Dr. Kat Toups, MD

Kat Toups, MD is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (the highest honor bestowed by the APA), Board-Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and previously boarded in Geriatric Psychiatry. She is also a Certified Practitioner with the Institute for Functional Medicine.

Dr. Toups was formerly an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at U.C. Davis, where she was the Inpatient Residency Training Director and later the founder and Medical Director of the Bay Area Research Institute, a Clinical Trials Research Center in Lafayette, California, for 12 years. After serving as the Principal Investigator on over 100 clinical trials, including 20 failed trials for Alzheimer’s medications, she realized that the elusive cure for brain and psychiatric illness was not going to be found in a pill.

In 2009, Dr. Toups attended a “Food as Medicine” conference that opened her eyes to the power of nutritional interventions and learned about Functional Medicine—a paradigm that could help patients to really get well by working to uncover and correct the root causes of their illness. She went on to complete all of the advanced training for certification at the Institute for Functional Medicine, and scores of other functional and environmental medicine trainings. Her practice is now devoted exclusively to functional medicine psychiatry and functional approaches for treating cognitive impairment and dementia.

Dr. Toups was a contributing author to the academic textbook Integrative Therapies for Depression: Redefining Models for Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention published in 2015 by CRC Press.

Dr. Toups is currently collaborating with Dr. Dale Bredesen on a prospective clinical trial using a functional medicine method to reverse mild cognitive impairment and early dementia.

She is also the author of an upcoming book, Dementia Demystified: The Definitive Guide to Resurrecting Your Brain, Reversing Cognitive Decline, and Regaining Your Memory.