Why I Started a Direct Primary Care Practice in Charlotte, NC
I've wanted to be a doctor since I was four years old, after seeing one on TV. That part has never been complicated for me — I have always wanted to heal people. What has changed, over the years, is my idea of what that healing should look like, and eventually, who should be in charge of how I practice it.
Where It Started
I grew up watching my grandmother and my cousin both live with type 2 diabetes. My mom tried, for years, to help them change their eating habits. It never fully took, and I watched the disease progress the way it so often does when it isn't caught and managed early: dialysis, vision loss, a wheelchair. My cousin passed away from complications of diabetes at 33, during my last year of medical school.
I don't think of my desire to become a doctor as being because of what happened to my grandmother and my cousin — that desire was already there. But I do think their story is part of why I ended up so drawn to nutrition and lifestyle medicine specifically. I earned my undergraduate degree in nutritional science, and I've been lifestyle medicine certified since 2020, because I believe how much of chronic disease is preventable or reversible when it's caught and managed early, with real time and real support.
Why I Didn't Plan to Own a Practice
For most of my career, practice ownership wasn't the plan. I figured I'd rather just take care of patients than deal with insurance contracts and billing, and expected to find a good practice and stay there for a decade or two.
That's not how it went. When I started at my last practice, the expectation was 19 patients a day. By year three, that number had climbed to 23, an NP had been added with unpaid supervision duties added onto my own patient load, and I was told my panel was "closed" to new patients while it quietly stayed open to five or six new patients a day.
You cannot counsel someone meaningfully on lifestyle change — the kind of change that might have altered my grandmother's and my cousin's outcomes — in the amount of time that structure allowed. To keep from bringing work home, I was getting in up to 45 minutes early, working through lunch, and staying up to 90 minutes late most days. I watched it get worse every year, and I knew I had to try something else.
Why Direct Primary Care
That's when I started seriously looking into direct primary care. DPC removes insurance from the day-to-day relationship between doctor and patient, which means no arbitrary patient quotas, no 7-minute visits, and no incentive to see as many people as possible in a day. It meant I could go back to practicing the way I always believed medicine should work — enough time with each patient to actually manage chronic conditions, actually counsel on lifestyle, and actually be reachable when something comes up.
Long Health and Wellness is a direct primary care practice in Charlotte, NC, built around one idea: healthcare should build healthy lives, not just treat disease after it's already taken hold. That's not a slogan for me. It's the reason I do this work.
What This Means for You
If you're looking for a Black female primary care doctor in Charlotte, NC who has time to actually know you, who trained specifically in nutrition and lifestyle medicine, and who left the traditional system because it wasn't allowing her to practice the kind of medicine that changes outcomes — that's what you'll find here.
I'd love to talk with you. Book a free 15-minute intro call to see if Long Health and Wellness is the right fit for your health, for the long run.