Meet Dr. Phil Zhou

Dr. Phil Zhou, DO is an osteopathic physician in Upland, California, practicing cash-pay medical care at Phil Zhou Medical — with a focus on weight loss, headache, insomnia, anxiety and depression, back and shoulder pain, and disability physicals and legal-related paperwork.

Harbor–UCLA trained — four years of neurology residency there — board certified as a hospice medical director (HMDCB), a member of the American Academy of Neurology, and eleven years in Los Angeles County hospitals, clinics, and patients’ living rooms, including 8 years of house calls. He speaks English and Mandarin.

Where I come from

I was born and raised in Southern California, except for five years of my childhood spent in mainland China.

My background is multi-disciplinary: neurology, urgent care, and hospice. It is a rare mix, and it came out of a strange journey — but in every one of those specialties I found myself treating mainly the same problems. The human body has the same issues, over and over.

In college, my research in synthetic organic chemistry was funded by Pfizer. I was working on a compound that targeted pain but would be less addictive than the pain medications that already existed.

My areas of focus — every one of them — were born of dealing with these issues myself, or alongside someone close to me. If a condition also lends itself well to a cash-based clinic, even better.

Why this practice exists

I have practiced medicine in a county hospital, in a federally underserved primary care clinic, and in hospice — often at a patient’s kitchen table. Those settings have almost nothing in common except one thing: the medicine got better when I had time, and worse when I did not.

Hospice taught me that most clearly. When you sit with someone at the end of their life, you find out what the system missed — the symptom nobody chased down, the conversation nobody had time for, the question the patient never got to ask. I opened this practice so those things get caught while there is still time to do something about them.

So the model here is deliberately small. One physician, a limited panel, and a price you can see before you agree to it. No insurance company decides how long your visit is, because no insurance company is paying for it.

In the past I have made house calls for billionaires and Hollywood celebrities. Now I work for you.

Why the neurology training matters here

This is a general medicine practice. That is the work, and it is what most visits are: an infection, a rash, blood pressure, a refill, a physical. But roughly 40% of ordinary general practice turns out to be neurologic once you look at it — the headache, the dizziness, the numbness in a foot, the memory that is not what it was, the sleep that stopped working, the pain that does not behave like ordinary pain.

I completed four years of neurology residency at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, so that 40% does not become a referral and a three-month wait. It gets worked up in the room, by someone who spent four years on exactly these problems:

• Headache and migraine — distinguishing the ordinary from the dangerous, and actually treating the ordinary rather than sending it away
• Stroke — acute recognition, risk-factor management, and what recovery realistically looks like
• Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias — diagnosis, staging, medication decisions, and the conversations families need
• Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders
• Neurologic pain — neuropathy, radiculopathy, and the pain that does not respond to the usual approach because it is not the usual kind of pain
• Seizures and epilepsy
• Sleep disorders
• Anxiety disorders
• Cerebral palsy and other neurodevelopmental conditions

What Amazon taught me about medicine

Before medicine, I worked at Amazon. I did not expect it to shape how I practice, but it did. What stayed with me was how seriously that company took speed and convenience — the sheer amount of work that went into removing small frictions most businesses never even notice, on the theory that a hundred small annoyances are what actually drive people away.

Healthcare has the opposite instinct. The hold music, the portal password, the form you fill out again, the three-week wait for ten minutes, the bill that arrives in six weeks with a number nobody warned you about — none of that is an accident. It is what a system optimized for billing rather than for patients.

I wanted to build the other version of that for my own community. Good customer service is not a strange thing to want from a doctor. You are a patient, and you are also a customer, and there is no good reason those should feel like different things. Most prescription refills here take one text message — no portal, no phone tree, no appointment to ask for something routine. That is a membership benefit, and it is the kind of small friction worth engineering away.

You can text me or email me. That is not a marketing line — it is how I have practiced for years, and it is the part of hospice medicine I most wanted to bring to everyday care. A text at nine in the evening asking whether a symptom is worth worrying about is exactly the kind of question that should be easy to ask.

I speak English and Mandarin. My Spanish is poor, so I do not pretend otherwise: my assistant is a native Spanish speaker and handles Spanish-speaking patients and interpretation. If you are more comfortable in Spanish, you will be spoken to in Spanish.

Ready when you are

Call or text (562) 575-6816 to book a visit, or join as a VIP member and have a doctor in your corner every day of the year.