Tenacious Healing

The following is an excerpt from Alumni & Friends Magazine Winter 2025 issue. Read the full issue here.

Segerholm ’13 brings UJ-inspired passion to functional medicine.

On a subzero January morning in the Dakotas, I dialed Dr. Beth Segerholm ’13 at her Newport Beach, California home and launched directly into a report of the weather.

Having never formally met in person, I thought, what else could feel more like an American-sized bowl of comfort food to someone who grew up in Northwood, North Dakota?

“You know what? There are many things I miss about North Dakota,” Segerholm began to laugh. “That is not one of them!”

With the ice fittingly broken, we were ready to dive into Segerholm’s passion: practicing functional medicine for Florida-based Root Cause Medical Clinic, where American-sized bowls of anything are typically frowned upon.

It’s a world in which those seeking medically trained assistance must hold themselves accountable through proactive and professionally curated disease-preventing measures rather than conventional, reactive solutions where doctors are largely tasked to douse four-alarm fires with life-saving surgeries and symptom-quelling medications.

Urgent and emergency care are truly miracles of God, but this practice is intriguingly different. Functional medicine simply asks, “Are four-alarm fires naturally preventable?”

“Conventional medicine is amazing at managing acute illness, but we’re taking an acute care model – a sickness model – and applying that to health,” said Segerholm, as she explained the current insurance-covered industry norms. “We’re applying (a sickness model) to preventing and reversing disease, and it’s not working.”

According to an independent research report published in September by The Commonwealth Fund, people in the U.S. die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths when compared to the developed nations of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. All of which, it’s worth noting, spend at least nearly half as less on healthcare than the U.S.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates 129 million people in the U.S. have at least one major chronic disease – such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease – and numerous socioeconomic factors are expected to increase the prevalence of preventable and treatable chronic diseases in the years to come.

Last year, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was 77.5 years, according to the CDC.

“We’re a nation that has the most resources and we have one of the highest chronic disease rates in the world,” Segerholm said. “Our life span is the lowest when looking at comparable countries.”

Those gloomy facts don’t sit well with Segerholm, who’s been looking through a much different lens than most Americans since childhood.

Growing up with family members who struggled with severe food allergies and sensitivities, her household was steered toward whole food nutrition and healthier, organic meal options at the dinner table, which in turn provided a solid foundation for her overall general health.

The benefits of this lifestyle began to sprout when it came to physical activity, as a high school-aged Segerholm became a three-sport athlete before being recruited by UJ to compete in both volleyball and track & field.

“Food is not just calories in and calories out: it is information for every cellular response,” Segerholm said. “I learned from a young age that food can either help us or hurt us, and that was a beautiful thing.”

At the age of 13, a mission trip to Guatemala through a local Northwood church truly opened her eyes to the field of medicine. She’d receive the President’s Key and graduate from UJ in 2013 with a degree in nursing and the highest academic honors.

UJ is also where she’d receive a life-altering masterclass in tenacity, but more on that later.

It wasn’t until Segerholm was both working as a bedside nurse and earning her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree in Arizona when, through her own health issues, she was first introduced to the Institute of Functional Medicine (IFM), the leading institute of training for clinicians of functional medicine in the country.

“I was having a lot of skin issues related to hormonal imbalance, and I wasn’t getting the outcomes that I felt I could through conventional medicine,” Segerholm explained. “I began the Institute of Functional Medicine’s certification process and started implementing what I was learning on my own self. I began to heal when conventionally different medications were either making things worse or provided a short-term, Band-Aid solution. Things would always return.”

Segerholm is a certified member of IFM and has been treating patients virtually via telemedicine from her home in California for Root Cause Medical since 2021. She’s also a board-certified family nurse practitioner and is licensed in California, Florida, Arizona and Washington.

A primary care provider who has worked with all ailments, Segerholm’s areas of expertise are optimizing cardiometabolic, microbiome/gut, and hormone function.

“We need to get away from, ‘What is the diagnosis and how do we provide the quick fix,’ which is generally a pill and a surgery, and we need to come back to the foundations of our being,” Segerholm said. “Which is, ‘What are we feeding our body?’”

Segerholm is trained in “nutrigenomics,” or the study of how food affects a person’s genes and how a person’s genes affect the way the body responds to food. Obviously, all doctors would recommend a healthy diet and exercise to patients, but Segerholm explains it isn’t that simple.

She offers specific nutrients that will attack specific symptoms or disease processes, part of a personalized holistic plan to preventative healing.

“Just telling patients to exercise more and eat better is not enough. Our bodies are way more complex than that,” Segerholm said. “We use precision medicine practices and advanced testing to determine the root causes that are placing stress on our bodies as a whole.”

Following a detailed medical history and advanced lab work on each of her patients, stressors such as food, lifestyle choices, infections, toxins and trauma are identified and addressed through diet, exercise, sleeping and stress management. Root Cause Medical is then able to build a team of medical professionals, which includes a medical doctor, registered dietitian and chiropractors, around each patient to help execute Segerholm’s individualized plan.

“It’s the total body burden,” Segerholm said. “Generally speaking, not one thing and one instance is going to create the symptoms of the diagnosis that we have right now. It can happen, but generally it’s accumulation. It takes time to develop disease.”

And, she added, the deck is stacked against Americans. Dare I point out the grim statistics mentioned earlier in this story?

“A big part of what needs to change is at the system level, and with how we farm and process our foods,” Segerholm said. “There are so many things people are unaware of unless you’re in a profession like mine. I’m working at a very micro level, patient by patient, but there are macro issues going on within our country and that’s beginning to change, or I hope it is.”

Working outside of an insurance-based model gives Segerholm far more access to her patients, as follow-up visits and lab work are unable to be denied. She sees around four to eight patients a day, instead of possibly dozens in a conventional clinic.

“I can’t spend 30 to 60 minutes with a patient in insurance, and a lot of the testing that we’re doing is seen as not necessary by insurance,” Segerholm said. “But I know that there is imbalance, and this is going to help my patients. We’re just not willing to be ruled by insurance and told, ‘This is how much time you need to spend with a patient,’ and ‘This is what you need to prescribe.’”

However, Segerholm will prescribe medication if it presents itself as the solution.

“Even though a lot of how I help someone is through nutrition, lifestyle and guidance, I also have prescriptive ability, and I do believe in medications,” Segerholm said. “There is a time and place for that. But they shouldn’t be seen as a cure, and in most cases, I’m taking people off medications rather than putting them on one.”

Patients typically work with Segerholm for a minimum of three months, but she says many have remained in contact with her for years to maintain their health. And although she never wants to act as a dictator of her patients’ care, she did say some UJ-learned tenacity has helped her motivate her patients to stay the course.

“At UJ, I learned tenacity. It’s difficult to be a two-sport athlete but first a student,” Segerholm said. “I had so much support around me in order to learn how to not give up, critically think and manage my time. My coaches and professors were so integrated into my success. They cared about it.”

She said the experience was profound, and it’s something she hopes she’s able to instill in her patients.

“I have tenacity with my patients, because healing is a journey,” Segerholm said. “It can be really hard. It’s never linear and it requires someone to stick beside them, encouraging and supporting them. I learned that through my experience at UJ.”

Finally, Segerholm isn’t concerned with some of the skepticism surrounding her profession. She’s simply here to help people, and, in some instances, she’s been a last line of defense.

“I think a lot of the skepticism surrounding Functional Medicine is just because it is not the standard of care, yet,” Segerholm said. “But I’m able to teach my patients how their body actually works, and I have seen mystery illnesses resolve with foundations.

“It is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

In the future, Segerholm sees herself educating the next generation of functional medicine clinicians and potentially writing a book. But for now, she’s happy to be making people healthy from sunny California, and she’s thankful UJ played a part.

“I just know that a lot of where I’m at right now is because of my experience at UJ and the type of support and encouragement I was surrounded by,” Segerholm said. “My life goal is continuing to give hope to people in their most vulnerable times and helping them understand that the body is innately meant to heal and be healthy.”