About

Who I am

I'm Sarah Luebker, and I'm a board-certified rheumatologist at White River Health in Arkansas. I serve there in three other roles as well, as medical director, infusion director, and associate faculty. I'm certified in internal medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine, and certified in rheumatology by that same board, and I did my fellowship in immunology and rheumatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Before Vanderbilt I did my residency in internal medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. I earned my medical degree at Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and my first degree was in biology at Oklahoma Christian University. Before medical school I worked in ophthalmology as a technician and a surgical coordinator, which is where I learned what a clinic looks like from the other side of the desk.

What I work on

My research and writing have centered on three diseases, which are systemic sclerosis, lupus, and Sjogren's disease. I contributed to the CONQUER scleroderma registry, where my part was the work on gastrointestinal symptoms in early disease, presented at the American College of Rheumatology in 2022 and submitted to Rheumatology as a concise report. I've also published a case report on recurrent ascites in lupus, and I've presented work on malignancy risk in lupus.

More recently I've been working on metabolic health, which isn't where most rheumatologists spend their time. I gave a three-part grand rounds series on it at White River Health in 2025, covering the standard American diet, the relationship between metabolic and cognitive health, and endocrine disrupting chemicals. The publications page has the full list of both the research and the talks.

Why this site exists

This site is independent of my clinical practice at White River Health, and nothing here is medical advice for any one person. I write it for two reasons, and the first one is simple enough. Patients bring me questions about food, exercise, and the things around them every day, and those questions deserve better answers than they usually get, because most of what people find online comes from somebody selling something.

The second reason is that nothing here replaces a conversation with the physician who knows your case, and a page that says so plainly is more useful than one that pretends otherwise. What I try to do is draw one line, which is the line between what the evidence supports and what gets claimed on its behalf. So I'll say plainly that diet doesn't cure autoimmune disease, and that lifestyle changes work alongside medication rather than instead of it.

A supplement can have a good story behind it and no trial data at all, and I'd rather tell you that than sell you the story. Drawing that line also means being honest in the other direction. The research does support doing some things differently, and there are several places on this site where it says so.

How this site is written

Every figure on this site comes from a named study, and each one links to the paper it came from. I read each page and sign off its exact wording, which takes time, and there are a great many pages. A page I haven't signed off yet still goes up, because the alternative is leaving you with the old site, and that page says so plainly at the foot of it.

That notice tells you three things about the page you're reading. The page was put together from the cited studies, it isn't my opinion, and it has no medical review date on it. It gets one once I've read the wording myself, and then my name goes on it and the notice comes off, so you can always tell which pages I've read.

I don't run advertising on this site, I hold no affiliate arrangements for anything mentioned here, and I don't accept industry support for the talks I give. If any of that changes, it gets disclosed on the page it applies to. The disclosure appears before the arrangement does rather than afterwards, which is the only order that means anything.