If you found The Medicin because of Immune Intel AHCC, HPV, mushrooms, our podcast, or some random Instagram post, you may not know how any of this actually started.

And it’s kind of a wild story.

There’s a high school romance. A wedding. A divorce. A health crisis. Medicinal mushrooms. Disneyland fireworks. Burning Man. A global pandemic. A business we never planned on building. Pregnancy loss. And eventually, our daughter Summer.

And a WHOLE LOT of self-discovery along the way...

It started with us

In 2013, I graduated from dental hygiene school with honors. One week later, I married my high school love, Chase. We moved into our Greenwood apartment (sight unseen) in Seattle and started building the life we thought we were supposed to have.

Three years later, we were divorced. I’m not going to get into what led us to divorce here, but if you want all the gory details listen to episode #111 of The Medicin Podcast.

Chase moved to San Diego. I stayed in Seattle, and found a little West Seattle apartment for myself. We went our separate ways genuinely believing that chapter of our lives was over and we would probably never see each other again.

I was a shell of myself. I was the one who initiated the divorce, so why the heck did I feel so awful?

And instead of getting healthier after the divorce, I went pretty hard in the opposite direction.

I looked “healthy.” I wasn't.

I was exercising too much and not nourishing my body properly.

From the outside, I looked fit and healthy. Behind the scenes, I had pretty intense body dysmorphia. My hair was falling out. I had cystic acne. I was having fainting spells. My hormones were a mess.

I was a dumpster fire, progressively getting worse and worse.

One day in the shower, a HUGE clump of hair came out in my hand. And after crying on the shower floor, I decided that I needed to make a radical change.

I listened to every health podcast I could find. I read books. I researched. I experimented. I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did and, more importantly, how to feel better.

Somewhere in that period, the hygienist I worked with told me about “a mushroom”that a patient of hers had been taking while dealing with HPV.

It was called AHCC®.

Down the rabbit hole I went – “Why hadn’t I heard of this so called mushroom if it was so great?!”

I learned that AHCC® was a cultured mushroom mycelia extract developed in Japan and that it had been studied for its effects on immune function. I became fascinated by it.

Okay, okay…I became obsessed.

I had no idea at the time that this obscure mushroom compound would eventually change the trajectory of my life.

I needed to redefine what “healthy” actually meant

Eventually, I realized I couldn't supplement, exercise or biohack my way out of the bigger problem. I needed to completely rewrite the story of what health meant to me.

Not just my body. My mind. My relationship with food. My relationship with myself. My soul. Not only did I need to release my strict rules around food and exercise, I also needed to release the immense shame I felt from my divorce.

I wasn't okay, but I had this deep feeling that there was more in store for me. I just had to keep seeking. And I did.

I temporarily stepped away from full-time dental hygiene and enrolled at The Academy of Culinary Nutrition, where food was treated as medicine.

*One of my final assignments — a live cooking lesson in front of friends & family*

I started cooking constantly. Learning. Creating recipes. It was like meditation. I was developing food, but I was also developing myself.

And then one of those recipes accidentally turned me into an entrepreneur.

Enter: Brain Hits

For one of my final projects, I created a functional food I called Brain Hits.

They were made with brain-healthy fats, superfoods like bee pollen and goji berries, and the ingredient I had become completely obsessed with: raw AHCC®.

And people freaking loved them.

Friends started buying them. Then I rented a commercial kitchen, and other people started buying them. I set up a website and figured out the shipping. Before I knew it, I was making Brain Hits and sending them all over the country.

Suddenly I had a business. And I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

And I definitely had no idea where any of this was leading. I kept telling myself, “You’re a dental hygienist, not an entrepreneur.” But something deep inside was also telling me, “keep going!”

Then came March 2019.

The weekend that changed basically everything

I went to Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California.

While I was there, I connected directly with the Japanese manufacturers of AHCC®. They encouraged be to 1) go to Japan that summer and learn more at the International Congress on Nutrition and Integrative Medicine and 2) develop my own private label of AHCC®.

That alone could have changed the course of my life (and it did). Except something else happened that weekend too: I reconnected with my ex-husband.

Chase and I had decided we could be friends. Enough time had passed. We were different people, and we had both done a TON of self development. Surely two mature adults who used to be married could hang out platonically.

Well…

By the second day, Chase kissed me outside Disneyland. I sh*t you not, actual fireworks were going off next to us.

The pull toward each other was undeniable. Chase + Me: Part II had begun.

Naturally, Part II started at Burning Man

By August, I was moving into Chase's condo in San Diego. And we kicked off Part II of our relationship at Burning Man 2019. Not exactly where two Christian school kids thought their love story would pick back up. Ha!

*Stargazing on the outer edges of The Playa*

A month later, my first shipment of Immune Intel AHCC® came in the door. I remember hoping and praying I could sell these 24 bottles.

Again, there was no grand business plan. I didn't have a five-year vision. I just believed in what I was learning about AHCC®, knew it would change lives, and felt compelled to keep sharing it.

So I did.

*The V1 original branding of Immune Intel AHCC® under MIMIFIT.*

Then I decided to start a podcast

Around this same time, I started The Medicin Podcast. Did I know anything about podcasting? Nope. But that hadn't stopped me so far.

Plus, I was living in California but didn’t have my CA state dental hygiene license (a very lengthy process), which propelled me towards exploring the podcast avenue without falling back on hygiene — I literally couldn’t.

The idea behind The Medicin was actually pretty simple: I wanted to have conversations exploring “Medicin for body, mind and relationships.”

And I wanted to share my own experiences, including the messy ones, in hopes that something we talked about might land with someone who needed to hear it.

Eventually Chase joined me. And then, just a few months after launching Immune Intel, the world changed dramatically.

And suddenly everyone cared about immune health

In early 2020, the world shut down because of a novel virus. Almost overnight, immune health became something everyone was thinking and talking about.

Our tiny AHCC® business exploded. (It IS the most clinically researched specialty immune supplement, after all)

People were desperate for information and support. I'd get inventory in and sell out almost immediately. Then I'd get more and sell out again.

It became way too much for me to manage alone. So Chase, with his very different brain and business skill set, stepped in.

And we've been business partners ever since.

What started as me falling down a health rabbit hole after one of the hardest periods of my life had somehow become our thing.

The Medicin became bigger than we imagined

Over the next 5 years, The Medicin Podcast dropped an episode every week.

We asked questions. Interviewed fascinating people. Talked about health, relationships, sex, mushrooms, personal growth, controversial ideas and plenty of things you're probably not supposed to discuss at the dinner table.

The podcast eventually crossed one million downloads.

I created two HPV education courses (alongside colleague Dr. Nathan Riley).

We launched another mushroom product, MushyLove Latte.

Immune Intel AHCC® made its way into homes all over the world.

And somewhere along the way, this thing that I had accidentally started became our actual life.

Then life broke us open again.

Some chapters aren't meant to be pushed through

In May, 2024 we spent a dreamy month in Greece and Italy, and on the last day of the trip, found out I was pregnant. We were absolutely stoked to start our family. Getting pregnant on the very first try?! In Italy?! It honestly felt like a fairy tale.

Then we lost that pregnancy around 7 weeks. We were crushed.

I got pregnant again a couple months later. We were elated. Everything was perfect until our 20 week anatomy scan.

I’ll never forget the worst phone call of my life. My phone rang as we were on our way to a friend’s house for dinner. My midwife explained that our baby boy, Dash, had a laundry list of serious problems and would not survive much longer.

I spent the entire night crying.

We lost him a few weeks later and I had surgery to remove him from my body. It absolutely broke me. I felt like all joy had been stolen from me, forever.

*Baby Dash’s tiny footprint and last ultrasound photo*

After five years of showing up behind the microphones every week, we decided to sunset The Medicin Podcast. I just couldn’t do anything meaningful at this point. I needed time to heal physically and emotionally. We needed space.

Space to grieve. Space to heal. Space to figure out who we were after everything we'd been through. We didn't know exactly what the next chapter would look like.

And then came Summer.

Our dream girl

Today, we get to be Mommy and Daddy to our daughter, Summer (who is 6 months old at the time of this post). She is perfect.

We're building a life in Sedona. We're still building The Medicin. We're still learning, questioning, experimenting, screwing things up and figuring things out as we go.

But becoming parents has added an entirely new dimension to the question that has been underneath The Medicin from the beginning:

What actually makes life better?

How do we take care of our bodies without becoming obsessively consumed by health?

How do we raise a healthy kid in a world that can feel increasingly toxic?

How does our relationship thrive while raising a family and running a business together?

How do we stay curious without believing every wellness claim on the internet?

How do we live a really fkn good life?

We don't have all the answers. That's kind of the point, eh?

So, what is The Medicin now?

We're not health practitioners. We're not relationship experts.

We're two people who have been through a LOT, remain relentlessly curious, and have learned that some of the best conversations happen when you're willing to ask questions without pretending you already know the answer.

The topics have evolved because we have evolved.

*Our first official date night as mom & dad, celebrating my birthday*

Health. Marriage. Parenthood. Relationships. Spirituality. Business. Loss. Wellness. The wildness of being human. And our ongoing attempt to live well in a pretty toxic world.

We take health seriously.

Ourselves? Considerably less so.

So if you like thoughtful, no-BS conversations from two silly people who are willing to talk about the hard stuff, question the conventional stuff, and occasionally ruin a perfectly intelligent conversation with a fart joke...

Welcome to The Medicin. You might want to start with the podcast.

We Got Divorced. Then Built a Mushroom Company.