September 29, 2004 was my last day in the United States Navy, having served in the medical corps for 5 years, I found myself unqualified to do anything related to medicine in the "civilian" world, which of course was a shock, and rather disappointing. 

On top of that, I had been graced with a beautiful baby girl, whom I adored, but ultimately needed to support.  At that time I tried to go to school on the GI Bill, but quickly figured out that it wasn't going to provide what my daughter needed, so I had to find a job, which landed me in the executive recruiting space ever since.

Even though school wasn't going to work out during this season of my life, this is where I met one of my best friends, Justin Marchegiani, in an Exercise Science course at the University of Massachusetts.  Fast-forward almost 20 years, he is still one of my best friends, and now a world-renowned functional medicine doctor, who has been practicing for years.  To his credit, he has always been one of my best encouragers, and an inspiration to me throughout my lifetime.   

This brings me to our own family’s health journey.  Over the last 5-10 years, our family has had our own health struggles (some pretty serious - more to come on that in another post) that conventional medicine could not solve without pills or surgeries. All these collective experiences rekindled my desire to once again attempt to go back to school.

In 2020, I finally had a chance to go back to school again.  Originally, I planned to go back to train as a Doctor of Osteopathy or Doctor of Chiropractic.  However, after having a long conversation with Justin, he convinced me that if I went to conventional medical or even chiropractic schooling, I wouldn’t learn much about functional medicine, if at all, but it certainly wouldn’t be the primary focus. Functional medicine, however, had become one of my main interests, and what I mostly wanted to pursue further.

So as much as I thought that was the route, another plan started to emerge.  This brings me to the culmination of which this note began. 

With the support and encouragement of Dr. Justin, and another pivotal mentor, Dr. Frank, I have now launched my own  Functional Health practice Heritage Health as a Certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, and I am thrilled to announce I am officially accepting new clients. 

I am using a very similar framework that is used by other top functional medicine practitioners like Dr. Axe, Dr. Pompa, Dr. Justin and Dr. Frank whom I've learned under.

It is also is the same model of care that I have used to manage with my own autoimmune issue, Sjogren’s, our youngest daughter’s battle Lyme disease and other tick-borne co-infections, our other daughter’s issues with food sensitivities, and my wife’s struggle with hormonal issues.  I'll post more about each of these stories as time goes on.

Looking back on my first experience with medicine I realized that I only knew how to correlate pills with symptoms and emergency medicine.  Ultimately, I want to help people get better, to stop merely surviving, and start thriving, and that starts with getting to the root of their problems. Let's get started today!

Blessings,

Rob, FDNP, OTA