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.

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 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 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 had hoped. I worked mostly in oncology, but saw again and again that pharmacologic therapies, especially in chronic conditions, 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 this for myself through a last-ditch effort of holistic diet and lifestyle changes. It seems wild to me now, but coming from pharmaceuticals and having my dad in the industry growing up, I could not believe such simple or almost ‘outdated’ health and wellness philosophies would be what allowed me to successfully avoid a third autoimmune diagnosis of Lupus, and reverse disease progression on my other diagnosis’s.

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. I chose Functional Medicine because it combines the science and data that I am familiar with from my pharmaceutical background, into treatment in a way that is individualized to each client. Here I am able to beautifully blend both worlds of science and the more soulful holistic medicine to heal every part of you.

A diagnosis is not a life sentence.