Nowadays it seems as though you can only be in either the western medicine camp or the holistic medicine camp. The two could not seem more opposite one another, differing in technique, treatment, & overall values, and the stress of choosing which is best is the last thing a sick person should have to worry about. Nurse Jamie, a celebrity skincare expert & Registered Nurse, believes that there is a way to take the best parts of each & use them to help people be their healthiest & happiest selves.

The little things, says Nurse Jamie, the things that we hear every day that we ignore anyway are the first step. “Sleep is huge,” she says. “I tell my clients the magic hour for anti-aging is to be in bed by 11 p.m. each night.” That, along with drinking half of your body weight in fluid ounces per day, are two of the most basic human needs that most of us don’t practice. Nurse Jamie says she can’t stress these seemingly little things enough because they truly are the foundation for your healthiest self, inside & out. Want glowing skin & a refreshed metabolism? Sleep & drink water. Want to avoid wrinkles & wake up feeling ready to tackle the day? Sleep & drink water. Want to have the energy to run around with your triplets while balancing running two businesses like Nurse Jamie does? Well, you already know what I’m going to say. Of course, there’s more to a healthy lifestyle than sleep & water alone. Nurse Jamie recently began incorporating adaptogens into her diet after she started experiencing thyroid issues (she’s hoping to try the Gracefully Fed meal program soon which targets health through holistic & delicious meals). “The thing about adaptogens,” she says, “is that they are real food that allows the body to adapt positively to change.” She notes that many vitamins are almost entirely synthetic, & that we need to learn more about what we put into our bodies. Having cured her thyroid issues almost entirely through attention to food, water, sleep, & adaptogens, Nurse Jamie has developed on-the-go-packs (coming soon!) that make it easy for all of us to create healthy lifestyles.

With a client list including Jessica Alba & Kourtney Kardashian, Nurse Jamie has developed tools that not only help what goes on inside the body, the things we can’t see, but also help what we can see. “I think massages are very beneficial,” she says, “because the skin is the largest organ on our body. Since the skin’s function is to keep things out of our bodies, when we apply topicals to our skin, it just sits on top unless it’s massaged in. The great thing about my tools is that they work very quickly so you get all the benefits without having to spend twenty minutes doing it.” Just as celebrities caught on to how powerful Nurse Jamie’s tools, so did retailers. She says, “My very first retailer was Harrod’s of London which is one of the most prestigious retailers. The reached out & I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sure my receptionist got that wrong, it’s probably just some guy named Harold from London,’ but sure enough, it was the real deal!” Soon to follow were such retailers as Revolve, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Dermstore, Net-A-Porter—pretty much every retailer you can think of.

While her products are innovative & top-notch, we wondered how did Nurse Jamie find herself an in-demand specialist who every celebrity & top retailer wanted to connect with? Well, Nurse Jamie remembers, that all came from her Midwestern childhood in Indiana where food for her meant “Kraft singles with thousand island dressing & a can of Big Red soda.” When she moved to Los Angeles, she noticed the norm was something quite different: people walking around with a yoga mat rolled up in one hand & a juice in the other. It opened her eyes to all that went into a healthy lifestyle, and after getting the chance to offer her services to the Dunst family (yes, that Dunst family, in Kirsten), she decided it was time to expand into her own medical spa. Clearly, she was right to do so.

Nurse Jamie says that listening to your gut, both in health & in life choices, is like drinking more water & getting better sleep—another one of those things we don’t do as much as we should. “You don’t have to be a yogi or a vegan to apply some positive changes to your lifestyle,” she says. She doesn’t let herself get torn between one camp or another when it comes to healthy living. Instead, she takes the time to learn about her body & what goes inside, finding balances that work for her, & thanks to her countless hours of research and developing innovative tools, she’s there to help find what works for each of us too.