Why I Chose to Leave Technology to Pursue a Career in Preventive Health Care.

In my 20’s I was blessed to begin my professional career as a telecommunications engineer for an industry leader and fortune 500 company. In 2002 when I started my role, I was transplanted from the northeast to the southeast to support Florida, the Caribbean, and Latin America. It was an exciting time as new technology was emerging and segmented voice and data providers were beginning to coalesce. This consolidation of voice and data over internet protocol gave enterprises the opportunity to connect locations and people all over the world with the click of a button. It opened the door for workforce optimization tools beyond telephone and email to include video conferencing, web messaging, communication device portability, interactive voice response systems, speech recognition, and the list goes on. In the beginning I loved my career! It was my first real job and not many of my peers secured successful opportunities right out of college. I was traveling all over the country acting as a liaison between our client’s information technology teams and our project deployment teams. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the technologies we were developing were not only workforce optimization tools that streamlined how business professionals managed their time and communications. It became apparent that these technologies also gave enterprises the opportunity to reduce labor costs by offshoring and doubling the work of existing workforce. We were the first wave of artificial intelligence. I slowly became perplexed, because although I saw the positive uses information technology could provide, I was also able to see how it could negatively impact humanity. This became a difficult personal moral dilemma that I eventually had to face.

Simultaneous to me facing this dilemma, my father was dying from an immunocompromised condition in his early 60’s. It was convinced that his condition manifested due to lifestyle related choices and ignorance about self-care. My father raised me because my mother passed away when I was only 7 years old. At 45 years old, she too passed away due to lifestyle related choices and ignorance about self-care. The saddest part about my mother is that she was a health care provider. Much like many other professionals in her field, she ignored her own care to make time to care for others first. While my father was fighting for his life, my career in technology provided me with the ability to work remotely and be with my father. Our workforce optimization tools made be available anytime from anywhere. Although I was fortunate enough to have this option to spend the last few months with my father, it was clear to my dying father that I was always connected and had little time for myself & family. He begged me on his death bed to enjoy my life and to pursue a career in alignment with my philosophy of helping others.

After my father passed away, I had a lot to think about. I already had a 3/4 of a million-dollar home, two expensive cars, a vacation property, and a child involved in a sport that cost the family a lot of money. My direct report at the time was Dan, the vice president of engineering. Dan was a cool dude. He was super smart, worldly, a bad ass musician, and a former baseball player. We had honest conversations. One day I asked Dan if he loved his job. He laughed awkwardly and confessed that it was “too late” to do what he loved. At that point in his life, he had three young sons in college and a stay-at-home spouse. He needed a reliable income within an enterprise that’s considered indispensable. I shared my dilemma with Dan, and he encouraged me to consider a shift in careers. Having worked with me for several years he believed I had what it took to be successful at anything I believed in. “You’re young enough”, he said, “don’t wait, because the more people that rely upon you and the more things you acquire will handcuff you to a regrettable destiny.” This was enough reassurance to get me started on my journey.

I’ve always had an enthusiasm for exercise science, nutrition science, and lifestyle remediation techniques. I became an early adopter of biohacking technology for the purpose of supporting my own health. 8 years of schooling later I began my functional medicine practice to Tampa, FL. Driven by my desire to help myself, others, and to live in memory of two people who lost their lives too early to lifestyle related disease, I started my practice with health in mind. Today our clinic has a 700+ patient practice and is growing. We serve a community of people interested in preserving their quality of life and longevity. We offer functional medicine services that include nutrition counseling, physical therapy, acupuncture, massage therapy, oxygen therapy, injection therapy, and much more.

Using a functional medicine approach Tampa Bay Holistic Wellness strives to identify and treat the underlying causes of patient’s illnesses, diseases, and/or dysfunction. We take a patient-centered approach that is customized for each patient experience. We focus on the whole person and not just an isolated set of symptoms. Functional medicine clinicians look for the interactions between genetics, environmental factors and lifestyle which inevitably influence health outcomes.

As the owner and medical director of Tampa Bay Holistic Wellness, I practice what I teach. What began as a journey to change the trajectory of my life, evolved into helping others do the same.