Functional Nurse Academy Success Story: Lori’s Journey From School Nurse to Functional Medicine Entrepreneur

Oct 5 / Melissa Schreibfeder, BSN, RN, BC-FMP

🎧 Listen to my podcast with Lori below!

For Lori, education has always been at the heart of nursing.

Throughout a career spanning decades, she worked in obstetrics, labor and delivery, the operating room, a physician’s office, care coordination, childbirth education, and eventually school nursing. She also earned a master’s degree in health education.

But her path into functional medicine wasn’t driven by her professional experience alone.

After struggling for more than 20 years with chronic gut issues, fatigue, sleep problems, and gluten sensitivity, Lori began looking more deeply into her own health. That personal experience eventually led her to integrative health, functional medicine, and a new way of using the nursing skills she had developed throughout her career.

Today, Lori is a board-certified functional medicine practitioner, Functional Nurse Academy graduate, and owner of her own wellness practice.

And she’s found a way to combine two things she has always loved: nursing and education.

Going Deeper With Functional Medicine

Before discovering Functional Nurse Academy, Lori had already completed an integrative health practitioner certification and had begun seeing clients.

But she wanted to go deeper.

“I wanted to use my nursing expertise,” Lori explained during our conversation.

That desire eventually led her to FNA.

Through the program, Lori says she developed a deeper understanding of blood chemistry, functional testing, and how different pieces of a client’s health picture may connect. She particularly enjoyed expanding her knowledge around women’s hormonal health and learning more about tools such as DUTCH testing and GI mapping. 

Today, those skills are incorporated into her work with women experiencing concerns such as weight gain and hormonal changes.

She also continues to use the FNA Mentorship Library and monthly education to keep learning even when she can’t attend live sessions.

Lori shared that she absolutely loved FNA and easily earned back her financial investment after completing the program. 

Building a Functional Nursing Practice Around Education

One thing that stands out about Lori’s business is that she hasn’t limited herself to one-on-one functional medicine services.


She has built education into her practice in several different ways.


In addition to working remotely with individual clients, Lori teaches community workshops, has provided corporate wellness education, and collaborates with other local wellness professionals.


One of her newest educational interests came directly from her own experience with food.


After avoiding and struggling with gluten for years, Lori began researching freshly milled grains. She purchased a grain mill, started milling wheat berries and making bread at home, and became fascinated by the differences between freshly milled grain and commercially processed flour.


That interest eventually became something she could teach others.


Lori now hosts local classes where participants learn about freshly milled grains and watch her demonstrate how to mill grain and make a basic loaf of bread. She has even rented a commercial kitchen to hold the workshops.


The classes have also created an interesting connection with her functional medicine business.


Some existing clients have attended her milling classes, while some people who first discovered Lori through the classes have gone on to become one-on-one clients. 


It’s a great example of how a functional nurse can take an area of genuine interest and turn it into another way to educate and connect with the community.

Rethinking the Conversation Around Gluten

A major part of Lori’s current education centers around the way grains are processed.


During the podcast, Lori and I discussed her experience with gluten sensitivity and why she became interested in freshly milled grains.


Lori explained that a whole wheat berry contains the germ, endosperm, and bran. Her classes explore what happens when grain is processed into commercial flour and how that differs from milling whole wheat berries immediately before using them. Pasted text


For Lori, this has changed the way she personally thinks about gluten and whole grains.


It has also reinforced a larger philosophy behind her practice: nutrition education shouldn’t simply be about giving someone a long list of foods to eliminate.


There are situations where an individual may need to avoid a particular food, and celiac disease requires a different conversation. But Lori and I also discussed the importance of looking at food quality, the individual’s overall health picture, and the potential nutritional consequences of unnecessarily restrictive diets.


Rather than automatically focusing on restriction, Lori wants people to learn more about the food they’re eating and how it’s produced.

Prefer to watch? Watch my interview with Lori below!

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