About

I was forty-nine. My TPO antibodies were over nine hundred. I was also, at the time of that visit, a board-certified nurse practitioner who had already diagnosed her own Hashimoto's years before the cardiac event brought it into sharper focus.

That sentence was not the reason I built this practice. It was the moment I understood why the practice needed to exist.

Credentials.

Bernadette Spencer, RN, MSN, FNP-C, FMACP. Licensed in the State of New York. United States Army veteran. A clinical career built in corrections medicine, nursing homes, and hospitalist settings before functional medicine found me through my own chart.

What I believe about medicine.

Conventional medicine is not broken. It is functioning exactly as it was designed to function — for a patient population that does not include the woman reading this page.

Functional medicine, as it is commonly practiced, is not the answer to that failure. Most of what gets sold under the functional medicine label is supplement affiliate marketing in a lab coat. Coaches without licenses. Hair mineral analysis marketed as cellular-level insight. Sixty-dollar jars of powder that do not change a single marker.

What I believe in is clinical medicine practiced with more time, more labs, better interpretation, and a relationship long enough to see the axes move.

If you are still reading.

You have read enough. The next step is the application.
I read every one.

— Bernadette