why nouriva exists.

Twenty-four years ago, my mother went in for what she thought was a routine physical. She had some low back pain, which wasn’t unusual after having back surgery decades earlier. She was also a little more tired than usual, but she chalked it up to getting older.

What followed was a diagnosis of stage-four lung cancer and a prognosis of two weeks to two months to live.

When I got the call, time seemed to stop. She had just visited me in New York City for the holidays. I couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t seem real.

I flew home the next day and stayed by her side through appointment after appointment. What I experienced during that time changed the course of my life.

The care focused almost entirely on the cancer. Very little attention was paid to my mother as a person—how she was really doing, how she felt, not just physically, but emotionally, what mattered to her, how she was coping, or what might support her quality of life through an incredibly difficult time.

She began to feel more like a diagnosis than a person. Like a number.

That stayed with me.

When the treatment she was offered proved too difficult for her to continue, I started looking for other ways to support her. I wanted to understand what else might help her feel better—stronger, more comfortable, and more like herself—for whatever time we had left.

That search introduced me to naturopathic medicine.

At the time, I already had a career I loved. I had spent more than a decade working as an art director and creative director in advertising. Medicine was not part of my plan.

But something about the philosophy of naturopathic medicine made immediate sense to me. It looked beyond a diagnosis and considered the whole person: nutrition, sleep, stress, medical history, genetics, lifestyle, environment, metabolic function, and the many factors that can influence health over time. It asked not only what was happening, but why it might be happening and what might be contributing.

It also placed enormous value on something that had felt painfully absent during my mother’s experience: listening to the patient, building a relationship, and meeting someone where they are.

This was my “aha” moment. I wanted to help people in this way, so I went back to school and became a naturopathic doctor.

More than fifteen years of clinical practice have only strengthened that conviction. My perspective deepened further when I later became a patient navigating complex health concerns myself. I learned firsthand how difficult it can be when a very real experience is dismissed, oversimplified, or difficult to explain.

It changed the way I listen.

Over the years, though, I also became increasingly uncomfortable with another direction healthcare—and functional medicine in particular—can take.

Expensive specialty testing can become routine. Supplement lists can grow longer and longer. New interventions can be embraced because they are new. Complexity can begin to look like thoroughness, while the financial burden on the patient keeps growing.

That isn’t what thoughtful care looks like to me.

Care shouldn’t be measured by how many tests are ordered, how many supplements are recommended, or how elaborate a protocol becomes. And recommendations should never be influenced by what’s trending on social media or how much revenue they can generate.

A test should help answer a meaningful question. A supplement should have a clear reason behind its use. Every recommendation should make sense for the individual person.

Sometimes looking more deeply is necessary. Sometimes the best place to begin is remarkably simple. And sometimes good clinical judgment means deciding that something doesn’t need to be done at all.

That philosophy became the foundation for Nouriva.

I wanted to create the kind of healthcare I had wished for my mother: care that recognizes the person living with an illness, not simply the illness itself. Care that listens before it acts, takes the time to understand the whole story, and recognizes that doing more is not automatically the same as providing better care.

I also wanted that kind of care to be within reach.

Good healthcare shouldn’t depend on someone’s ability to afford an expensive private practice, order every specialty test, or spend hundreds of dollars each month on supplements. That belief is one of the reasons why I built Nouriva as a nonprofit.

The goal isn’t to do the most. It’s to understand enough to decide what matters most. And it means meeting people where they are. There is no report card here. If life got in the way of something we discussed at your last visit, we start from where you are today. Healthcare should help people move forward, not make them feel ashamed for not doing everything perfectly.

Whatever your background, identity, or financial circumstances, you deserve healthcare that sees you as a person—not a diagnosis or a transaction.

That is the care I wanted for my mother. And it’s the care I wanted to build for every person who trusts me with their health.

That’s why Nouriva exists.

for all humankind.