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Stabilizing the Nervous System.
Personalizing the Taper.
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MD – Albany Medical College
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Residency – UNC Chapel Hill
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MPH – Johns Hopkins University
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MS – Albert Einstein College of Medicine
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IFM Certified Practitioner (IFMCP)
Training & Credentials:
Affiliations & Memberships:
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Alliance for Addiction Solutions – Board Member
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Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices – Board Member
Valsa S. Madhava, MD, MPH, MS, IFMCP
Board-Certified Internist | Board-Certified Addiction Medicine Physician | IFM-Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner
Dr. Valsa Madhava, MD, MPH, MS, IFMCP, is a board-certified Internist, Addiction Medicine physician, and Functional Medicine practitioner with formal training in clinical research.
She earned her medical degree from Albany Medical College, completed her Internal Medicine residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins University (MPH) and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (MS in Clinical Research Methods). She is certified in functional medicine through the Institute for Functional Medicine.
Dr. Madhava directs two specialized private practices—Brain Body Medical and The Benzo Taper Doctor—focused on complex nervous-system destabilization and psychotropic medication withdrawal. Her work applies a systems-based understanding of stress biology, integrating neuroendocrine and autonomic physiology with individualized tapering strategies for patients with refractory or high-risk withdrawal syndromes.
Her work emphasizes restoring physiologic regulation during withdrawal by addressing dysregulation across the five domains the framework describes.
In 2025, Dr. Madhava authored an original study published on medRxiv introducing the Five-Axis Stress Biology Framework™, a clinical and educational model for organizing the broad, overlapping symptom patterns reported during benzodiazepine withdrawal. Her research examines how withdrawal symptoms overlap across multiple areas of brain–body regulation and identifies biological questions for further study.
Citation: Madhava V. Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Symptom Clusters: Distinct Phenotypes with Treatment Implications. medRxiv 2025; doi:10.1101/2025.10.07.25336923
(The 2025 preprint used a rule-based framework to organize symptom reports. A revised analysis presents those categories as exploratory clinical summaries rather than distinct phenotypes, and further analysis of overlapping symptom organization is in preparation).
“Recovery is not a matter of willpower or dose alone. It depends on the demands the nervous system is managing and the capacity it has to meet them.”
To learn more about working directly with Dr. Madhava,
Earlier Talks and Interviews
These materials reflect earlier perspectives prior to the formal development of the Five-Axis Stress Biology Framework.
