About Josie

Josie Nelson is the founder of Integrative Health Strategies and the Program Director of Documenting Hope. She is a certified health coach, an ethicist, an advocate, and a lifetime student of holistic health. With a skillful mix of insight and analysis, Josie consults on a wide range of integrative health matters and helps her clients navigate a health landscape that is so saturated with quick fixes and conflicting points of view that discernment can be difficult.

Working sometimes independently and at other times as part of a collaborative team of doctors and other health practitioners, Josie is always learning: from key mentors, courses and conferences, the published literature, and from her clients. She has a knack for finding little clues that can make a big difference. Whether sifting through a health history, listening closely to a client, strategizing about next steps, or looking at a set of recent lab results, Josie cares about the details and the big picture.

 

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Josie Nelson is the founder of Integrative Health Strategies and the Program Director of Documenting Hope. She is a certified health coach, an ethicist, an advocate, and a lifetime student of holistic health. With a skillful mix of insight and analysis, Josie consults on a wide range of integrative health matters and helps her clients navigate a health landscape that is so saturated with quick fixes and conflicting points of view that discernment can be difficult.

Working sometimes independently and at other times as part of a collaborative team of doctors and other health practitioners, Josie is always learning: from key mentors, courses and conferences, the published literature, and from her clients. She has a knack for finding little clues that can make a big difference. Whether sifting through a health history, listening closely to a client, strategizing about next steps, or looking at a set of recent lab results, Josie cares about the details and the big picture.

 

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The Rest of Her Story

Josie’s skill set includes the ability to work with children and adults on personalized nutrition and supplements, functional laboratory analysis and lab review, applied nutrigenomics, emotional and spiritual dimensions of chronic illness, and an understanding of physiology that helps her identify when specialized assessments might be warranted.

Josie’s areas of study also include five element theory, energy medicine, and internal arts. She has practiced Qi Gong since 2008, is a student in Damo Mitchell’s classical school Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist Arts, and was certified to teach material from the school’s curriculum after completing a 2.5 year intensive teacher training in the fall of 2017. 

Before Josie trained to be a health practitioner she studied history, philosophy, religion and ethics while on a path to a doctoral degree at The University of Chicago, receiving degrees from Georgetown University and The University of Chicago Divinity School. She also worked in management consulting with both industrial engineering clients, health industry clients, and on business ethic initiatives.

While this is not the typical path of an integrative health practitioner, the experience proved invaluable to Josie. Not only did it develop her capacity to look at a problem from many different angles, to spot an incomplete or incoherent answer, and to work patiently and systematically through details, it taught her how to regroup when real life experience collides with theory.

Josie also had an unusual opportunity to think deeply about what health actually is, how commonly held ideas about health have changed over time, and about factors that influence the advancement or decline of human well-being. These experiences helped her to become an excellent health detective on behalf of her clients.

Josie has witnessed the profound impact of an approach to health that includes informed consent, access to real food, integrative medicine, and healing modalities not typically embraced by mainstream medicine. She once held elected office in the District of Columbia and lived to tell about it. She has been blessed with two amazing children, a fine sense of humor, and generous teachers.

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