Start Here: The Nervous System Eats First (And Why I Practice Medicine Differently)
The answer is simple: The Nervous System Eats First.
If you have been reading my Notes, you might be wondering who I am and why a doctor is jumping from gastroenterology (Zyrtec and gut microbiomes) to sleep medicine (3 a.m. wake-ups) to trauma psychiatry (Polyvagal theory).
The answer is simple: The Nervous System Eats First.
In medical school, they teach us to treat the body like a series of disconnected rooms. Cardiology takes the heart. Gastroenterology takes the gut. Neurology takes the brain.
But your body doesn’t operate in silos. Your body is an interconnected ecosystem, and the nervous system is the CEO. If your nervous system is stuck in chronic survival mode—running from a tiger that isn’t there—it doesn’t matter how many hormones you take, how many supplements you swallow, or how much sleep hygiene you practice.
You cannot heal a body that is actively trying to survive.
I know this because I didn’t just study it. I lived it.
The Surgeon Who Forgot How to Feel Hunger
For the first half of my life, my nervous system was in a state of chronic threat. I grew up in a household full of chaos, where softness wasn’t an option. I learned to survive by going fast, staying ahead, and disconnecting from my body.
That dissociation made me an excellent surgeon. I spent nine years in surgical training, logging 144-hour work weeks. I could stand at an operating table for thirty hours straight. I perfected the art of shutting my body down—ignoring hunger, ignoring fatigue, ignoring the need for the bathroom—because that is what the environment required.
I ignored my body right up until 2014, when a massive pulmonary embolism blocked both of my lungs. I was a physician. I knew the signs. And I still almost went to work instead of the ER. That is what it looks like when you have spent your whole life overriding your body’s signals to keep performing.
The ER team told me if I had waited any longer, I would be dead.
The veil finally lifted. I realized that the way I was practicing medicine—and living my life—was not sustainable.
The Real Work Begins: Safety as Treatment
When I left surgery and began to heal myself, I realized that talk therapy alone wasn’t enough. My conscious brain could rationalize everything, but my nervous system was still frozen. I had to learn how to bypass my conscious mind and signal safety directly to my body.
I studied neuroaesthetics—how beauty, light, and color literally change your heart rate and muscle tone.
I read The Body Keeps the Score.
I learned that the gut is the second brain, and that sleep is where the nervous system repairs itself.
I realized that sleep, the gut, and the nervous system are not separate departments. They are one system.
And when perimenopause hits, that system goes haywire. For a neurodivergent woman who has spent 40 years masking, her nervous system is completely exhausted. When you add hormonal fluctuation to an exhausted nervous system, you get the crashes, the brain fog, the 3 a.m. wake-ups, and the chronic burnout.
Why I Built This Space
My mother sat in a hospital room recently, fighting a medical system that kept dismissing her, and she looked at me and said, “They trained y’all to be employees.”
She was right. The system trains doctors to manage parts, write prescriptions, and move to the next room. It does not train doctors to look at the whole woman.
I am not an employee anymore. I built this space—and my telehealth practice—because women need a physician who can see across systems.
When I talk about the gut, sleep, and trauma, I am talking about the foundation. If your gut is on fire, your sleep is destroyed, and your nervous system is in threat mode, giving you hormones is like painting a house with a crumbling foundation.
We have to fix the foundation first.
Welcome to my Substack. This is where we learn to stop surviving, and start healing.