Interview with Functional Medicine

We’re honored to feature Rebecca Hart, Nurse Practitioner and founder of Faith, Hope, and Wellness, in this special Community Spotlight interview. Rebecca is a functional medicine provider who offers compassionate, individualized care with a focus on treating the root cause of health concerns — not just the symptoms.
In this interview, Rebecca shares her approach to whole-person healing, the unique conditions she commonly treats, and how her faith-based practice helps patients feel seen, heard, and empowered on their wellness journey. From hormone imbalances and gut health to chronic fatigue and autoimmune conditions, her expertise is both broad and deeply impactful.
This spotlight is a must-watch for anyone looking to better understand functional medicine, explore integrative care options, or connect with a provider who blends clinical excellence with genuine care.

So glad to talk to you today. So what we are doing is we are doing a Spotlight series on the top functional medicine practitioners in our area in the Poole Savannah area. And of course, you are my number one U and so I wanted you to be able to just tell our community a little bit more about you about what you do about what you specialize in what you’re passionate about, and how our community will be able to find you and work with you. Oh wow U. Well, thanks for thanks for having me.

I’m honored.

Let’s see well. I guess first I need to start with functional medicine, so functional medicine is getting to the root cause of the problem and not just masking it with more pills. And here’s the deal. The pills can also be supplements, so it’s not just masking it with supplements too. Because I have a lot of patients, they don’t want to fix their diet and I cannot outs supplement a crappy diet, so number one lifestyle changes are huge and theres there’s a lot of people who come in who have the lifestyle completely down, so they’ve got their diet honed in. They’ve got their exercise honed in, but they’re just still not feeling their best. So you know we do a full workup. So it’s myself and two other functionally minded nurse practitioners. I went back and got my Institute of Functional Medicine certification. So back in 2020, it’s growing quite popular. Back in 2020. I was one of 1300 in the world. Now it’s around 3, 100 ifm certified practitioners in well, actually the whole world. So it’s internationally so.

As far as what we do we look more for the root causes so that could be autoimmune diseases. It could be hormone issues. It could be, you know, diet changes it could be. There is the list that goes on and on and on. Some people just come in and say I just want to age gracefully, which is a good goal and have anti-aging. That’s very few because a lot of my people are chronically ill and so they may not acutely get sick. But they are chronically sick and they’re very, very sick people and they’ve. Unfortunately a lot of them can be gaslit by the medical community, meaning that you know their labs all look normal, you look fine.

And so they may absolutely look normal, but they sure don’t feel normal.

And so a lot of it to be for me. So our clinic is called Faith. Hope and Wellness. You have to have faith. Then you can have hope again because a lot of people come in like I actually felt like I was heard and I have hope which I haven’t had in years. And then patients can be well. So a lot of it’s listening and empowering the patient like yes, or something is wrong with you. You are validated, we’re going to fix this and so the people who do that’s the other thing is functional. Medicine is work. It’s not just I want a quick fix and that’s going to be it. So it’s a lot of education to teach the patient as well. And it’s a lot, it’s it’s a lot of investigator work, so you have to find a root cause. So autoimmune can be six or seven different things that’s making the immune system angry. So a lot of the times you’re ruling out one and then. And a lot of times.

It is multifactorial, so it may be we’re fixing the gut. Okay, the gut was 2030 percent of it then all right now, detox, it’s toxic load because we’re exposed to so many toxins. I was happy about that about environmental factors. What do you see are the top environmental toxins or things that are affecting our health today.

Like a state being one so round up, of course, that one’s been in the news a lot with lymphoma they have actually tied. That’s the only one that I know of recently that they’ve tied it to. BPA Plastic is huge.

So that’s in our own female leggings that we wear is BPA plastic. Yes.

They’ve gone away from mercury fillings and now they’re using composite fillings and composite fillings, have BPA plastic in them. So there’s a lot in women’s Health Products. Women’s Health Products. The average woman puts on over 100 chemicals on their body before they leave the house every morning.

Whether it be, you know. Shampoo. Conditioner, face cream, makeup.

Anything and everything washing the dishes so have they have a lot of different chemicals that we’re exposed to and just our microbiome. Our microbiome is a very hot topic in the functional world and the microbiome suffering because we’re exposed to so many toxins so like round up, round up actually messes with the sugar mate pathway. The sugar mate pathway is basically bacterial pathways and so it’s not necessarily killing us. But it’s killing our bacteria and actually if you look at a flea or an earthworm, they have around 30 genes of DNA we only have 24. So technically DNA dnawise earthworm or flea is more complex than we are. What makes us complex is our microbiome.

And so with our microbiome being complex it makes us complex. But if we’re losing our diversity, you can see where autism and different chronic illnesses are now playing a part in our in our chronic. All of our chronic issues today is just based off the inflammation. Oh, absolutely how do you feel about when we start talking about microbiome like antibiotics? I know there’s a lot of controversy surrounding overuse of antibiotics, so there is overuse of antibiotics. Then again there’s times where I have to use antibiotics. I don’t like to jump to antibiotics, but if somebody has lime and they’re having a whole lot of issues, i love to use herbs. But if things are dire then we have to go to antibiotics. It’s not something I like to jump to, but sometimes it’s necessary. So a lot of times you have the you know the risk outweigh excuse me. The benefits outweigh the risk, so you’ll have the I love herbs. Don’t get me wrong. Herbs are one of my passions, especially fur, a line and a bunch of other issues.

Let’s see what else was I going to say,

But antibiotics in general yes, they are used too much. Especially. I think now it’s getting where a lot of mothers are less using antibiotics than their children compared to what they were in our day. Our day we didn’t. I think they. It was kind of the start of the antibiotic revolution with all the seal and the bubble gum and the liquid and all that stuff but the 2 thousand s. Oh, wow, like the mothers, just took them straight in and would give them antibiotics. It’s like. Oh, they got a sniffle. Oh, we’re taking them in, whereas now it’s like, let the fever ride, let it let it try to do its job. But yes, antibiotics, a lot of my early 20 year olds. I don’t know if the parents just didn’t let them play outside. Some of them were c-section babies. Some of them were given multiple antibiotics from zero to three years old. So we go into all that in our health. Sake history from like birth until now. And so my oldest one of my oldest patients c-section patients is 62, but I have one that’s 49 and.

She had diarrhea chronic diarrhea. She couldn’t drive from here to Atlanta without having she just couldn’t eat. If she didn’t eat, she didn’t have an accident and which was horrible because she really wanted to travel in life and everything else. So we did a stool test on her again. She was a c-section baby, so I guess I need to explain c-section. You’re making incision in the abdomen, pulling the baby out from there. So the baby isn’t coming through the vaginal canal, picking up the microbiome of the mother. So basically what happens is there is a doctor Oban up in Harvard who is testing babies who are born by c-section, testing the microbiome of the baby, testing the microbiome of the mother and they don’t match. So she’s doing a seed pro seizure. So she calls it where somebody’s a c-section. Maybe she sterile cloth wis the vaginal microbiome and then rubs it on the baby’s face. And then she’s retesting the microbiome of the baby and the mother and they map.

So just that little bit of microbiome inoculation of the baby, it helps the baby they’ve come to determine. Kids have less asthma, less allergies if they are not c-section babies. Wow. Wow. I talked to a lot of moms, about two as far as when they’re making birth choices and decisions as far as vaginal versus csection, and that is one of the benefits of a vaginal delivery.

Is to get that that seating and be able to get the those good healthy Bacteria.

Right the there’s more research now going on that baby actually may be exposed in utero to mom’s microbiome delivered through the buzzstream which is completely brush off the docket at a conference i just went to in November, but this one lady in particular. She had hardly any microbiome. She was eating all the right things to feed her microbiome, but she wasn’t making any butyrate and butyrate is a postbiotic and butyrate helps keep you from getting diarrhea. So she was not making any butyrate hence what she was having diarrhea. So we gave her some butyrate.

And her whole microbiome was on the very, very low side. So what I did is. I told her to go play in the dirt. I told her to do a garden. I told her to go play in the ocean and start hiking and really, really getting into those good microbes, you know, anywhere in the earth. While she took me literally she went to Antarctica, she went to Spain, she went to Costa Rica, she went to South America, in South Africa, and she in a year built up her microbiome back, mostly, probably because she was eating all these other foods in these other countries which have loads of microbiommon, and why there’s no pesticides really there.

So she got she’s absorbing her B- 12 again, whereas before she was not like so her microbiome is so much healthier, she looks healthier. She doesn’t have the diarrhea as bad anymore unless she eat something. You know bad that she’s not supposed to eat. But yeah. I love those tips because I think one of the big things now is like probiotics. Everybody’s think, you know, talking about like ingesting good bacteria. But like you Said was playing in the dirt, going in the ocean, being out in nature, which is something for a lot of us that we don’t necessarily do. But that is how we can increase our exposure. Like Said just typically.

The thing is there are so many millions of microbes that we haven’t even discovered. There’s only about 101, 100 that are in a Petri dish in a bottle. And so here we are taking these microbes every day.

And what we’re doing is creating a monoculture meaning we’re creating the big big populations of the same bacteria and other thing. That’s if they’re even getting down there because they have to be viable through the stomach acid and then make it through the small intestine and then open up in the large intestine. So as you see, it takes them a while to get where they need to go. So thats if they survive even getting down there. So some of the probiotics you may be taking, they just may be washing. So that’s why it’s important to have a really, really good probiotic, something that you know maybe bile resistant, meaning that you know the bile isn’t going to break it down through the stomach acid and it’s going to pass through and actually get to the large INT testing where it needs to be. That’s why it’s important to look, and it’s also important to switch your probiotics, so I have patients switch up their probtics, don’t be using the same probiotic over and over again because you’re going, get a monoculture.

I know I had um, i had took a class from a nutritionist and she said about every two to three months. I don’t know if if if you kind of please sometimes I’ll do a monthly, sometimes two to three months. It just kind of depends on the patient. It also depends on how low they are and the strain that you have them in, because a lot of times you know we can do PCR testing on specific strains of probiotics. And so those specific strains really.

You want to put them on a little bit longer if they have none in their gut. I love that you talk about that because I think so much of it right now for a lot of people. It’s just guesswork. They say, okay, I’m having gut issues. I’m going to take a probiotic. They find a random probiotic on Amazon and start taking it. But like you said, it’s about figuring out where you. You are low and it’s more of a personalized approach versus just take this one brand or this one. So this not. This is not baking other functional providers, but you will find a lot of and I get it too because it’s getting functional medicine out there. So you have a lot of well-known providers. They have protocols and things of that nature. But here’s the deal. You and somebody else down the road y’all are not alike, it’s not treating robots, and so you may have a specialized, you know everything. I can tell you that faith open wellness is specialized because of the fact I don’t like to guess.

You know sometimes it is practice we do have to make an educated guess and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. It’s the whole point of practice, but with I love doing GI gi tests like Genova because Genova specifically they will use Petri dish. They’re the only ones that I know. It will use Petri dish and it will use PCR. So PCR is more of DNA sequencing. So they look at how much DNA of let’s say E. Coli is there. But then they will grow E. Coli on the Petri dish and it may not be robust. Then again it may be robust and you really want E. Coli in your gut. And so I have some patients they have no E. Coli in their gut. You know there’s really not a good situation at this point to go and put E. Coli in the gut because it’s probably going to make you sick, you know, with food poisoning. But people really need E. Coli in their gut for a healthy gut and.

It’s not one of those things that it’s replaceable at this point right, which would be nice. But there are a lot of patients you find they do not have good E. Coli in their in their whole mill U of their microbiome.

So what should what should those patients do? Or is it just kind of something that you have? So sometimes sometimes. So you’ve got a product called like Megapoor. You know, they’ll claim that you know their’re spore based probiotic. Well, they have the research to prove it. I don’t know necessarily about E. Coli, but they have other ones that they will build up diversity of other microbiome bugs due to those backus spore based species of probiotics. So they have their research to back their products. But you know again, it’s go digging the dirt. You know, breathe the air in and put your feet in the dirt and you know, try to. I’m not saying eat with dirty hands. But you know definitely your vegetables are our soil. That’s another thing. Our soil isn’t as as fresh with nutrients as it used to be either. So that’s a lot of the thing is we’re not getting the nutrition in the nutrients either of.

Our food because we’re growing it even like outside my in my yard. I have my winter garden, so I have radishes and lettuce and kale and things like that. You know, it’s going to be nutritious because it’s organic. But it’s probably not going to be as nutritious as our grandparents would have eaten off of the land. Because when you use up the land, we’re not putting the nutrients back into the soil like we used to. You’re very correct about that. Just kind of kept strip in it. Yes. So for patients who currently have say a regular like primary care doctor and they’re wondering, do I need to also see a functional medicine doctor.

What would you say to them as far as why it would be important to maybe do to have both.

So I have a lot of patients who I actually request that you still keep your primary care provider that way in case like let’s say you get sick half the time they are messaging me because they want some natural fix. They don’t want to use antibiotics. They they try to avoid those things, but a lot of times I’ll tell them to keep their primary care number one. I don’t want to be on call 24, seven like other physicians are and providers and nurse practitioners. But yeah. I tell them to keep their primary care. But a lot of times we will see both. So a lot of times like I have one patient. I actually talk with the primary care provider and make sure she’s older, so she’s doing her thing. I’m doing more lifestyle functional and she’s like we’ll meet in the middle, do our thing together and a lot of times that’s what I do with my supervising physician as well like we’ll see patients together and.

A lot of the patients they want especially so I’ll explain to you that in the medical community there are horses and so horses are regular people who have regular problems.

Zebras are people who have extraordinary issues who have problems. Who doctors really don’t go chasing after.

Unicorns are what I have which are make-believe things which are hard to even prove to exist in chronic illness and things like that. So a lot of the patients I need a primary care physician who will work well with you. I need somebody who will, you know, work together with you that, you know we can get this problem together. They don’t think I’m, you know, who won’t think I’m crazy or.

Anything like that and like trust your opinion but also you trust theirs and so because I will tell you like a lot of doctors, still they don’t, you’ll have different doctors and so I’ll have patients go to a primary or they’ll go to a specialist and oh I’ve seen my functional person. So for instance. I have one patient in Atlanta. Actually she came down to see me. She thought she had long COVID and she didn’t have long COVID at all. It just so happened she had a pituitary tumor and so the pituitary tumor had cut out her hormones and she hadn’t had hormones in six years and so at that point she was 44 and so she had stopped cycling at like 37 and so she was getting sick all the time and she’s like what in the world is going on. And so I found the pituitary tumor while her husband they live up in Atlanta. I said you need to see an endocrinologist or you need to see a nerve surgeon because it was teetering on the sides of being removed because it was about one centimeter.

And so I said you need to go see the endocrinologist. So they went to go see the endocrinologists and endocrinologists is like at Emory who picked this up and they’re like. Oh well, our functional medicine practitioner. She rolled her eyes and the husband’s like. No, you don’t get to roll your eyes, she found it you didn’t. So there’s a lot of doctors who are still and.

Extenders so nurse practitioners and pas who are still like know functional medicine is hogwash.

But it it’s looking at the patient as a whole. So you may have a patient especially these chronic sick patients who have a GI physician, a pulmonary physician, a cardiologist, endocrinologist, a radiologist like they’ve got all these numbers of physicians and they aren’t talking. Yeah, so I have a background where I used to work for a critical care doc, who was also a pulmonologist who was also an internal medicine and who was also sleep medicine and critical care. And so with having a wide background of such of that nature, I’m able to put a lot of the puzzle pieces together with having that conventional background as well and putting all of that together so that so a lot of times like I have elderly ladies that just need a voice because they don’t know what’s going on because nobody will explain it to them. So I take time and I sit there and explain it because some doctors, they just don’t have the time or maybe they just don’t want to. I honestly I try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt that they actually want to take time with the patient to understand.

But some it’s, it’s hard and so a lot of times it’s for me, it’s a ministry, this is a ministry, it’s trying to help people be heard and a lot of time it’s just trying to make people better.

And when they get better and partly what has been my success when they get better, they tell somebody else they tell somebody else they tell somebody else. If you don’t know what’s going on with you. Rebecca will figure it out. And so I try to just listen, understand, do the right testing and I don’t. You know, if I have to guess. I have to guess. But a lot of times like you said, they just kind of guess and it’s.

It it’s not necessarily what may be best or tailor fitted if you want to say or customized absolutely, absolutely and I love your background because I do feel like just like all physicians aren’t created equal or have the same background. All functional medicine practitioners may not have the same background, so I think your extensive, extensive background in the medical field like said working in internal medicine and critical care and sleep medicine that you’re able to really understand, kind of both sides and and have a very like comprehensive education and understanding, which is how I found you is just because I had so many patients that are like, yeah, my functional medicine practitioner Rebecca Har Rebecca Har. I kept hearing your name. I’m like, i’re telling me all of these amazing success stories of how you’ve healed their gut, how you’re working with them with their Lyme disease, and how they’re really getting their life back, which is why I really wanted to be able to sit down and talk with you and highlight.

All of the amazing things that you and your team does. Because I know you said you have you have two practitioners that were.

I do I couldn’t do it all I wish, but I couldn’t do it all. So I’m happy to have Dallas and Lilia with me and so they they bring their own special niches to the table of what they of what they do. And you know it’s been an honor and a blessing to have both of them at the office as well. And the thing is with a lot of these patients, it’s also working on their so it’s working on the holistic so it’s working on.

The body is working on the mind, their spirit, because a lot of them are crushed. They are just crushed when they come in the office because they’ve been to mayo. You know, I’ve had one of them that’s been to National Jewish in Colorado because she came from Colorado. They’ve been to multiple. It may have stacks of paper in this thick when they come in of like, this is all what I’ve had done. You know, this is everything and it’s’s, it’s hard for them. Its it’s hard for them and I will tell you some patients, it’s hard for them to understand what functional functional is because some of them or are so tied to a diagnosis. In other words, it may be like fibberalia, or it maybe. And it’s like, but really what’s the root cause of your fibermyalgia? Yes, you heard all over, i get that. But what is actually driving the fiber Malia itself. So some patients? It’s Epstein bar. So Epstein bar is a herpe virus which causes mode. 40 percent of the population has it at age nine. So. But here we found recently just in November at the conference they were doing research and they were doing.

Basically studies on long COVID and so they were basically showing that 41 percent of the population who had COVID had reactivated Epstein. Barr.

And then 6060 something percent had reactivated human herpearus Sick. And so you wonder why these people are feeling sick. It’s not necessarily yes, covid started it, yeah, but what is now doing the damage now, you know could be CR, yeah. And that’s something that I’ve heard so much about as long Covid. But long Covid definitely seems like a very much like an umbrella term that people aren’t really able to fully define. So that is very U very cool that you’re getting all this new knowledge about. Truly, what what is this long Covid? What are these viruses that are being activated? This is the first time’m hearing about it, so that’s really, really fascinating. There’s, there’s, and so there’s a i have one patient, her long Covid she suffered four years, so after she had Covid she really has lime. So her Lyme reactivated after the Covid because the Covid decreased the immune system. So here comes lime out to play. So because the immune system was being handled or the immune system was handling the line. So it’s it’s Covid completely stirred the pot.

So all of these things are now. That’s why I said investigative work. I was in Lion because you have to investigate, you know, is it some viral issue that’s causing for the patient? Is it lime? Is it a confection of Lyme? Or is it like I said a viral load? Is it parasite? Is it another bacteria of dysbiosis of the gut? Like it’s it’s on and on and on like you could spend days. I remember the last time we talked that remember one of the things you mentioned was mold and how mold is huge, especially here in Savannah. So I treat a lot of mold, lot of mold. And so those I think are the the most that gets misunderstood by just providers period because it’s not something you can see and these people are so chronically ill and it’s their house that’s actually making them ill, but it could have been the house before, so they’re in a clean house now. But if you don’t get rid of those toxins because 25 percent of the population have Haley genetics where they cannot detox the mycotoxins and so they can’t detox them, if they can’t detox them, they just stay sick.

Wow and their immune system stays down and I have women. Usually I can tell the women because they’ll have some sort of histamine issues where they’ll have reflux hives, anxiety, insomnia, they can’t sleep well, they will have low testosterone so that’s huge for a woman. So I’m seeing 20 yeararol women who should have testosterones in the 20 s maybe 30 s, which is normal. But I’m seeing them less than three.

Wow so why? Why is that? Because all that testosterone shutting over to estrogen so mycotoxins increase. Aromatase. Aromatase is the enzyme that pushes all the testosterone into estrogen. So these girls heavy cycles, heavy periods PMS symptoms, all the excess estrogen and guess what? When you have low progesterone compared to estrogen, you even have more histamine issues. And so you’ve got histamine on top of histamine. So you can have snooty nose like I said the hives just all sorts of stuff. So these people are completely run down and completely ruined, and they just don’t feel well fatigue, fibermyia, they’re aching all over and so like I had one, she was a teacher. So teacher, I’m like most schools notorious for mold. Why during the summer it’s hot here. You think they’re running the air condition when nobody’s there. New.

So most of the teachers come back to their rooms. They’re highly moldy.

So clean them, clean them up, not a problem. But that doesn’t get everything. So long Story had a teacher.

A young black woman and had a lot of fibroids, had a lot of issues with excess estrogen and stuff and long story short. We ended up putting her on some binders. She’s like. Oh my gosh. Rebecca. I’m telling everybody about you. I’m not hurting anymore, I’m doing great and have we completely fully gotten where we need to get with her? No. But she’s feeling so much better than what she did. Because now she I mean, she’s got the greatest. She’s the great teacher, she’s good with the kids and she’s just.

She was just struggling, she’s like I can’t make it and she has a really good work ethic. But she’s like I can’t make it from point A to point B. So.

I would I would have put my money on it that she had Epstein bar, she did not. She did not have reactivated up Steam Bar at all she had mold and so when we looked at all her markers for it’s called Sears which is chronic inflammatory response syndrome, they were all off the charts. So I started her run a binder prescription binder. And since we have been she is HUNS better sleeping better. Fiber Mile is better and she’s doing great. That is amazing, that is amazing. Well. I want to wrap up. We are almost out of time, i your stories and when you talk about your the your current patients and past patients. I always learned something every time we talk U and learn something new about chronic disease and illness. And I think that you are bringing such a light and a voice to people who maybe feel like they don’t who feel like they’ve been dismissed. So I wanted to give you the last three minutes if you had any final words for our community about how to read you about what they should do.

So one I tell people I learned two new things to day.

Because it is constant with the research and everything else trying to learn the greatest. That’s another thing. Functional medicine is about ten to 15 years ahead of conventional medicine, so we are in Poole so right off of a Canal street. Our first appointment is two hours long and it is two hours long. For a reason, because we literally spend all that time talking about the issues that the patient is having, and you know how they are when they were born. Were they sick? Where they you know, did they have trauma? Because trauma, you carry that, you carry that to adulthood and that can make you chronically ill as well. So I have a lot of people that we have to work through trauma, and we teach that too.

So we go through all of that so there’s myself, there’s Lolita and there’s Dallas. So there’s several of us to go around as far as at faith, hope and Wellness. And basically you call our office and so you know know we can give you the office number. You want me to say the office number you can. I will make sure to link all of your information down below. So basically our office number call the office number. Shannon is our office manager and she’d be more than happy to talk to you about know everything that we do. Basically we do anything that walks through the door, so you we’ll do high blood pressure, willll do chronic inflammation, will’ll do high cholesterol. We’ll say Do I just want to live longer? Those are kind of easy cases and then we have other ones that are mystery cases and we have to figure them out. And some people like we had some people just come in with straight up hair loss and like the one that had hair loss she actually had Li the other one that had hair loss, he worked in a bank and he was exposed to mold and we actually grew his hair back. Wo cool.

That was actually Lilia Patient and he actually has his testimonial on our Facebook