Medicine the way it used to feel —with the tools of today.

Althera Alternative Care was founded in 2018 by Todd LeCesne, PA-C, MPAS, MBA, and Raquel LeCesne, CAE — a husband-and-wife team who set out to build the kind of clinic they wished existed.

Todd is a native New Mexican who has practiced medicine in Albuquerque for more than 30 years. He's treated patients, taught medical students at UNM, and worked the front lines of urgent care and emergency medicine. Somewhere along the way, he noticed the same thing most providers eventually do: the 15-minute visit model wasn't built for real healing. It wasn't built for the conversation about sleep, stress, nutrition, hormones, or the slow decline that shows up years before a diagnosis does.

So he built something different.

Raquel joined the practice full-time after a career spent solving operational problems at scale — first in university governance and development at the UNM Foundation, later as General Manager of a Beverly Hills wealth management firm serving professional athletes and entertainers. She brought that same rigor to Althera: building the systems, partnerships, and infrastructure to grow a clinic without losing the thing that makes it work — time with your provider, not a queue for one.

Today, Althera is a membership-based, direct-pay practice. No insurance company between you and your provider. No 15-minute cap on what matters. Just a team that knows your name, answers when you call, and has the time to actually dig into your health — not just react to it.

We designed our clinic to feel less like a waiting room and more like a place you'd choose to be. That was intentional. Anxiety about the doctor's office is real, and it gets in the way of good care. So we built a space, and a model, meant to remove it.