Carly Willeford
My Journey To Today!
Welcome and if we have never met or you are new to our community, my name is Carly Willeford, and I am the owner of a local small business Coastal Carolinas Integrated Medicine (CCIM). My belief in an integrated healthcare model is what has driven my vision for over 30 years.
I am happily married to a physician Ken Willeford M.D. for over 34 years now and I am also a mother of six amazing adult children; 2 of whom are physicians, 1 is currently a 4th year med student, 1 currently serves our nation as special operations medical corpsmen on team units, and the last 2 are completing their university studies.
My career began with a degree in Social Work (BSW) and professionally worked in a Counseling Center. I then went into the profession of nursing and obtained my RN/BSN, MS, FNP, and DNP (Doctorate of Nuring Practice). In my days of hospital nursing I worked in acute care, and specialized in the neonatal ICU at the University of California, Davis Medical Center. After my first baby was born I moved onto adults specializing in Neurotrauma Critical Care and Medical ICU. During these years my husband was in the season of being an Anesthesia Resident and starting his first job after Residency.
In the 90's we left California and relocated to Supply, NC for a great opportunity in rural healthcare! We build a home on the beautiful Holden Beach which in those days was just 12 miles from the old hospital before the newer one was built! Riding your bike to work living ocean front was a dream come true for us! My husband was the first Anesthesiologist in Brunswick County and improving surgical outcomes in this up and coming rural but "ocean front living" charming small town screamed "entrepreneural idea" and a really great place to raise all of our little ones. Eventually, my husband decided to leave the hours and post-call burn out of Anesthesia and completed a Pain Medicine Fellowship in Pennsylvania. Upon returning we opened a private practice Interventional Spine & Pain Management on the campus of the hospital.
Here's the coolest part....I took advantage of a few rooms not in use in our center at that time and opened a small part-time integrated medical practice while being a (full time momma! ) and introduced my community and patients to many new modalities such as infra-red sauna therapy for detox, colon hydrotherapy, nutritional/metabolic/genomic testing, organic acid panels & even hormone testing which was stuff they never heard of but were full in! My community loved it and small towns really support small business owners! We grew into educational classes and were able to launched a weekly organic co-op out of my church fellowship hall to increase access to organic produce and products for our rural community. Its seems strange this was such a new concept back then but even today, we must recognize we still have underserved communities and barriers to healthcare and higher quality food within their communities.
My long term outcome data in my patient base is outstanding and we proved chronic diseases such as diabetes, weight gain, high blood pressure and cholesterol, depression and even CVD could be reversed or mitigated with lifestyle changes. I achieved my personal goal of containing cost and keeping people "out of the hospital" when possible, especially after my ICU days of caring for patients
(& their family) when a loved one was admitted sometimes with devastating diagnosis or outcomes that could have been prevented. I learned real quick back then that anti-aging lifestyles is where its at but you must front load it early in your life. The earlier the better!
As a full-time mom raising a tribe of babies, I knew I needed lots of energy to own our own businesses and my passion for healthy meals, water and various products only grew as raising healthy kids became my focus in life! My deep connection to food as the answer health & fitness led me into the space of plant based culinary schools in Atlanta! Also, getting away to the city when you live in small towns was the best ever for mental health! I really liked the raw foods and plant based culinary programs because I knew tossing meat on anything was the easy part but the difficult challenge was getting my young kids to eat vegtebles and find hormone & antibiotic free meat. Searching for healthy food led me into the world of growing my own gardens and microgreens, herbs, the study of herbology & essential oils and replacing toxic products iin my home.
One of the coolest things I did as my family matured in ages was get away to DC to attend the Capital University of Integrative Medicine (CUIM) program which brought together doctors, dentists, nurse pratitioners, PA's, Chiropractors etc., etc., from across the nation one weekend every month to learn and advance our functional medicine knowledge. Some of our nations & world's leading experts would teach Friday-Sunday, it was like the greastest conference once a month in the greatest city meeting so many new colleagues all with the same interest in functional medicine. These years probably were some of the best educational opportunities I have ever had, especially as a nurse practitioner. However, and sadly, this doctoral program was before its time and did not pass accredidation hoops which is the reason I jumped ship and enrolled in the University of South Carolina accredited Doctoral DNP program.
I attended USC's founding DNP program which (back then) provided double or triple board certifications. You enrolled with your NP speciality and came out with one of the other clinical specialities Acute care or Psych NP and double boarded! For those who really wanted to kill themselves got triple boarded! Is it any wonder they completely revamped todays DNP programs! I went into the doctoral program already board certified as an FNP and took the required courses and clinicals in acute care and psych along with the rest of the doctoral requirements. I graduated USC DNP program specializing in Family and Psych.
Health Care vs. Medical Care (distinct but complementary) are two (very) different patient care models.
The success of maintaining your health in our current toxic environments will absolutely require preventative measures and (functional medicine testing) coupled with traditional medical care when necessary. Having a genetic disease in ones family like Huntingtons Disease (HD) forced me to become an researcher and expert in nutrition and genetic testing (nutragenomics) because my families life depended on it as there is NO CURE or medication for HD. I dedicated my life to the study of this disease and to neurodegeneration and probably read every study ever published in efforts to fight this disease. Getting inside hundreds of text books learning everything I possibly could about the brain-body-gut-gene/epigenetic connection to nutrition and detoxification to help my family members suffering with this devasting autosomal dominate disease.
Interesting personal fact:
I outperformed the Huntington's Disease Center HD end stage assessment of my brother while he was a patient at John Hopkins. We were told he was "end stage" get prepared kind of thing. I focused on training his own family and care takers and eventually his 24 hour care takers and had them follow all my protocols, neuro diet, muscle-centric exercise, and strategies for behavioral /psych treatment plans, neurotrophic herbs and supplemented drinks among a bunch of other stuff. We did take him to local neurologist but I did not like their plan. Some of the swallowing medications I did use when we got to that point. He went on to live 10 more years afte they called him end-stage! Think how much someone who doesn't have a genetic neurodegenerative disease could benefit with the correct diet and medical "home" plan! If Covid didn't hit him and (his staff) he might have made it longer! When you grow up a HD survivor in a family and enter health care, most chronic diseases seem so simple to cure compared to HD. There is nothing worse than HD, in the chronic disease category because its genetic. You have the gene or you don't. If you have it you get the disease, no matter what and predictor testing tells you your fate when you are healthy and young....can you imagine that?