From Patient to Pioneer: A Q&A with Dr. Brandy ‘Dr. Z’ Zachary, CEO of The Dr. Z Functional Medicine Academy

After a lifetime dealing with chronic illness, collecting diagnoses but very few answers, I eventually became sick enough to end up on permanent Social Security disability. I was told I would never work again.

Turns out, I’m really bad at being told what I can’t do.

Eventually, the question became bigger than my own health. If people like me were falling through the cracks, what would it actually take to change that?

That question became The Dr. Z Functional Medicine Academy.

We started by teaching healthcare practitioners how to work with the patients who don’t fit neatly into one box—the person with five diagnoses, 30 symptoms, a stack of “normal” labs and no idea why they still feel terrible. Our education is now jointly accredited across 10 national accrediting organizations, including ACCME, ANCC and ACPE, and we’ve trained more than 70,000 healthcare professionals in the past three years.

But we kept discovering something frustrating: education alone wasn’t enough.

My first functional medicine case took me more than 10 hours to work through. Ten hours. For one patient. I wasn’t willing to give patients less, but nobody can build a sane practice spending 10 hours analyzing every case.

So we built LabDX to do in minutes what used to take hours of digging through complicated lab data.

Then we found the next problem. And the next.

That’s really how this company grew.

The Dr. Z Way now has more than 50 tools because being a great practitioner requires much more than just knowing medicine. You have to know how to build a business, find patients, sell without feeling sleazy, lead people, stay on the right side of the law, create a webinar, manage a complicated case—the list goes on. So we built the stuff I wish someone had handed me when I was figuring all of this out.

And then there was the biggest problem of all.

The patient.

Because while we were making practitioners better, millions of people were still sitting at home doing what I had done for years: Googling symptoms at 2 a.m., carrying records from doctor to doctor, collecting diagnoses that didn’t seem to connect, and wondering, “What the heck is actually wrong with me?”

That’s why we built DiagnoseThis™.

It’s for the person with a messy health story who doesn’t need another list of things they could have. They need help putting the pieces together. What matters? What might connect? What’s missing? What should I be asking my doctor?

Because the sickest person in the room shouldn’t also have to be the detective, researcher and project manager of their own medical mystery.

When I look at the company now, it’s almost funny because none of this was some brilliant 10-year business plan. We hit a problem. We solved it. That exposed the next problem. So we solved that one too.

I’ve never taken outside funding. I bootstrapped the company from the beginning. But what we’ve built since then is very much a “we.” There are now 62 of us across 10 countries.

And somehow, this company built by a woman who was told she’d never work again grew 2,095% in three years and was just ranked No. 150 on the Inc. 5000, No. 19 in Healthcare & Medical and No. 1 in Wyoming.

I still find that a little nuts.

Because I was never trying to become a CEO. I was trying to get my life back.

Somehow, figuring out how to do that turned into helping a whole lot of other people get theirs back, too.

I spent more than 20 years being the person sitting on the other side of the desk, collecting diagnoses that described what was wrong with me without ever really explaining why. I became sick enough to end up on permanent Social Security disability and was told I would never work again.

So when I talk about what’s broken in healthcare, I’m not observing it from a boardroom. I’ve lived it. I continue to live it.

But lived experience alone doesn’t make someone an authority. You have to do the work.

I’ve spent decades studying healthcare, written eight books, built clinical tools, and we’ve now trained more than 70,000 healthcare professionals. Thousands of practitioners have gone through our paid programs. Our company grew 2,095% over three years and was just ranked No. 150 on the Inc. 5000, No. 19 in Healthcare & Medical and No. 1 in Wyoming.

And through all of that, we’ve stayed an education-first company. We teach constantly, including plenty that people never pay us for.

I also think trust requires being willing to say, “I don’t know.” That’s especially important in healthcare, where uncertainty is real and pretending otherwise can actually be dangerous. I’m much more comfortable saying, “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t know. And here’s how I’m thinking about it.”

I didn’t build this company because healthcare was working for me. I built it because it wasn’t.

And I think people can tell the difference between someone who has chosen a market and someone who has lived the problem they’re trying to solve.