We were lucky to catch up with Emily Sadri recently and have shared our conversation below.

Emily, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

The first five years of my career I worked as a Nurse Midwife and NP in a busy, Cleveland based midwifery practice. We attended births in one of the large hospital systems. I loved the work, but the lifestyle, specifically the hospital overnights, and expectation to see 20+ patients in one day in the office, really wore on me. I considered myself a healthy person, and yet it felt impossible to stay well. I wanted to be a model for my patients, and yet I constantly battled overwhelm and fatigue. One year, my entire family got sick with the flu. Everyone recovered, but I stayed sick. I hardly took time away from work, and one day, about a month after I first got sick, one of the physicians I worked with pulled me aside in the clinic. “You don’t look so good,” she said. She insisted on working me up, and I was shocked to realize I’d been walking around with a fever. I had developed post flu pneumonia. Before leaving the office I saw one more patient. Driving home that day I knew something had to change. I remember calling my boss and even though she tried to be supportive, I could hear her frustration that she’d need to scramble to cover my hospital call, and reschedule my office visits.

I was so tired of feeling tired, running on empty, and pushing past my body’s red flags for the sake of my patients.

Women do this all the time. We ignore our needs, and our health for our families, and for the sake of being good employees/business owners/fill in the blanks.

After I recovered I began my training in functional medicine, and three years later I happily resigned from my job and opened a private holistic medicine practice.

I help women figure out the root causes to their fatigue, brain fog, digestive and hormonal issues and rebuild their health.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been in the medical field for more than fifteen years. My undergraduate degree is in Acting from NYU (that’s a whole other story!). One of my “survival jobs” after graduation was teaching music to moms and babies. I taught in a space that was shared with childbirth preparation classes, and I loved watching pregnant families settle in on the carpet when I finished up teaching. I was working with families just a few months past that – with babies as small as four months. I became deeply interested in the transition to motherhood.

A few years later I enrolled in nursing school, with the intention to become a midwife. In my early nursing career (as a labor and delivery nurse in Manhattan’s lower east side) my side hustle was working as a birth assistant for a homebirth midwifery practice in NYC. The difference between institutionalized care and homebirth care was stark.

Every day that I worked in the hospital I felt like I was on a covert mission to protect and support women from insensitive and rushed care, and to help them avoid unwanted interventions that were the norm, unfortunately.

The US spends more money than any other nation on maternity care yet our outcomes rank below every other industrialized nation. We have three times as many maternal deaths, annually, as France, for example.

I came to realize, early on, that excellent care began with intimate, trusting relationships. A prenatal visit with a homebirth midwife is always an hour or more long, compared to ten or twenty minutes in the traditional setting.

I went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania and received a dual degree in Women’s Health and Midwifery. After graduation, I moved with my family to Cleveland, and joined a four midwife practice on the west side.

In 2021 I opened Holistic Women’s CLE, a small boutique women’s functional medicine practice that brings the heart of midwifery to the science of cutting edge integrative medicine modalities.

The women I work with don’t feel well, and have been told by traditional doctors that “everything is fine,” and their lab work is normal. I use complex, advanced testing, such as stool testing, and urine hormone testing, to find where the body is not functioning optimally.

In functional medicine we aim to identify imbalances before they become debilitating illnesses. For example, most metabolic disease (high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and insulin resistance) begins more than a decade before it’s diagnosed. It takes the right testing, a trained eye, and a skilled listener to identify what’s really happening in the body, and then to walk alongside a person as they attain optimal health.

Most of my patients are aged 35-55, and I help them understand their stress response, hormones, and specific metabolic type so that they can have optimal energy, mental clarity, and feel great in their body.

I love what I do, and it echoes midwifery in so many ways. I help women show up for themselves and their families as their best selves – and that impacts generations.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Compassion. Authentic listening. Being less concerned with what you can do to fix someone and first learning to hold space. So much of what I do is creating a venue for undoing the trauma women have experienced from medical visits where they felt unheard, unseen, and even gaslit over their symptoms. Humans crave connection and love over everything else.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start?

Not a lot of people realize that women are more likely to start their business with a no interest credit card, versus a small business loan. I started with nothing but a credit card with an eight thousand dollar limit. As I earned money, I paid off that debt in my second month and reinvested a large portion of my first year’s revenue back into the business. I was resourceful and wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.holisticwomenscle.com
• Instagram: @emilysadri_np
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085690782589
• Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/emily-sadri-06b60814
• Other: Www.emilysadri.com My practice is located in the Van Aken District in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Image Credits
Images by Danielle Fantis Photgraphy, Suzuran Photography and Six Figs Coaching