Chris Koo, BSc, MD, CCFP

Area of Study / Keywords

culinary medicine physician wellness

About

Dr. Chris Koo is the first-ever Wellness Director for the Department of Family Medicine. His mission is to explore what makes people happy and thrive in their current roles. By fostering important conversations and developing a productive culture around wellness, he hopes to empower people to develop strategies to mitigate the factors that contribute to unwellness. His target population includes physicians faculty, non-clinical faculty, community faculty, research staff, administrative staff, and learners.

Clinically, he works as a family physician at the Misericordia Family Medicine Centre. Since graduating from the UofA family medicine residency program in 2018, he has settled into full-service outpatient family medicine (minus obstetrics). He incorporates additional training into his practice, including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Gunn intramuscular stimulation (IMS) treatment, and point-of-care ultrasound (PoCUS).

He has developed an emerging interest in culinary medicine. After 5 years in clinical practice, he found that many patients continued to struggle with nutrition-related chronic disease, despite using resources that were already available. He proposes that many patients may first need to gain skills and knowledge to prepare food to achieve sustainable improvements, and this food should first-and-foremost be delicious. In pursuit of this idea, he obtained professional culinary training in 2023-2024 at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa and graduated at the top of his class with the Grand Diplôme (Cuisine and Pastry). He runs the Culinary Medicine Elective for undergraduate medical students, in which food (rather than supplements and medications) take the spotlight as a pillar of health. He also runs culinary wellness workshops for resident physicians to foster self-care, nutrition, and social well-being during residency training.

Research

Dr. Koo works with the Primary Care Alberta Provincial Pathways Unit as a primary care advisor for Edmonton Zone. This working group is a collaboration of patients, primary care teams, and specialists. It develops evidence-informed referral pathways aimed at reducing barriers between primary care and specialist care. He has personally worked on the Urology Provincial Primary Care Asymptomatic Routine Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) Testing Pathway and Urology Provincial Male LUTS Primary Care Clinical Pathway.

Teaching

Dr. Koo mentors family medicine residents as a faculty advisor at the Misericordia Community Hospital site. He also teaches across the academic curriculum in the residency program for behavioural medicine, academic day, and exam preparation.

For the undergraduate MD program, he is the faculty lead for the Culinary Medicine Elective for 1st and 2nd year undergraduate medical students. He also teaches physical examination skills, communication skills, discovery learning, and other small group learning sessions. His focus is to relate knowledge from classroom lectures and textbooks to real-world clinical applications.