A 33-year-old Santa Cruz native with a background in alternative medicine became the Coastal Health Alliance’s newest medical doctor this month. Gabriel Klapman, the son of an M.D. and a body worker, came “highly recommended for his degree of intelligence and compassion,” said Steven Siegel, the health alliance’s C.E.O. “His life experience and affinity for whole-person care and community-based health make him a perfect fit for West Marin.” Dr. Klapman studied neuroscience at Pomona College before attending the University of California Los Angeles’s School of Medicine. There, he lived in Venice Beach and taught yoga. He did his residency at Santa Rosa Family Medicine, then worked for One Medical Group in Berkeley before stumbling upon the job opening at the C.H.A. He was familiar with the area (he had a body craniosacral session with Point Reyes Station’s Asia Wong last year) and he married his wife, Sara Granovetter, in Olema in 2016. “We always had it in our minds to head out to West Marin,” he said. Community was another draw: “It’s old wisdom: humans do well in that setting.” He said that in 2006, he traveled to a rural village in the Peruvian Altiplano to help establish a medical post and waste collection program. The experience left a lasting impression. “I learned more from them than they did from me,” he said. “They had such a good life living in a village; I saw village life as an amazing thing with strong community support. They have to rebuild their house every other year out of adobe mud—and they’re truly happy people to the core. When I returned home, I was sitting outside of Costco and thought: I really need to get to work.” In West Marin, Dr. Klapman will be able to use his training in Feldenkrais-based healing work, which integrates skeletal and nervous systems for healthy movement, and meld Western and Eastern medicines. “Western medicine is good for a lot of things, but not for something like a chronic issue,” he said. “If somebody comes in with a chronic issue, I can use a different lens like herbalism or Chinese acupuncture. Integrative health is a new field and a lifelong learning process; every patient teaches me and I can grow. And it’s so cool that the Point Reyes community is craving that and wants it.”