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Patients keep adding prescriptions and still do not get better. The pharmacist filling those scripts often sees the pattern and may recognize opportunities to address gaps in care. Functional medicine training gives pharmacists another way to examine what might be driving those health challenges.
On Functional Medicine for Real World Impact, host Tracy Harrison talks with Dee Ann Valles, a pharmacist with more than 35 years in clinical, operations, and compounding practice and a certification in functional medicine. After a hard season of burnout and her own health challenges, Dee Ann left corporate pharmacy and built a hybrid career that includes work at an independent compounding pharmacy.
Dee Ann makes the case for integrating functional and conventional medicine at the pharmacy counter. She lays out what GLP-1 lifestyle support should cover beyond a routine prescription pickup, starting with the system she checks before protein goals ever come up. Tracy explains why deprescribing and polypharmacy review are a natural strength for pharmacists. Dee Ann also shares the one intake question she wants every practitioner to ask more often.
If you are a prescriber who wants a stronger partner on medication decisions, or a pharmacist weighing functional medicine training, this episode shows where that expertise fits in root-cause care. Listen to hear how Dee Ann became a functional medicine pharmacist without leaving her pharmacy training behind.
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Why Pharmacists Belong in Functional Medicine
02:09 From Pharmacist Burnout to a Hybrid Career
12:26 Carrying Your Pharmacy Training Into New Practice
17:30 Pharmacists as the Bridge Between Care Models
20:25 Deprescribing and Polypharmacy Through a Pharmacist Lens
22:14 How Case-Based Training Changed Her Clinical Lens
25:14 GLP-1 Lifestyle Support Beyond the Pharmacy Counter
32:40 Radical Self-Care and Practitioner Depletion
38:45 The Intake Question Practitioners Should Ask More
41:09 Advice for the Aspiring Functional Medicine Pharmacist
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