ABOUT ME

I didn't grow up thinking about health the way I do now.

I grew up like most people do — standard American diet, fast food, fad diets, intense exercise routines that were really just about how I looked. Nobody in my world was talking about nervous system regulation or root cause medicine. We were just living the way everyone around us was living and assuming that was fine.

But health was never fully abstract for me either. I watched people I love face serious diagnoses when I was young. I saw what illness does to a family — the fear, the appointments, the medications, the way it quietly reshapes everything. I didn't have the language for it then, but something about those experiences planted a question in me that never fully went away.

Then I went to pharmacy school. And that question got louder.

Because what I was learning professionally kept connecting back to what I had watched personally. I was being trained inside a system that treated disease in pieces — this medication for this symptom, this specialist for this organ — and I kept seeing the same pattern my family had lived through show up over and over again in the patients around me. People being managed. Never actually getting better.

That's when I knew I needed to understand something the system wasn't teaching me.

I earned my Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Florida A&M University and spent over ten years practicing in community pharmacy — the kind of pharmacy where you actually know your patients by name, where you watch the same people come back month after month, year after year.

And that's what started to nag at me.

I watched people's medication lists grow longer while they kept getting worse. I watched providers who never talked to each other, therapies that duplicated or conflicted, side effects that created new symptoms that created new prescriptions. Nobody was getting better. They were just being managed. And I was handing them the next thing in a bag, stapled shut, nice and pretty. Knowing it still wasn't going to fix what was actually wrong with my patients.

That stayed with me. It never stopped bothering me.

When my own health collapsed, I turned to functional medicine — the root cause approach that looks at the whole person rather than treating disease in isolation. I saw several practitioners, took what was genuinely helpful, and noticed where even that world fell short. That firsthand experience as a patient moving through both systems is where my approach was born. Not from a single methodology or a certification, but from living inside both worlds and understanding exactly where each one serves people and where each one fails them.

I am currently completing a Master's in Clinical Herbalism — not because something was missing, but because plants represent one of the most complete whole-system medicines that exist, and expanding into that knowledge felt like the natural next step in how I understand the body and what it needs to heal.

I don't believe one system is better than the other. I believe the right tools, used in the right context, for the right person, at the right time — that's what actually works.