Before going to graduate school to pursue functional medicine, I was just like you. Struggling to find symptom relief and live a full life despite my diagnosis.

After years of symptoms, I had finally been diagnosed with Celiac Disease in the eighth grade. I remember struggling to keep up socially with limited food options outside of my home at the time or simply being made fun of for being gluten-free. At the time, I would of rather eat gluten than be hungry or be an inconvenience to others.

The summer following freshman year of college, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia after a year of living with unexplained pain, causing weight loss and mental exhaustion all while trying to keep up with school and healthy peers.

I graduated with a Food and Agribusiness Marketing degree from the University of Delaware, eager to learn the industry because as a “foodie”, many times left out due to a gluten intolerance, I wanted to disrupt that space. Luckily for my work today, its given me the knowledge to get through the grocery store sorting out the best quality items in terms of ingredients, production, transparency, etc. using any label or packaging; that I can now teach you!

I then started my career in the pharmaceutical advertising industry with the pure intention of helping people like myself suffering from illness find the treatment that works best for them. I always said, “medicine is not one size fits all”, knowing first-hand that medication doesn’t always have all the results we hope for as “the standard of care”. I worked mostly in oncology, but saw again and again that pharmacologic therapies, especially in chronic conditions like I struggled with, are more intervention medicine or, simply put, a bandaid.

I saw there is a second half to the equation that is using nutrition, supplements, and other modalities to direct the body on how to then heal itself- while we’ve slowed disease progression or reduced symptoms with pharmacologic medication.

I learned the power of a holistic approach for myself through a last-ditch effort of diet and lifestyle changes while dealing with a third mystery autoimmune disease, which has now come to be diagnosed as POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome)/Dysautonomia. I just knew that being so young, only 24 years old, I couldn’t keep going down this path. I wasn’t able to sleep, I couldn’t sit or stand for long periods of time, I was constantly bloated and having skin reactions and histamine flares, it was becoming debilitating. I came to that by only taking medications was not ever going to be enough to stop or reverse disease progression.

It seems wild to me now but, coming from the pharmaceutical industry and having my dad in the same industry growing up, lifestyle intervention seemed completely dismissive and I just could not believe such simple or almost ‘outdated’ sounding health and wellness philosophies would be what allowed me to finally find symptom relief and a better quality of life.

Ultimately, I knew there was more I could be doing to help others suffering, like I had for so long, to find their way to a better quality of life sooner.

A chronic diagnosis is not a life sentence.

You always have options.

Medicine is not “one-size-fits-all”.