Board Certified in Functional Medicine
Nurse Practitioner
Rebecca Hart obtained a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2008 and a Master of Science in Nursing for Adult Nurse Practitioner in 2012, both from Armstrong State University. Rebecca worked as a coronary care ICU nurse for four years while obtaining her NP degree. For the past 7 years as an adult nurse practitioner, Rebecca has worked in Critical Care/Pulmonary medicine, sleep medicine, internal medicine, and wound care. Rebecca is certified in functional medicine from the Institute of Functional Medicine. She realized that the root cause of the problem needs to be discovered for the patient to truly heal. The patient needs to be treated in a holistic approach: body, mind, and spirit for overall faith, hope, and wellness. When she is not working, she enjoys gardening and working on her farm. Rebecca is married with two boys.
I was always a healthy child and the doctor would always tell me jokingly that I must be eating an apple a day. As a teenager, I started having acne and was prescribed a daily antibiotic. A few years after this, I developed a goiter and was started on thyroid medication. Soon after, I developed terrible GI symptoms and rashes. As my symptoms progressed, I started dropping weight and having blackouts when standing quickly at work. After seeing multiple physicians who could not figure out my problem or telling me it was in my head, a nice lady handed me a card for a functional medicine physician. I learned that with the years of antibiotics, I lost gut integrity and immunity from leaky gut which led to my thyroid problem, multiple food allergies, and malabsorption. As I healed my GI tract, my symptoms resolved and I returned to a normal weight. By my late 20s, I still had problems with chronic fatigue. After hearing physicians say “You are just tired because you work a lot” and “Your labs are normal”, I was told I was depressed. No depression existed but fatigue and tiredness. I started actively researching and learned that genetics and environmental exposures lead to the worsening of my symptoms. I have overcome my autoimmune disease and chronic fatigue with diet and other lifestyle factors.
In my thirties, my little boy started having behavioral issues. After observing him, I noticed that his ADHD and autistic tendencies were not occurring all the time. Desperately wanting help for my child who could not understand how the action met the consequence, I turned again to functional medicine. With healing his GI tract of multiple imbalances, his behaviors have improved with diet and lifestyle.