Michael Hilts, MD

Michael Hilts is a family medicine and sports medicine physician at Hilts Direct Primary Care in Greensboro. He has practiced medicine since 1999, most of that time in Greensboro with Piedmont Orthopedics, now Cone OrthoCare, focusing on non-surgical sports medicine and family medicine.

In 2014 he and his family relocated to Texas for five years. While there, health struggles within his own family introduced him to functional medicine, which looks for the root cause of illness instead of just treating symptoms, and he took every course on it he could fit in.

Functional medicine visits tend to run long and cost more, since most practitioners in that field skip insurance altogether, so for years he tried folding pieces of the approach into a busy insurance-based practice with mixed results. Frustrated by how inefficient the system had become, he found real enthusiasm in direct primary care, which lets him keep a much smaller patient panel while giving each person far more.