Functional Medicine
Sarah Piestrup is a Family Nurse Practitioner with more than 20 years of clinical experience and more than a decade of advanced training and practice in functional medicine.
Her background also includes Traditional East Asian Medicine, acupuncture and herbal medicine, giving her an unusually broad clinical lens. She brings those disciplines together to understand your health history, current symptoms, physiology and the factors that may be keeping you from feeling or functioning as well as you could.
Testing With a Purpose
Sarah uses laboratory testing to answer specific clinical questions, not simply to generate more data. Depending on what your history and symptoms suggest, she may look more closely at cardiovascular risk, gut and microbiome health, thyroid function, hormones, nutrient status, metabolic and mitochondrial function, genetics, environmental exposures, bone health or other underlying factors.
This may include conventional blood work as well as advanced specialty testing when it can provide information that changes the course of care. Results are considered alongside your medical history, medications, nutrition, lifestyle and the way different systems in your body may be influencing one another.
From Information to a Plan
Data matters only if it changes what we do with it.
Sarah uses what she learns to build an individualized plan that may include nutrition, targeted nutrients, herbal medicine, lifestyle changes or medication management. Follow-up testing can then help determine what is changing, what is not and where the plan needs to be adjusted.
Because Sarah is a licensed Family Nurse Practitioner as well as a functional medicine practitioner, functional medicine does not sit outside the rest of your medical care. She can evaluate the whole picture, prescribe when appropriate and help you understand how conventional medicine and integrative approaches can work together.
The goal is not more testing or more supplements. It is a clearer understanding of your body, followed by care that makes sense for you.
