Lessons from Local Leaders:

Mike & Jeanne Poss, & Emily Ugarte

Confidence Is Not Vanity: How Dr. Mike Poss, Jeanne Poss, and Emily Built Virginia Regenerative Medicine into a Practice Where Patients Feel Like Family and Leave Transformed

It Started with a Torn Rotator Cuff and a Refusal to Accept “No”

Virginia Regenerative Medicine didn’t begin as a vision. It began as a problem that needed solving.

Dr. Mike Poss had a rotator cuff tear. He was told by his doctor that surgery was his only option. He looked at the statistics, weighed the invasiveness of the procedure, and decided he wasn’t ready to accept that. “Can you figure something out?” he told his doctor. Remarkably, the doctor did. And it worked.

That experience — of finding a path through a problem that conventional medicine had declared a dead end — lit a spark that would take years to fully ignite. In the meantime, Dr. Mike continued practicing medicine, watching patients come in with conditions that traditional approaches simply weren’t resolving. He noticed a pattern: people who failed conventional medicine often had something deeper going on, something that a diagnosis and a prescription couldn’t fully address. And he began to believe there was a better way.

Around 2013 or 2014, he and his wife Jeanne Poss were living in Marshall, Virginia when he drove past a building for sale on Main Street. He describes what happened next with the simplicity of someone recounting a story they’ve told before but still find remarkable: “I got a wild idea.”

They went back to the building together. They said yes to the wild idea. And what has grown from that moment — over the better part of a decade — is Virginia Regenerative Medicine and Spa: a practice that blends orthopedic regenerative procedures, hormone therapy, aesthetic treatments, and longevity medicine in a way that almost no other practice in the region offers.

A Family Practice — in Every Sense of the Word

The team at Virginia Regenerative Medicine is three people: Dr. Mike Poss, a physician whose background spans orthopedics and regenerative medicine. Jeanne Poss, his wife and a registered nurse who describes herself as doing “a little bit of everything” at the practice — and means it. And Emily Ugarte, a licensed master esthetician who came to aesthetics through her own years-long battle with acne and the holistic approach that finally resolved it.

They are, in the most literal sense, a family practice. Dr. Mike and Jeanne Poss are married. Emily works alongside them both. And the dynamic this creates — the shorthand, the intuition, the ability to read each other in real time — produces something that patients notice the moment they walk through the door.

“We can be in a procedure, and I can tell by his body language: ‘Okay, I need to do this next.’ With ultrasound — he gets a look, and I know what he needs before he even asks.”

It’s the kind of coordination that only comes from years of deep trust — and it extends far beyond the treatment room. When patients arrive, they’re not walking into the sterile, transactional atmosphere of a conventional medical office. They’re walking into a 1905 farmhouse that has been lovingly converted into something warm, cozy, and completely unlike any doctor’s office they’ve been in before.

“People walk in and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is great,'” Jeanne says. “And then they see a family.” Sometimes patients don’t realize Dr. Mike and Jeanne Poss are married until she gives him a quick kiss — or until she’s bossing him around and he’s just taking it. The reactions are, she reports with a laugh, memorable.

Emily captures what this feels like from the inside: “I get to work with my best friends every day. I think they see it and they’re like, ‘Wow, this feels good.'” Patients have said the energy in the space feels different. That’s not an accident. It’s the product of three people who genuinely care about each other — and about every person they treat.

The Philosophy Behind the Practice: Whole Person, Whole Picture

Every member of the Virginia Regenerative Medicine team arrived at holistic care through a personal journey rather than an abstract philosophy. That distinction matters enormously in how they practice.

Dr. Mike saw patients in traditional medicine who simply weren’t being helped — and recognized that the gaps were almost always in the places conventional medicine wasn’t looking. Jeanne experienced hormone replacement therapy herself, at Dr. Mike’s gentle suggestion, and describes it as life-changing — not just for the obvious symptoms but for the brain fog that was affecting her ability to get through nursing school. Emily struggled with acne for years, tried every standard treatment, and only found resolution when she started treating it as a symptom of something deeper rather than a surface-level problem to manage.

“Acne, I think, was a symptom of a lot more going on underneath the surface. We look at the overall wellness — there’s a hormonal factor which we address here. So many facets to it that if you don’t approach it holistically, you’re just going to continue the band-aid approach.”

This philosophy — that symptoms are signals rather than endpoints — runs through everything the practice offers. A woman comes in for a facial and mentions she’s been unusually tired. Emily starts asking questions. A conversation with Dr. Mike or Jeanne Poss follows. Suddenly the facial appointment has become the beginning of a hormone evaluation. The skin treatment was the door that led somewhere far more important.

“99% of the time,” Jeanne says, when asked how often one concern leads to discovering another. “Almost everybody.”

The Patient Who Came in for a Facial and Left with a Life Change

The story that illustrates the practice’s integrated approach most vividly is one that happened the day before the interview was recorded.

A patient came in for a facial. As she settled into the chair, they noticed her ankle was wrapped. Dr. Mike mentioned a peptide cream he thought might help. He wrapped it neatly. They did an ultrasound. They were able to identify the problem clearly — something that hadn’t been identified before — and they scheduled a procedure.

She left saying it was the best facial of her life. She also left with a plan for her ankle that she hadn’t arrived expecting to find.

“She left renewed — ‘That was the best facial of my life, and you guys helped me with my ankle. You guys are amazing.’ There were hugs.”

It’s a small story and a large one at the same time. What it illustrates is that Virginia Regenerative Medicine’s value isn’t just the individual services it offers — it’s the connections the team draws between them. Because Dr. Mike, Jeanne Poss, and Emily are all in the same building, talking to each other, and trained to see the whole person rather than just the presenting complaint, patients routinely leave with more than they came for. Not upsold — actually helped.

This cross-pollination runs in the other direction too: a patient who comes to Dr. Mike for a knee procedure starts talking about their skin. Emily gets a referral. The knee patient becomes an aesthetics client. The aesthetics client becomes a hormone patient. The family comes back — sometimes literally. “Somebody will come in, and then bring their kid back for acne. Or their mom. Or their dad,” Jeanne says. “Our family takes care of you and your family.”

What It Really Means to Listen

Most medical practices have waiting rooms. Virginia Regenerative Medicine has conversations.

The team has deliberately built unhurried time into every appointment — not as a luxury but as a clinical necessity. Because the information that matters most often doesn’t appear in intake forms. It surfaces when someone feels comfortable enough to share it.

“Most of the folks who come in have already failed multiple other traditional options,” Dr. Mike explains. “They already have that sort of cloud over them.” By the time patients arrive at a regenerative medicine practice, they’ve frequently heard “no” more times than they can count. They’ve been told their symptoms are just aging, just menopause, just something to manage. They’ve been dismissed.

“Women come in and say, ‘I went to this doctor and this doctor, and they keep telling me: you’re just aging, it’s just menopause, deal with it.’ And I say: it is not. You don’t have to live like this.”

The act of actually being heard — of sitting in a room with people who don’t brush you off, who validate what you’ve been experiencing, who say “we went through some of that too” — can be transformative before a single treatment begins. Jeanne describes watching patients’ body language change mid-conversation as the tension and defensiveness of years of dismissal start to soften.

“Every person that leaves gets a hug,” she says. “Because we become like they’re our friends. They’re family.” She’s watched patients come in single and return years later with partners, and then babies. She’s seen milestones celebrated in that space that have nothing to do with medicine — and everything to do with the kind of long-term relationship that only grows from genuine care.

Everyone on the Team Has Been the Patient

One of the most unusual and powerful aspects of Virginia Regenerative Medicine is that every person on the team has personally experienced the treatments they provide.

Dr. Mike received a regenerative knee procedure at a medical conference — from a presenter he initially thought was being rude for staring at him as he limped down the hall, but who turned out to be a specialist who saw immediately what was wrong. The treatment happened right there at the meeting. By the time he walked back to his room, the difference was already noticeable.

Jeanne Poss’s story with hormone replacement therapy is perhaps the most instructive. She was in nursing school, struggling with brain fog so severe she wasn’t sure she’d make it through. When she began HRT — at Dr. Mike’s suggestion that she be “the first patient, just for fun” — the clarity that returned was, she says, the thing that got her to the finish line. “Had I not had that, I don’t think I would have made it through.”

Emily’s journey with acne is the foundation of her entire approach to aesthetics. She spent years trying everything conventional medicine and mainstream skincare had to offer. Nothing worked until she started looking at the whole picture — hormones, gut health, lifestyle, not just the skin itself. That lived experience means that when an acne client sits across from her, they’re talking to someone who genuinely knows the road they’ve been on.

“It’s not just empathy — you feel what they feel because you’ve been there. And I think that really comes into play in our interactions, because it feels different. People feel that connection, and it’s special.”

This is the engine of trust at Virginia Regenerative Medicine. When they tell a patient something works, it’s not because they’ve read about it. It’s because they’ve lived it.

Confidence Is Not Vanity — It’s Healthy Living

There’s a phrase Dr. Mike and Jeanne Poss return to throughout the conversation, and it’s worth sitting with: confidence is not vanity.

They say it because they’ve seen the alternative — patients who’ve avoided treatments that could genuinely improve their quality of life because they’ve been made to feel that caring about how they look or feel is somehow shallow. The woman who comes in looking down at the floor, avoiding eye contact, not quite inhabiting the space she’s in. The same woman, six months later, with a big smile and a different energy entirely — so different that the photographic evidence is striking even to people who knew her before.

“You can see the before picture and she’s looking down, not confident, didn’t look that happy. Six months later: makeup on, hair a different color, big smile. It is life-changing — now she’s out in the world. What would she have missed had she not?”

The team is also direct about where the culture of perfectionism is causing harm. The filtered, algorithmically curated images that fill social media feeds have created unrealistic expectations that are making people miserable and driving them toward treatments that aren’t right for them.

“If we get a patient that comes in and says, ‘I want a frozen face,’ then maybe this isn’t the right practice,” Emily says. When someone insists their pores are too big, she tells them plainly: look at my skin. I’m an aesthetician, and having pores is completely normal. Skin is supposed to have pores. The goal at Virginia Regenerative Medicine is never to conform to a filtered fantasy — it’s to help each person look and feel like the best version of themselves. Their actual self, not an Instagram ideal.

The shift they’re seeing in the industry validates this approach. Patients are increasingly moving away from procedures that add or fill toward treatments that stimulate the body’s own collagen production and natural regeneration. The results look more authentic because they are more authentic — the body doing its own work, supported by science. “We’re getting out of the filter era,” Jeanne says. “And it’s about time.”

What’s Next: Longevity, Science, and the Future of Aging

Ask the team what excites them most about the next chapter of Virginia Regenerative Medicine, and the word that comes up first is longevity.

The science of aging — what causes it, how to meaningfully slow it, and how to optimize quality of life across every dimension — is advancing faster than it ever has. Appearance, function, and quality of life are the three axes Dr. Mike maps it across: skin condition and laxity; muscle mass, joint health, and strength; and the internal factors — gut health, hormone balance, nutrition — that determine how well everything else functions.

He’s watching the medical establishment begin to reckon with the limits of what it thought it knew. Medications that were standard of care are being reevaluated. Approaches that traditional medicine dismissed are being validated. The integration of regenerative and functional medicine with conventional care is happening — slowly, but it’s happening.

Virginia Regenerative Medicine has been living at that intersection for years. They’re not waiting for the medical mainstream to catch up. They’re already there, refining what they offer, adding new treatments as the evidence matures, and continuing to do what they’ve always done: experience it themselves before they offer it to anyone else.

“Are you guys for real?” patients sometimes ask when they first arrive. The team finds it charming. The answer is yes — genuinely, consistently, stubbornly for real. A family that built something out of need, that has tested everything they offer on themselves and each other, that takes the time to actually listen, and that sends every patient home with a hug.

That, they’ve found, is not a common thing. It should be.

Connect with Virginia Regenerative Medicine and Spa

Virginia Regenerative Medicine and Spa is located in Marshall, Virginia and welcomes patients from across the region.

📸 Instagram: @varegenmed

💻 Facebook: varegenmed

📱 Text or call the office anytime @ (540) 905-7370

Or just come by. The door is open.

Reach Emily Ugarte & Mike & Jeanne Poss Below