About Me
Hello friends, I believe we are all here for similar reasons. One major reason being that western medicine and insurance companies have left much to be desired. Of course, we need both western healing and some insurance help, but we are here because we know there is much more to optimizing our health than these options afford us. I am Ryan Castorino and I am a family nurse practitioner and patient interested in integrative and functional medicine. I have been a registered nurse since 2005, working in inpatient settings for close to 15 years. I have approximately 5 years of experience in MICU (medical intensive care unit), electrophysiology, and emergency department. Throughout my time as a nurse I always knew there was something deeper to the collective healing needed, both in and out of the hospital. I found that preventing being in the hospital in the first place was the safest and best course of action for a healthy long life, however I do appreciate these services when needed, of course. Unfortunately, because of the way our healthcare has been setup (in the US) the hospital has become a place many people rely on for the everyday needs. This is a much bigger problem that will take more time than I have to fix. I choose to be the solution on the other end, in the realm of prevention and lifestyle medicine, hopefully avoiding or at least significantly reducing the need of a hospital bed. Throughout my career in all of my settings I enjoyed learning everything from healing music, energy, vibrations to Ayurveda, acupuncture, chiropractic, foundation training, etc., I believe this is truly endless . I always knew integration of ALL healing modalities was the key to true healing, mainly because I have witnessed this over and over in every setting I've been in. This includes both as a provider/clinician and a patient myself. Every individual is just that, Individual. This is the key to success, in my opinion. Yes there can be protocols for certain workups in any field but if we lose the ability to adjust to each patient "Individually," we lose an opportunity for optimization. For the last 5+ years I have been working as a family nurse practitioner, basically starting 6 months before the pandemic hit the US. I learned much about myself and the needs of people from around the world, working at a university health center. I found that I enjoyed spending more time than typically allotted to see my patients and found various ways of achieving this on an individual basis. I found a connection with the graduate students who were interested in treating the underlying cause of symptoms and optimizing their lives with a lifestyle medicine approach. Many times I found myself urning to learn more about functional medicine because every tid bit I learned and utilized had a much higher success rate than the standard western medicine model. I was witnessing my patients ,who were ready and willing to learn and make changes, f