About Us

Dr. Ryan Ferns - Founder

Dr. Ferns’ journey to functional medicine was a windy one. In his youth, Dr. Ferns played every sport imaginable. He became fascinated by the idea that he could eat and train a certain way and he was able to experience measurable improvements in his physical performance. As he got older and began thinking about a career, he did not have a mentor in life capable of guiding him down a path that would give him the opportunity to help others experience a life with optimal health. So when he graduated from college, he enrolled in Physical Therapy school thinking that was the career path most similar to his interest in health optimization. After a few years of being frequently denied by health insurance companies to do anything beyond physical medicine, Dr. Ferns made the drastic decision to change his career path. He applied to and was accepted into the Yale School of Medicine. Thinking a career in medicine would allow him to treat patients in a more holistic manner and not be limited to just physical health, he immersed himself in the program at Yale learning everything he could about the diseases that afflicted the human body and the treatments offered in medicine. Not long after beginning his clinical rotations, Dr. Ferns quickly realized that the limitations he experienced as a physical therapist were even more severe as a medical provider. The average visit time with patients in his urgent care and primary care clinical rotations was 7-10 minutes. Again, Dr. Ferns became quickly frustrated with the limitations placed on him by the health insurance companies and he felt no closer to being able to provide the type of comprehensive care he always dreamed of. It was at this pivotal time in his life Dr. Ferns received a phone call from a man by the name of Dr. Charles Webb. Dr. Webb was one of the top functional medicine doctors in the country at the time and he began explaining to Dr. Ferns that if he was willing to break out of the conventional healthcare system, he could create a practice that would provide his patients the kind of care they deserved. Dr. Webb mentored Dr. Ferns to make yet another shift in his career path and begin his specialty training at the Institute for Functional Medicine. After learning about the advanced scientific treatments and methods in functional medicine, he began building a team of experts that would be able to provide a level of comprehensive care unheard of before in this region. As a result, the functional medicine practice known today as The Healthplex was born.