Why I'm Offering Functional Medicine in My Psychiatric Practice

For thirty years, I've sat with people in their hardest moments. And over those years, I've watched the same pattern repeat itself.

A patient comes in already on medication. Sometimes two. Sometimes more. The diagnosis fits. The prescription is appropriate. And yet — they're still tired. Still anxious. Still flat. Still not themselves. They've adjusted the dose. They've tried different SSRIs. They've added something for sleep. And then they ask the question every honest psychiatric provider has heard a thousand times:

"Is this as good as it gets?"

For much of my career, the answer to that question, within the boundaries of what insurance reimburses and what a fifteen-minute med check allows, was sometimes: maybe.

That answer never sat right with me. Because I was also quietly tracking the other patterns.

The patient whose anxiety lifts not when we add a benzodiazepine, but when she stops eating the foods her body is inflammatory to. The mother whose "depression" turns out to be hypothyroidism that three providers missed. The young man whose panic attacks resolve when his sleep apnea is finally treated. The perimenopausal woman whose "treatment-resistant depression" is actually a hormonal cliff no SSRI is going to fix.

These weren't outliers. These were the patients I kept noticing.

The body has always been part of the story.

I'm a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, but my training started in pediatric and general nursing. Before I prescribed psychotropic medication, I watched gut health affect mood in colicky infants. I watched thyroid disorders mimic anxiety in middle-aged women. I watched sleep deprivation produce textbook depression in new parents. The mind has never been separate from the body — only our specialty silos have suggested it might be.

Functional medicine, in its honest version, is just the discipline of taking that connection seriously. It is not anti-psychiatry. It is not anti-medication. It is the willingness to ask, before or alongside the prescription, what else is going on?

• What does your blood work actually look like — not just "in range," but optimal?

• What is your nutrient status?

• What's happening with your gut, your hormones, your inflammation, your sleep?

• What if 30% of what we've been calling "depression" is actually a vitamin D level that's been below 20 for years?

These questions do not replace psychiatric care. They deepen it.

Why I couldn't do this through Headway.

I value the work I do through Headway. It's how most of my patients access me — efficiently, through their insurance, without barriers. For medication management and brief therapy, it's the right model.

But Headway, and frankly no insurance-based platform, can bill for what functional medicine actually requires: 75-minute intakes, lab interpretation that goes beyond reference ranges, ongoing protocol refinement, supplement and nutrition guidance. Insurance won't reimburse for it because the system isn't built for root-cause work. It's built for diagnosis, prescription, and refill.

So I made a decision: I'd offer functional medicine as a separate, cash-pay tier — not instead of insurance-based psychiatric care, but alongside it.

Patients who want my standard psychiatric services keep accessing me through Headway exactly as before. Patients who want the deeper workup, or who have plateaued on conventional treatment and want to ask the bigger questions, can now book a functional medicine consultation directly.

Two doors into the same practice. Same provider. Different depth of work.

What this looks like.

A 75-minute initial functional medicine consultation includes a full history, lifestyle and nutritional review, and an honest assessment of what testing will actually answer questions for your case. Within a week of your visit, you'll have a written plan — labs (if appropriate), targeted nutrition and supplement guidance, lifestyle interventions, and, when it's clinically warranted, medication adjustments.

Follow-up visits review labs and refine the protocol. Most patients see meaningful change within three to four visits.

Cash-pay only. Not billed through insurance. Telehealth across Utah and Idaho.

Who this is for.

You don't need to be an existing psychiatric patient to book functional medicine. Many people book FM as their first visit; some combine it with ongoing medication management through Headway; some have a different psychiatrist they want to keep and just want a functional workup added to the picture. All of those are welcome.

The point isn't to choose between conventional psychiatry and integrative care. The point is to stop treating them as opposites.

Why now.

After thirty years in clinical practice, the moment for this kind of work has finally arrived in the culture. Patients are asking better questions. The research on the gut-brain axis, on metabolic psychiatry, on inflammation, on hormonal influence — it gets stronger every year. The tools to actually do this work are evidence-based, accessible, and increasingly hard to ignore.

I'm offering it because, in hindsight, I should have been offering it sooner.

If you've been on psychiatric medication for a year or more and feel like you've hit a ceiling, or if you suspect there's something physiological your current care hasn't addressed, I would be honored to take a deeper look with you.

Book your functional medicine consultation →