Have you ever felt discouraged leaving a doctor’s appointment? Maybe you felt bothered by the lack of time a doctor spent in the room with you, or perhaps you didn’t feel heard because the nurses and physicians were rushing through the appointment, talking at you, and simply trying to meet their overbooked patient load. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals in general often have the best of intentions with a deep desire to help people, but healthcare as we know it just isn’t working. The system is failing us. It’s okay to call things as they are.

We talk to women day in and day out within our practice that think that something is wrong with them because they’re not feeling any better. They’re not getting better and they aren’t seeing the results that they’re going for in their healthcare. But the thing is, it’s often not an issue with them. There’s nothing wrong with the many, many women that we talk to day in and day out. What’s wrong is what’s happening with healthcare.

At Radiate Wellness we offer a Woman-Centered Functional approach to healthcare. It’s a mouthful, I know—but what does it mean? We’re trying to provide something different than what we have all experienced in the run-of-the-mill healthcare setting. The 15-minute doctor’s visits and the one-way conversations. The feeling that we have to rush, rush, rush to get everything on our list taken care of in that short amount of time so that our doctor can understand what we’re going through, just to kind of be told, “come back when it gets worse or when it’s bad enough.” It’s okay to say there’s something wrong with healthcare. This is why we’ve decided to bring forth something new, unique, that meets the needs of our clients.

So let’s break it down a little bit. What is a woman-centered approach? And what is functional care? Basically, it is like a retraining of everything we’ve known about what healthcare is so far. It’s taking that one-way conversation that we’ve all experienced within our doctor’s office, where we don’t have the opportunity to get a word in edgewise or where we feel like we’re being talked down to. We’re flipping that on its head, and we’re saying this has to be a two-way conversation.

We bring your story, your health history, and your goals to the center of the conversation. It’s not an afterthought, or “if we have time for it.” It is the center of everything that we provide because your story is gold to us as practitioners. The more that we know about what you’re experiencing and what you want your quality of life to look like, the better we can provide you incremental steps to get to where you want to be.

The other thing is, this can’t be done in a 15-minute session. Understanding your story and seeing results takes time and it also takes a relationship, which is a big part of what we find useful in women-centered functional care. There has to be a relationship between you and your provider where you feel that you can trust them and tell them how you’re showing up that day and what’s going on in your life. So those two things just in themselves—the two-way conversation and having the time to be able to be held accountable with consistency in a real and lasting relationship is what makes this different.

The third thing I want to address is what does it actually means to be “functional?” All of the practitioners on our team are functional nutritionists. This means that we are trained to see you as a whole woman—not just as your hormones or your symptoms, such as digestive problems, brain fog, or fatigue. We look at all of these things as a part of the whole you, along with all the things that you do day in and day out that is keeping you where you are. We’re trained to see you as a whole person and share that with you so that you can begin to see how the many different pieces of your health are really integrated and tied together. That is where the magic truly starts to happen. And that’s where we start to see shifts in health.

We have been trained to think of our bodies as these independent islands where things exist on their own. We’re just watching these specific symptoms until they turn into a diagnosis. If we back it up, we pull back the curtain and we look behind the scenes, we’re able to see that things are way more connected. When we find out what the root cause is, we’re able to unfold a whole new path of working towards your health.

Just to recap, these are just three main ways that a woman-centered functional approach is flipping healthcare on its head: We’re offering a two-way conversation that is both dynamic and equal. This is not a relationship where you are being talked down to or being talked at. We are giving you the time and ability to express yourself and to be able to have a relationship with a provider that is truly in your corner every step of the way. We’re also bringing attention to the importance of integrated healthcare, looking at the whole person.

If this sounds like the language you’ve been looking for, like the kind of care you feel you deserve, feel free to reach out. Let’s chat. The best way to get started is just to shoot me a message and book a Strategy Session. I would love to hear from you and to hear some of your experiences of what you’ve been struggling with within health care. I would love for you to take that first step in realizing there’s nothing wrong with you, but there’s a whole lot wrong with our healthcare today. I’ll talk to you soon.