Learn More about Vibrant Wellness
Vibrant Wellness’ innovative testing panels identify key imbalances in areas like nutrition, hormones, toxins, and the gut microbiome so you can take targeted steps toward optimal wellness. Discover the possibilities and become a provider or connect with one near you at vibrant-wellness.com/signup
It really takes courage to completely change course and walk away from a successful hospital medicine career. Dr. Brooke Stubbs did just that after realizing the pace and pressure of her work were costing her her health. She found her way to lifestyle medicine, and that shift changed everything about how she practices and how she lives.
In our conversation, Brooke talks about what she’s learned along the way: how to build a concierge practice that actually works, set boundaries, create supportive systems, and price her services in a way that’s fair and sustainable. She also shares how Vibrant’s customizable panels have helped her provide consistent, comprehensive care. I love her honesty about learning through trial and error and her passion for building community. Her story is such a great reminder of what’s possible when we combine science, purpose, and heart in medicine. ~DrKF
PS: I’ll be hosting a free webinar with Vibrant Wellness next month [November 2025] for a deeper exploration of their lab test panels and how to leverage them in clinical practice. Join my newsletter here to be notified when registrations open.
In this episode of New Frontiers, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald sits down with Dr. Brooke Stubbs, an internal and lifestyle medicine physician who transitioned from hospital-based care to a concierge model centered on prevention, personalization, and sustainability. They discuss the essential components of building a successful concierge practice, including setting boundaries, developing efficient systems, and pricing services to reflect their value.
Dr. Stubbs shares how she integrates functional medicine testing into her workflow and how Vibrant Wellness fits into the picture with advanced specialty labs and custom panels that streamline diagnostics and enhance consistency in patient care. This episode offers real-world insights for clinicians ready to evolve their practice and deliver comprehensive, data-driven, and patient-centered care.
In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:
- Burnout as a catalyst for change: Discover why Dr. Stubbs left conventional hospital medicine to pursue lifestyle and functional medicine and how rediscovering purpose transformed her approach to patient care.
- From burnout to better medicine: Learn how a concierge-style practice helps prioritize time, connection, and prevention for clinicians and patients alike.
- Building a purpose-driven practice: Explore practical strategies for establishing a concierge medicine model, including boundary setting, pricing structure, and aligning your practice with your mission.
- Creating scalable systems that work: How implementing team-based systems, clear workflows, and supportive staff structure can reduce clinician burnout and enhance the patient experience.
- Streamlining care with functional lab testing: Discover how Vibrant Wellness helps clinicians simplify diagnostics, reduce administrative time, and deliver the comprehensive data today’s patients expect.
- The value of customized panels: Learn about designing consistent baseline lab panels that improve efficiency, follow-up, and patient satisfaction.
- Tracking trends for better outcomes: Explore how data-driven testing and repeat assessments help practitioners track biomarkers, visualize trends, and personalize care for better long-term results.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine. And of course, today’s no exception. I am here with Dr. Brooke Stubbs. She is a double board-certified internal medicine and lifestyle medicine physician with a master’s in nutrition from Columbia University. She’s the founder of Rooted Femme, a concierge practice in Austin where she helps women improve their health through both medicine and lifestyle. Brooke has served as a hospitalist on a bone marrow transplant unit, she’s authored peer-reviewed articles and a textbook chapter, and she speaks nationally on lifestyle medicine. She’s also the creator of Rooted Retreat, an annual wellness event empowering women to take a proactive approach to their health.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Brooke, it is so great to be with you. I’ve just had a really nice time getting to know you over these past handful of weeks. You’ve got a really interesting journey into lifestyle medicine. I think a lot of us do and it’s nice to hear our stories because they’re unique. So tell me a little bit about you and where you came from and how you got here.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Thank you. It’s been so great getting to know you too. I came from a background in internal medicine. That’s what I did my residency in, that’s what I trained in, and I went into hospitalist medicine with the idea that it was going to be my career path. And just a few short years into that I was very overworked, I was very burnt out, I wasn’t taking care of myself, I was a zombie at home, and I was six weeks pregnant with my second child when I experienced chest pain. And about this time, lifestyle medicine had been presented to me and COVID had just started kind of being on the radar. And with the chest pain, that was really a wake up call for me. Like I’m not taking care of myself, this job is really not… I mean in that same week, Kara, we had a doctor who was in his 60s, a really, really incredible surgeon, and he died of a stroke. And then a cardiologist in his 40s had run a marathon and then dropped and had a massive heart attack.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. And that coupled with having experience of chest pain, I was like, this job is gonna kill me, or my lifestyle is gonna kill me, and so I stepped away. I put in my resignation that week and lifestyle medicine really turned my life around. I implemented all of the pillars of lifestyle medicine and I felt a 180 in how I was feeling, a 180 in my lab work, my cholesterol improved, my blood pressure improved, my symptoms of anxiety, irritability, headaches, endometriosis, you know, all of these things improved. And I just knew that this was the way I needed to go in order to— I kind of already intuitively knew too, through having my master’s in nutrition before medical school, that we were missing something.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We could save lives in real time and that was really inspiring work. But then the next morning after the person who you just saved his life with a heart catheterization was eating bacon and biscuits with gravy. I knew intuitively there was something more we could be doing to help people stay out of the hospital and that just seeing those people in those snapshots. It wasn’t fulfilling me in the way I am fulfilled now, truly, and in the way that my life radically changed by having a different focus and a more preventative focus. And it was very hard, once I got started and decided I was going go this route, to get people on board. But the one thing I knew that I could do was help people with fertility. And I knew that I had really great success with my fertility journey, part and parcel to the fact that I had really changed my lifestyle.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: And so that’s where I really focused my attention early with a virtual health focus in the pandemic, which was perfect, and then with people trying to get pregnant and helping them change their lifestyle. And I’ve done really well with that patient space helping them with success through that journey.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, let’s brag on you a little bit. I mean, you’re 100% in your work with fertility patients.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, and I don’t want to brag. It’s not me that does the work.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s amazing.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: It’s these women who do the work. But any woman that’s signed up with me has gotten pregnant.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Incredible.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: It’s been such a joy, and it’s been such a profound part of the work that I do. But it extends to people like, just today I had this sweet, beautiful young mother come in who you can tell– Her mom has autoimmune disease and she’s just presenting that way. You just know these little red flags that are presenting or leading her down that path. And I know from the work that I’ve done with other people with autoimmune disease, these lifestyle factors can help to put all those symptoms at bay. It’s incredible that the way that I felt for 35 years and the lifestyle I was leading and the amount of energy I had, I can’t even imagine walking through life like that.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: And now the energy that I feel and I didn’t even know how good I could feel till I made that transition and I wanted that for other women. And then as women, we make a lot of the health decisions in our community and in our families and so that that trickles into husbands and children and parents and siblings.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s just such a beautiful and powerful journey. And it’s especially amazing when you come from this place of such deep experience, which is your own fertility journey and the fact that you were able to miraculously turn that around. And now you’re a mom of how many kids?
Brooke Stubbs, MD: I have two kiddos.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You have two. Okay. Congratulations and what a gift. And I’m sure that your own story and your willingness to be open with that really creates a safe space and just all the essential ingredients of this type of medicine, that honesty, the support, the community, knowing what to do. And the other piece I want to underline is the ripple effect of this medicine, that when one of our patients improves, responds, and embraces what we’re doing, they take that forward. And a lot of times, yeah, the women are in charge of that, of the health and wellness in their family.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. I think, as one of my patients will cheekily say, “Oh yes, I’m back in the place of magical healing and happiness.” She just always feels good when she comes in. When she leaves there’s always something, whether it’s just the empathy from one of the providers, or our community here, or something that we’re doing in order to give her hope, or just recentering her focus. And I think that’s medicine in and of itself and I think that it’s overlooked traditionally.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It is. Yes! And we’re going to circle back at the end because I do want to hear you’re doing some pretty cool ‘give back’ work as well and I want you to talk about that. Listen, it takes huge courage. So many of us have done this, you know, transitioned from the conventional care model into something extraordinary. I am a naturopathic physician by training, so I was in this space from the get go. I didn’t have to take that same kind of leap that really feels terrifying. When I listen to your story, or there’s an MD in my office, who similarly had that ‘come to Jesus’ moment where he had to leave– He’s an internal medicine physician also and needed to take the leap and did it. And it’s such courage.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And you actually opened your own concierge practice. You and I were talking offline about that as well, how I admire it and how we’re still, many years into the journey, wanting to make the leap over to that. So I would like to hear a little bit about it; how you made that decision, how you set it up– and then we’re going to just talk about some of the nuts and bolts and what you’re doing to make the concierge structure work.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, so I think that the really important thing is when you set up a concierge there’s a couple of ways to think about it. And as a solo provider I had to be very clear with my patients, like this isn’t going be the concierge doctor that you call in the middle of the night. If it’s an emergency and you’re up in the middle of the night you have to go to the emergency room. I don’t have emergency imaging, I don’t have emergency tools. And so that is one of the things that we just set patients up for, that expectation.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Perfect. Yeah.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: And with that expectation, they understand and they’re very happy that I provide for same day appointments. So the way I set that up is that anybody can request an appointment online and then we have to call to book. But then I leave some time open that you can’t request an appointment and that’s just for my concierge members if they need to get in same day if it’s an emergency-type situation. And a lot of time that looks like, I’m going out of town and I need to be seen, or I think I have an infection and I’m supposed to be going to see my 90-year-old mother and I don’t want to spread COVID to her and I want to get a test, or something like that. And so that’s an easy way to kind of put boundaries around things.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: When I started it was slow. I think anybody who’s in primary care is going to have an easier time making the transition because I was in hospitalist medicine. I didn’t take anybody with me. So I think having that in mind and having enough in reserve where you can ramp up is really important.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Word of mouth is key. I think our business has ramped up when I had a better location, you know, so that’s important. I think having brick and mortar and not being 100% virtual was really important for my demographic. Although I know that it’s great to be remote, to be able to have that flexibility and I know that there’s a market for that too. I do most of what I do in person and I will say, I think when you set your prices, set your prices. Know what you want to make and know how much you want to work and set that price. And the people will come. It may take some time, but people will come. I would get so nervous that nobody was coming that I’d lower my price and I think if I had to do it again, I would have never done that. And I learned and now I’m ramping back up.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: So I think that kind of doing that reverse engineering in terms of what the salary is you want to make and how much you want to work. And I would also say for longevity and for preventative health, really put boundaries on the amount of time you’re in work, and the amount of times that you take breaks from work, and the amount of time that you’re home, and really put it away when you can. I need a lot of staff to be able to do this. I see patients all day. I’m back to back to back to back from like 9:30 until 4 and I have a little bit administrative time before and after, and I take a 30-minute lunch break. Other than that, I am seeing patients and I have five minutes in between to send prescriptions. So I have to have two people at the front, somebody checking calls, and returning voicemails, and checking people in and out. And then I have staff doing quick follow ups for people who are on medical weight loss or things like that.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: I have a big team around me. Including me, I have a staff of seven people. So six other people on my staff and some of them are part-time and some of are full-time. But it takes all of that because I can’t always do the marketing emails and I can’t always do the brochures. And so I have an office manager who helps with some of those things, and I have somebody who does my my static posts on social media. I do my own stories and things like that. So I have a big staff, I’m ramping up my pricing, and I have a good location and word of mouth has been key, key, key for me.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. And you opted out of insurance as well. Let me just add that because, I think ultimately, those of us who opt out of insurance are glad that we did, but it also makes another ramp-up period.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Oh, for sure, for sure. And I’ve had patients come to me because they can’t get into their provider for a month or two and they’re waiting on them because they take their insurance and they want to see me on a one-off. I don’t really offer that. In the past I’ve lost that boundary, but I have to stick to that.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Good.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: So, provide the product that you want to provide and the patients who want that product will come to you. That’s kind of the long and short of what my advice would be. But yes, I opted out of insurance and of course you have to do the Medicare opt-out when you do your licensure in order to be legal in doing that.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, thanks for all of that. You made mistakes and you corrected also. So you don’t have to get it right. You can course correct as you figure out, oh my god, I have to set boundaries. I have to do a better job with my– I mean, who doesn’t need to go through that?
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. And I think there’s going to be people listening who are just like me that have people saying, “You should do a concierge medicine.” I was like, “I’m never doing concierge medicine. That’s not me. That’s not me.” And then I’m like, “Oh, this is so me!” And I think if there’s any inkling of that, go for it. And yeah, things are going to change. The scope of my practice has changed so much from when I set out doing virtual and counseling people on fertility to what it is now and I love it. I mean, it’s just great.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. When you and I were talking offline we talked about ways that you are streamlining your practice and surviving. You have this amazing team, as do I. You also told me you started with Quest and you transitioned into using Vibrant Wellness as one of your, I think, tools of streamlining, but also tools of quality. I want to talk about how you brought Vibrant into your practice and what you’re doing with them.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. I think as I’ve seen the market get more and more into things like functional lab work, they want to have a breadth of lab work. And in the beginning, when I was, like I said, undercharging for my services, I wanted to be able to include lab work, but keep it within a very narrow price range. Quest was helpful for that to some degree because there’s no minimum to how much you can order. Some of the tests are pretty inexpensive if you set up your client account, so a CBC can be anywhere from like five to six dollars. And so CBC, CMP, hemoglobin A1c– I could get a lot of labs done that were baseline for a relatively inexpensive amount.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: So that’s where I started and that served us pretty well. But then you’re kind of figuring out, do I send the extra labs with insurance? Do I try and do it client bill? So then it just gets chaotic and it gets hard for my staff too. So in order, like you say, to streamline it and to provide for our patient base— we’re following this with the market and what people are really asking for in practice– we realized we need to be able to offer more. And it is easier to be able to do this through Vibrant because they have this Vibrant America panel where you can just pick and choose any of the things that you want. So we have extended hormone testing, we have extended lipid panel testing, which is kind of like the cardiac panel but it’s not quite that extensive. We can get things that are inflammatory markers and a little bit longer list of the lipids. And so it really kind of speaks to their true risk.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: And then we can add things like magnesium, which wasn’t even in our list. Or vitamin D, or B12, or folate, because those things can get expensive through Quest. But when you do them all together with Vibrant, there’s a $225 minimum that you have to order for the lab work, but as we’re increasing our concierge fee and our concierge costs, and we’re adding more things and more services, and really getting in line with what the market is already asking for those, we’re getting a more extensive lab work for $230 and our patients are much happier. And I don’t have as many questions about who’s getting what. Everybody’s getting the same thing, and it’s going to the same place, and it’s under the same payment structure, and it’s just much easier and much better for the clients, truly.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. The physician who I go to has their own custom Vibrant panel as well and I love it. I really love it. And we are talking about bringing it on when we transition into our concierge structure because it is incredibly comprehensive. It’s everything under one roof, there’s no fuss, no muss. And for me as a clinician, not to have to think about the baseline tests I’m running, not to need to put any thought in that, it’s just done and my team knows what they’re going to get, I mean that sounds really appealing. So I’m a huge fan of designing my own panel.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And I know that you have a structure where you have people do this baseline or some sort of a modified version of that throughout their membership year and I’d like to hear a little bit about that. But then you layer in– I mean, Vibrant is pretty much one-stop shopping for all testing. I mean, we use that all the time in my practice for their toxins, sometimes we do their Gut Zoomer and food sensitivity. I mean they just have everything. So your panel, the original panel, do you do that at periodic events or do you have a follow-up panel that’s a little bit different than the baseline? And then talk to me about layering in the additional elements of their test menu.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. So the way we have it structured is that you get the same panel when you start and then at six months. Now, obviously I have patients who have a lab abnormality and, like I talked about that minimum lab draw, sometimes we do have to still utilize Quest because now we’ve found something. Let’s take thyroid for instance. If you have an abnormal thyroid and I’m only going to follow your thyroid and I want to follow it at shorter intervals, it doesn’t make sense then for me to always send to Vibrant. So, yes, we still utilize Quest, and obviously it’s very individualized for patients, but for the generic healthy things that aren’t going to change a lot, it’s every six months, the same panel. That makes it easy, people appreciate that. It’s more than what they’re getting in their primary care and it’s more than what their insurance is covering and it’s covered underneath our increased tier. We have a base basic tier, but it’s covered under that tier of concierge medicine.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And they also lay it out. I mean, you can look at trends because just looking at my own data, yeah, it’s really handy to have my trends over time.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, it is. And then the more you order, the more discounted it is. Let’s say, I just had a patient the other day, we did her basic blood work and she had a few other things she wanted to add to that just because she was curious, and then she wanted to do a food sensitivity test. So it made that food sensitivity test a lot more affordable because we were already doing all these labs.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, interesting.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: So you’re right, it’s a very nice one-stop shop for functional labs. There are some things you can’t get on there. I think that some of the genetics aren’t as robust. There’s probably like five four or five genetic markers, but again they’re the ones that you probably want to test. I don’t think you can get a BRCA yet so we still have to use Quest for several things. But we do it in a way that’s very minimal and really influenced by what we can do at Vibrant and how patients are really requesting their labs. I mean, most of what you want and what they’re asking for is there.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. That’s awesome. Basically, the more you layer on, the cheaper it becomes. That’s really nice. All right, so of the deeper dive panels, in my clinic, when we’re analyzing toxins, which we do on all of our patients, we’ll use the Total Tox Burden panel from Vibrant, just all the time. And then maybe when we’re doing the follow-up, we’ll do a lesser if we don’t need to get all of them, we can just do a chunk of whatever abnormalities we found. But what are the ones that you’re most commonly using in your practice?
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, so I mentioned the Food Sensitivity test. People love that. The Gut Zoomer that shows the microbes and metabolites in there, which is very insightful for patients to figure out what their gut issues are stemming from. And then we do a lot of Hormone Zoomer. One issue about that is it’s a urine test that you do at home and we talked about this a little bit. Those tests take a while to get drawn because it’s on the patients and they have to time it and all that stuff. There’s several samples that you have to take and you have to take them one time and so there’s a little bit of– I find if you coach them up and you kind of tell them what’s going on first it makes it easier for them to draw that.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Do you have your team trained in it as well? Can they support them.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We’re working on it.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, good. Yeah, I find that to be super essential. Or what Rhonda does in my office is she’ll tell the patient to call Vibrant and to communicate with them, which sometimes works.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah. They really do have a good staff and a good team that will help. And they have a lot of resources online on how to draw them. I think there’s a QR code with all of the things also where it’s got a link with a video and they’ve got a nice app.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But to your point, if left in the patient’s hands, it may be immediate or it may not.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, and I think it’s more immediate the more dire the situation of course.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, that’s right. So the Hormone Zoomer, the Gut Zoomer, anything else you’re using? The Food Sensitivity.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, we use the Food Sensitivity and then I love the Cardiac Health Panel. That’s just one of my favorite ones. And you mentioned the Mycotoxin or the Total Tox Burden screen. That’s always insightful. I will weigh that with the patient’s desire to see those numbers and follow those numbers, like you say. It’s really nice to track if you’re really interested in that with the fact that it’s not going to change my management if I think some of those things are going to be abnormal anyway. I’m going to still tell you the certain lifestyle factors that will help with that anyway. So, yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I think it can be motivating for certain patients to see those findings. It can be highly motivating to do the kind of cleanup work that we want them to do. An interesting case that I had in my practice not too long ago was a very high glyphosate and I had them do a follow up on that. Let’s do an immediate retest, you know, because they go out to eat at restaurants and it’s possible that’s your exposure. Because there’s a lot of media on glyphosate right now and it can be extremely anxiety-provoking. But at follow up it was negative. They didn’t have a significant burden of it, which suggests to me that they had an acute exposure in restaurant X that they had gone out to the night before. Don’t do that anymore or know that you’re going to have that transient exposure. For me, it was worth it. For them, it was worth the price tag.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, I want to do that for my husband. He has a history of cancer in his family. He lived in kind of a food desert where there wasn’t a whole lot of organic food. And then he golfs a lot, so I’m always like, take those clothes off, get in the shower. But yeah, somebody like that, he’s a perfect candidate to have that test.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. Perfect candidate. Yes, absolutely. Another family that I work is coming to mind who live on a golf course as well. We pay really pretty close attention to their total toxins, yeah.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Sure.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, this is really helpful. Anything else you’ve brought into your practice that helps with the turnkey element? Are you working with a certain supplement company or do you keep products in office? How do you make that work? Just out of curiosity.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: There are certain supplements that I like. I’ve been really vocal on my Instagram. I really have loved the Parelel Packets, the Peri Support. Now, when you get into the methylfolate and which folate, some of my OB colleagues will be very consistent with if they’re in the perinatal period, they need to have true folic acid. So, that’s one issue with the perinatal one, the prenatal vitamin, and you can talk to your provider about that. Some will just recommend the methylfolate, but I really like their perinatal support. We see mostly women– of course we have some men in our practice– but we’re focused mostly on women in that just-after-baby phase, and early 40s and I love it. It’s packaged and I’m not trying to sell it. I don’t have any ties or anything, I just like it. If I was going to do my own supplements that’s the way I would do it.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Actually, on my whiteboard in my office I’ll just list, these are the supplements I would take and they’re all in here. Or most of them are in here and I would add these few. So that’s how I handle vitamins but I do think that there’s opportunity for me to really hone in on one particular vitamin company and bring those in. And so that’s always on our brain, and also, should I do it myself is also on my brain.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s cool. Yeah, good for you.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Yeah, and then we’re going to bring in a DEXA scan. We just signed the paperwork on it last week so any day now we’ll have that. And that’s part of increasing the tier and the strategic– Giving people what they want and providing a turnkey kind of package where they can follow those body metrics and see their body habitus change. We do a lot of weight loss in our office and we want to make sure their muscle mass is being maintained and we want people to focus on gaining more muscle as they go through perimenopause or menopausal states. So those are things that have really kind of helped with the flow of traffic without needing me to be the only person who can provide service here.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. Awesome. I think that’s a huge important piece for those of us in a single provider setting is having support; having other people in the office who can do stuff. Yeah. As we mentioned in the very in the beginning, you’re giving back to the community, which I think is huge. I think it’s very impressive because I know your plate is pretty full. It’s very full. What is it? Tell me a little bit about that and why you decided to do it.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Gosh, I love this event. So we do an event and we’ve done it annually in the past leading up to this year. We took one year off because that year comes fast and you’re right, it’s a ton of work, but it’s a beautiful event. So we’re doing it biannually now. It’s every two years.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: So we don’t make any money off of the event. Anything that we make goes to charity and then we raise money for charity at the event. And it’s usually local charities, but the first year we did a national charity on fertility because a lot of things were happening around reproductive rights. Last year we gave to a local charity that helps with providing services for homeless women and their children and some of those are health services. Not only is that part great, it’s actually such a vibrant thing for our community. We have anywhere from 65 to 85 people that show up. It’s a day of speakers were we talk about health, we talk about mindset, we have sound bath meditation, a yoga session, we have a breath work session, then we have all kinds of vendors.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We had somebody who’s doing cupping and ear seeding and then we have vendors that are selling goods and doing gua sha facials. We had a yoga studio that’s here in town, that’s also part of a corporate chain with different locations. They were here and they were giving different packages out. It is always so good when you get women together and you’re connecting them in such a positive, healthy mindset-promoting way that the vibes are high. You just want to be there all the time. So we’re trying to create more of those throughout the year in smaller settings. We just hosted a small event here in our office. You can see this is my lobby.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. It looks really nice back there.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We move furniture around and we got about 25 people in here and we did just a little forum on perimenopause. We had women all the way from their late 20s into their early 60s asking questions and everybody just left with that feeling of, I’ve got a community here. I’ve got a place I can ask questions and I can recenter myself and focus on myself for a little while. It’s really one of my favorite things.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I love it. It sounds so, so, cool, Brooke. When I’m in Austin and you’re doing an event, I will be there. It sounds beautiful.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Thanks. Please.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, it sounds awesome. We did a masterclass for three days. It was virtual, but we were able to create kind of a juicy community. And we had over 100 countries represented.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: I love that word. It is. It’s so juicy.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s juicy. Yeah.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We might just have to have you come in as one of the speakers.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I would love to.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: We had Jessica Shepherd, and she was fabulous.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, she’s a badass. Well, listen, Dr. Stubbs, it was great to talk to you. Great to hear how you brought this to life, this concierge vision, your courage in actually undertaking it. I understand the need to streamline and I love the way that you use Vibrant. I mean, we’re using it in our world and I look forward to that custom panel because I think it’s an important component of any concierge structure or even beyond a concierge structure. And anyway, thank you so much for coming on, joining me and sharing your brilliance.
Brooke Stubbs, MD: Thank you. Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun.
Dr. Brooke Stubbs is a double board-certified physician in Internal Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine with a Master of Science in Nutrition from Columbia University. She is the founder of Rooted Femme, a concierge practice in Austin dedicated to lifestyle-based care for women.
Dr. Stubbs previously served as a hospitalist on the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at St. David’s Medical Center and has co-authored a textbook chapter on skin pigmentation and melanoma risk. She is the creator of The Rooted Retreat, an annual wellness event empowering women to take a proactive role in their health while supporting charitable causes. A sought-after speaker and media guest, Dr. Stubbs has been featured on Fox 7 News, The Ladygang Podcast, Tribeza Magazine, and Austin Monthly, and was named a Top 5 Finalist for Austin Business Woman’s 2023 Doctor of the Year award.
With a background in chemistry and visual arts, she approaches health as a creative, whole-life practice and believes that true well-being is the sum of quality in all areas of life.
Learn More about Vibrant Wellness
Vibrant Wellness’ innovative testing panels identify key imbalances in areas like nutrition, hormones, toxins, and the gut microbiome so you can take targeted steps toward optimal wellness. Discover the possibilities and become a provider or connect with one near you at vibrant-wellness.com/signup
Podcast: Reversing Aging: Screening, Wearables & What To Do Now with Sergey Young
Podcast: Why Centenarians Are Defying Science: Secrets to Living 100+
Podcast: Why Human-Centered AI Is the Future of Medicine & Mental Wellness
DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge





