About Me

Welcome to Health and Wellness with Dr. Brenda.

I didn't set out to run two separate worlds. Life built them for me.

I became a pediatric neuropsychologist because I wanted to be the person in the room who could tell parents the truth about their kid, clearly, without the jargon that makes a child sound like a diagnosis instead of a person. I've spent years now sitting across from families in the middle of the hardest conversations of their lives: an evaluation, a diagnosis, a school fight, and I've watched the same thing happen over and over. Everyone in the room is focused on the child. No one is checking on the parent.

The other half of my story started somewhere completely different: on my own body, at a point where I had to decide whether I was going to keep making excuses or actually change something. I did the slow, unglamorous work: real food, real movement, real consistency, and I came out the other side of it as, of all things, an endurance athlete. I train for triathlons now. I'm working my way through a half marathon in all fifty states. And somewhere in the middle of that transformation, I got just as curious about longevity and healthspan as I already was about the brain, what actually helps people not just live longer, but stay sharp, strong, and independent while they do it.

For a long time I kept those two parts of my life in separate rooms, the clinician and the athlete, the credentials and the lived experience. Then I realized they were never actually separate. The same instinct that makes me want hard clinical proof before I trust a claim about a child's diagnosis is the same instinct I bring to a peptide protocol, supplement or a recovery gadget someone's trying to sell me. I vet everything through both lenses now, because I refuse to say something's solid when I haven't actually checked.

That's the filter this whole space is built on. Not because I have all the answers, I don't, and I'll tell you when something's still exploratory instead of pretending otherwise, but because I've done the work of checking, twice over, before my name goes anywhere near it.

Outside of all this, I'm usually training for whatever's next, deep into a book with my book club, or just being honest with the people around me instead of performing "having it together." I'd rather be the friend who happens to have a doctorate and will actually tell you the truth than the expert who never admits what she doesn't know.

I'm glad you're here. If you want the short version of what I actually do, that's on my home page, this was the long version of why.