-year clinical rotations.
During my surgical rotation, I worked with breast surgeons. During my elective rotations, I spent a month at Massachusetts General Hospital in its multidisciplinary women’s health clinic—a novelty in 1996—and another month with a psychiatrist focused on sexual health. CWRU offered, and more importantly, supported all of these opportunities, solidifying my commitment to a career in women’s health.
Beyond titles and accolades, what does a "meaningful career" look like to you?
A meaningful career…when a patient hugs me and says thank you.
A meaningful career…when a college student asks me about pursuing a career in medicine, and wants my advice.
A meaningful career…when I can stand up on an airplane and help when the call for ‘medical assistance’ comes over the loudspeaker (which I have now done five times).
A meaningful career…when I still get excited 30 years later to learn about new and exciting scientific discoveries that help my patients.
A meaningful career…when I can pivot, try new things, go in new directions and still am able to heal people.
What message would you like to share with the next generation of physicians and scientists as they begin their careers?
The details of your career cannot be known as you plan your residency, post-residency/fellowship training, first jobs, etc—life intervenes. Rather, I have found it helpful to remind myself periodically why I went into medicine in the first place—not what I might do, but why I might do it. That subtle difference has been everything—it has challenged me to constantly shift, grow and try new things, even when I had no idea where they might lead.
If you could go back to your time in Medical School, what is one piece of advice you would give yourself?
We have chosen a career that, by definition, is focused on others. However, I did not appreciate in medical school that the importance of taking care of myself is an essential part of successfully taking care of others. Of course, I went to One to One and worked out, but I didn’t “put my oxygen mask on first” as we all need to do. It’s almost impossible to take care of others without taking care of ourselves first.
What is something about your life outside of medicine that might surprise your former classmates?
I pivoted from practicing medicine full-time to serving as a volunteer physician, author and speaker. My second book, The Braided Prescription: Seven Practices for Living Well from the Ancient Ritual of Making Challah—a narrative nonfiction follow-up to my memoir, Braided: A Journey of a Thousand Challahs, will be released Sept. 1, 2026. Braided is the story of what happened to me, what I learned, and how to make meaning from the practice of an ancient ritual. In this new book, The Braided Prescription, I describe the seven practices that emerged from five years of conducting over 100 workshops around the country, and how readers can use these practices in their own lives. In both books, I write about some of my experiences in medical school and while practicing in Cleveland at Cleveland Clinic.
This pivot has taken me down a path I never expected, and in the process, I have found a new way to heal people outside of a traditional clinic setting.
