The Injustice That Changed How I Think About Health
And Why I’m Starting This Blog
Injustice has always been a theme in my life, so fairness has been too. In fact, my parents used to tell me I was too fair. I always wondered how that could be a bad thing. I felt strongly that we should be fair to people, almost no matter the situation. So when I learned how lacking conventional medicine was, I felt very angry. It isn't fair that people don't know about the vast number of things they can do for their health and longevity, and that they can heal from most illnesses. Conventional medicine doesn’t tell them that or show them how to do that.
To be clear, conventional medicine can be incredible in an acute situation. I want their help if I'm in a car wreck, have a heart attack, or my appendix bursts, but when it comes to healing, it is completely lacking. Conventional medicine knows how to take care of symptoms, which is important, but that's where it stops. The body is incredible at healing. It is always trying to bring you back to homeostasis. If we help it with the right inputs, we have a much better chance of healing.
I had health issues that were mounting for years, but no one could help me. The doctors I saw gave me various prescriptions. Some made me feel a bit better, some made me much worse. One such drug was Prevacid, which gave me worse acid reflux, even though that's what it was supposed to heal. That's when I started looking into things myself and discovered a whole world outside of conventional medicine. I had also watched integrative medicine help my mom through her cancer in ways conventional care alone couldn't, which made the limits of mainstream medicine personal in a different way. It was also when I realized how unjust medicine really is. Doctors are taught to manage symptoms and prescribe drugs. They are not taught how to help a person heal.
What I learned about how the medical system became this way shocked me. In 1910, a report was published that completely changed the course of American medicine. It was called the Flexner Report, and it was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to evaluate medical schools across the United States and Canada. The author, Abraham Flexner, wasn't a doctor. He was an educator. But his report led to the closure of roughly half of all medical schools within a couple of decades, including most schools that taught homeopathy, naturopathy, herbal medicine, and other healing traditions. It also closed most schools that admitted women and almost all of the schools that trained Black physicians.
The schools that survived were the ones that adopted a specific model: laboratory science, pharmaceuticals, and a focus on disease rather than health. The Rockefeller philanthropies, which had significant interests in the emerging pharmaceutical industry, poured massive funding into medical schools that adopted this model. Schools that didn't conform lost their funding and eventually closed.
This is why your doctor today is trained to identify diseases and prescribe medications, but is rarely trained in nutrition, lifestyle medicine, or most importantly, how the body actually heals. It isn't because these things don't matter. It's because more than a century ago, a decision was made about what kind of medicine would be taught, and the alternatives were systematically pushed out. We didn't get the best of all approaches working together. We got one approach, with everything else marginalized.
That feels deeply unfair to me. People deserve to know there are other ways. They deserve to know that their bodies are not just collections of symptoms to be managed, but living systems capable of remarkable healing when given the right support.
When I found integrative and functional medicine, I thought I would get much better. I did improve slightly, but most of what they did was give me supplements. I had one functional medicine doctor who tested me for mold and toxins, which uncovered a lot. But even after detoxing, I was still not well, and there was just a long list of other things to take.
That was when I started to question everything, including the alternatives I had found. I realized that functional medicine, as helpful as it can be, has its own blind spots. Too often it became about adding more supplements, more protocols, more things to take. I started to wonder if we were missing something more fundamental, and then I stumbled onto Circadian Biology and Cellular Medicine.
What I have come to believe, after years of research, working with my own health and many clients’ health, is that the deepest healing happens at two levels most practitioners haven't fully focused on. The first is cellular. Every system in your body depends on healthy cells, and healthy cells depend on healthy mitochondria, intact membranes, and protection from the constant assault of oxidative stress and environmental toxins. The second is circadian. Our bodies evolved to follow the rhythms of light, dark, temperature, and timing. When those rhythms are disrupted, which they are for almost everyone in modern life, the entire system suffers. Hormones, metabolism, immune function, repair, mood, sleep, all of it depends on signals our bodies are no longer reliably getting.
When I started to address these foundations in my own life, things shifted in ways that years of supplements never accomplished. Not because supplements are bad, they have their place, but because they cannot do what the right light, the right timing, the right cellular environment can do. The body knows what to do. It just needs the right conditions. This is the work I do now. I help people understand their own biology at the cellular and circadian level. I help them identify what is disrupting their healing and what their bodies actually need to come back to balance. I don't rely on supplements as the answer. I don't promise quick fixes. What I offer is a different way of thinking about health…one that respects the intelligence of the body and the depth of what it takes to truly heal.
If any of this resonates with you, I would love to have you here. This blog is going to be a place where I share what I am learning, what I am questioning, and what I have come to believe about the path back to real health. I hope you will join me.