Personal
Jessica Maez is a Springfield-area native and grew up in Battlefield, MO. She first met her husband in the 7th grade; they went on to get married and currently have 3 beautiful girls.
Ever since she can remember, she has been passionate about understanding and supporting physiology in a way that optimizes health and promotes vitality in a toxic world. She first started practicing evidence-based medicine when a close loved one was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Education/Experience
She attended Missouri State University and earned a BS in Dietetics with a minor in Biomedical Science. She went on to complete Cox College’s combined internship/MS in Nutrition Diagnostics and became a Registered Dietitian. She then moved to Boulder, Colorado and completed integrative health coach training and worked as a Functional Medicine Dietitian. She then moved to Phoenix, Arizona and co-authored a systematic review & meta-analysis which was published in Current Developments in Nutrition and can be accessed here.
She then moved back to Missouri to complete an MS in Physician Assistant Studies and become a PA-C. After school she worked as a Trauma Surgery & Critical Care Physician Assistant at a local hospital. There, she gained invaluable experience in diagnostic reasoning, systems biology and critical care. It was also during this time that Rooted Wellness was born, an aspiration she had had since her early 20s when she first began building evidence-based, orthomolecular protocols for her loved one.
She is now currently focusing on Rooted Wellness and caring for her family, while also completing Institute for Functional Medicine’s IFMCP program, and will sit for that exam in 2026.
Philosophy
A proponent of mismatch theory, triage theory and orthomolecular theory, Jessica believes that the human body is exceedingly wise in its design and effective in maintenance of its primal goal: survival. This is not problematic for a person who lives in a bubble. However, none of us do, and in modern day life, this mechanism goes awry when subjected to stressors we are not genetically prepared to respond to. This has implications for nutritional status, which then cascades to impact every system of the body, and depending on the individual this manifests in different ways or in different orders.
Jessica believes that while raw data is helpful, testing is not always the answer and is sometimes counter-productive to understanding one’s experience. Many things commonly tested for in functional medicine–nutritional markers, inflammatory markers, and hormones–only give a snapshot and even that snapshot is subject to caveats such as timing, physiologic state, and the “kinetics and dynamics” of each compound–absorption/production, transport, utilization, breakdown, excretion. Complexity is found in every aspect of human functioning and only when this is respected, and curiosity is maintained, can the true root cause be discovered and corrected.