A nurse practitioner functional medicine career does not have to mean choosing between a hospital role and your own practice. Many practitioners feel that tension. One NP built both and shares how she made it work.

On Functional Medicine for Real World Impact, host Tracy Harrison talks with Laurie Johnson, NP, a seasoned nurse practitioner who works in a hospital OB-GYN clinic and runs a functional medicine private practice.

Laurie served over twenty-one years in the Air Force before building this mosaic of roles. She describes integrating functional medicine into conventional care for insurance-based patients and seeing more complex cases in her private practice when they need more time than a hospital visit allows. Laurie tells the story of a cancer patient who spent five months in a fixed program before getting to the care she actually needed. She also explains how she opened her functional medicine consulting business one daily step at a time after her family gave her an LLC for Christmas. Her first priorities for postmenopausal muscle and metabolic health round out the conversation.

If you are weighing functional medicine for nurse practitioners as a next step, listen for Laurie's experience with flexibility, fair pay for complex work, and access for patients at every level of need. Her experience offers perspective you can apply to your own clinical decision-making.