Who Am I - and Why I Do This Work (Part Two)

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Welcome to The Wellness Blueprint, your weekly dose of actionable insights to help you reclaim your health and vitality.

Who Am I-and Why Do I Do This Work (Part Two)

Early this week, I shared about my early beginnings in Korea and the roots of my philosophy on health. Today, I want to continue the story — because the path from student researcher to functional medicine practitioner has been anything but straight.

Connecting the Dots

Even in pharmacy school, I was chasing deeper answers. I published two research papers before I graduated — one on improving the bioavailability of EGCG, a green tea polyphenol, in cancer research. (PMID: 15284381).     The other on a proprietary skin delivery system for EGCG that I developed using my compounding background. (PMID: 16640828) 

On paper, I was on the “pharmaceutical track” — research, innovation, maybe big pharma. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became: nature’s compounds were profoundly powerful, and the idea that “natural therapies don’t work” (a line I heard often in lectures) was flat-out wrong. In our lab, EGCG was able to kill melanoma cells by 80%, in vitro. However, that never translates to animal and human trials because of the heavy phase 2 clearance of green tea in the body.  This was the part that my team and I improved by our piperine (black pepper compound) - to stop this phase 2 process and improve EGCG to do its job in the body. It was remarkable finding my team and I found and now many supplement companies use piperine (BioPerine™) to improve supplement efficacy in the body.   

That realization nudged me toward functional medicine. I enrolled in a functional medicine fellowship for post-graduate training, thinking I’d found the missing piece. But in those early days, my consultations were built almost entirely from lecture slides™ and case studies. I believed protocols and supplements were the answer. Lifestyle? Deeper root cause exploration? Honestly, I didn’t know how to connect it all.

A Hard Lesson

Then came a turning point. I recommended rhodiola to a client for stress and adrenal support. Instead of improving, she crashed. Later, I learned she had a COMT genetic issue that prevented her from metabolizing it properly.
That moment humbled me. It reminded me of something I’d studied years earlier — a pharmacogenomics class taught by Dr. Anthony Lu, one of the pioneers of the field. Patients don’t always follow the textbook. Protocols don’t always work. Real learning happens not from lectures, but from patients—and from our mistakes.
Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” Looking back, I see how God was guiding me all along — through research, through failure, through illness—to shape the way I practice today.

The Breaking Point

At 33, I had a heart attack(NSTEMI). On every lab test, I looked “normal.” Cholesterol perfect. Inflammation markers are clear. No red flags. And yet, my body broke down.
That’s when I realized: just because a lab says you’re fine doesn’t mean your body agrees. Symptoms are signals. And too often, the “reference ranges” we use in medicine are so wide, they miss the real picture.
My heart attack forced me to dig deeper. I began to understand how the environment, toxins, and the microbiome all collide to create illness. I wasn’t just a stressed-out pharmacist chasing credentials — I was a man in survival mode whose body had reached its limit. I had a lot of warning signs: indigestion, anxiety, insomnia, cystic acne, food sensitivities/allergies, chronic fatigue, and brain fog. 

Connecting It All

Through my recovery, through working with supplement companies, lecturing on CBD, and consulting with patients, one truth became clear: protocols alone aren’t enough. Supplements alone aren’t enough. Even “detox” isn’t enough.

What’s needed is an integrated framework that looks at:

• (E)nvironment – the exposures that shape our biology, especially circadian biology, reset.
• (N)ervous system regulation – how chronic stress, trauma, and circadian rhythm disruption keep us stuck in survival.
• (C)ellular health – how mitochondria and membranes respond to danger signals.

• (O)ptimizing Detox pathways – opening the body’s ability to release toxins safely.
• (R)ebalancing Microbiome – rebuilding resilience in the gut and beyond.
• (E)nhancing Resiliency – creating the strength to live fully, not just avoid symptoms.

This is what became my ENCORE Method — born not out of theory, but out of lived experience, clinical failures, patient breakthroughs, and my own healing journey.

Wishing you health and balance,

John Kim, Pharm.D.

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