Every once in a while, we reach a moment in our lives when everything we’ve lived through suddenly connects—and we realize the path we’ve been on wasn’t random at all. The title of this article has been my tagline for well over a decade, but only recently did I truly know why I’d chosen it.
This isn’t just a professional journey. It’s personal. It’s layered with grief, intuition, advocacy, and the deep desire to make meaning from everything I’ve learned along the way. This is the story of how I got here—and why I do this work now.
The Moment I Knew
I didn’t arrive at functional medicine through a class or a wellness trend. I arrived through loss. Through watching my parents decline. Through a rising, burning question inside me: Why aren’t we doing this differently?
My mother had diabetes and underwent a quadruple bypass in her early 70s. She spent her life cooking for my father but didn’t know how to nourish herself. No one ever said to her, “You can’t eat the food you make for him. You matter too. Your body matters.”
No one ever helped her feel like she deserved to take care of herself. If they had—if someone had supported her mindfulness, her sense of worth, her full human experience—maybe she would have stood in her own kitchen and said, “This food is going to take care of me first. I’m diabetic. You’re not. And it’s still going to be delicious for both of us.”
But not one Doctor said that to her. They didn’t even ask.
And then came my father—who, after my mother’s health began to fail, seemed to quietly let go. He had a stroke. Then Parkinsonian symptoms. Then dementia. And again, doctor after doctor—each one looking at one piece of him, but never the whole man. They prescribed medications that contraindicated one another. They missed things. And he disappeared into a system that treated him like a body, not a soul.
When he landed in a nursing home, it was awful. He developed an antibiotic-resistant superbug. I found myself in constant battle with doctors—firing them, insisting on consults they said were unnecessary. I demanded a rheumatology consult when he began developing fevers of unknown origin. They told me I was wasting time and that he was being sent home to die.
But I wasn’t. I was right. I knew something was off. He lived for two more years after we addressed the origin of the problem, his gall bladder.
That knowing—that sense of “something else is going on here”—has lived in me forever. But for a long time, I didn’t have the foundation to fully act on it.
That began to shift when I studied at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It helped me ask better questions—not just about food, but about the whole picture of health. The environment. The emotions. The work. The spirit.
Then came Function Health . Twenty vials of blood. Over 100 markers. When Jim and I got the results, I was furious—and thrilled.
Furious that this kind of testing existed and yet wasn’t part of standard care.
Thrilled because it confirmed what I had always known in my bones: we are whole systems, not siloed parts.
One of the biggest light bulb moments for me came when I saw the test for small particle LDL cholesterol. I’d never seen it before—not on a standard lipid panel. And suddenly, so much made sense.
My mother had a quadruple bypass—and three years later, she needed stents. Her total cholesterol always looked fine. No one flagged it. No one seemed concerned. But this—this type of dangerous cholesterol, small and dense and often invisible to traditional screening—this could have been what clogged her arteries especially with her intense metabolic issues.
Nobody told her. Nobody tested for it. Maybe the test didn’t exist 20 years ago, or maybe it just wasn’t routine. But it exists now. And it matters.
When my husband gets a regular lipid profile today, it still doesn’t show half of what we saw in the Function Health report. It’s incomplete. It gives you a sliver of information about how your body is functioning—when what we need is the whole picture. A map. A full story.
And here’s the thing:
I live in Cleveland, Ohio—home to some of the best medicine in the world.
The Cleveland Clinic. University Hospitals. World-class research. Incredible doctors.
And yet… we still only scratch the surface.
We’re trained to treat disease after it’s visible, not to explore what’s happening upstream—what could be prevented, softened, reversed—if we only looked deeper, earlier. My parents lived just miles from top-tier hospitals, and still, no one ever ran the right tests. No one ever asked the right questions.
If I’d had this twenty years ago, I could’ve made the difference I so desperately wanted to make. And while I can’t change that, I know they would be proud of the direction I’ve taken. I know they’d say, you’re doing exactly what you’re meant to do.
Today, I work as a health coach rooted in integrative and functional medicine nutrition . I’m an herbalist. I’ve studied hormone protocols. I use every bit of this training—and the deep wisdom earned from walking through fire—to help others feel seen, understood, and supported.
This is not just a career. This is the legacy of my parents.
This is my way of saying: There is another way.
And we all deserve access to it.
This is where my story begins. And it’s only just getting started.
With affection always,
Beth
P.S. If this story resonated with you—if you’ve ever felt lost in the healthcare maze, or wished someone would look at the whole you—you’re not alone. This is the work I now do every day: helping people uncover the root causes, reclaim their health story, and feel empowered in their own bodies again. If you’re curious about working together, or just want to stay connected, I’d love to hear from you.
