How Danielle D'Amico built her entire practice around one report
Danielle D'Amico is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P) and founder of Genuine Wellness, a virtual practice based in Orange County, California, serving clients across the US.
The challenge before Optimal DX
D'Amico's frustration with lab work started before she ever built a spreadsheet to track optimal ranges. As a pre-med student interning in the ER, she watched conventional medicine run short-panel labs against standard reference ranges that missed what was actually going on in a patient's body. When she moved into functional nutrition, she built her own workaround: an Excel version of Dr. Weatherby's functional ranges that she manually populated for every client. It worked, but it took hours of prep per person, and even then, many clients struggled to see why it mattered. They'd come to her after being told by their doctor that everything looked normal, with no explanation for symptoms they were still living with. Convincing them otherwise meant assembling her own portfolio of documents, client by client, just to make the picture visible.
Why she chose Optimal DX
D'Amico first encountered Dr. Weatherby's work at a conference, where another practitioner presented on functional lab review using his textbook. She bought the book immediately afterward and built her early practice around it. When Dr. Weatherby later launched Optimal DX in 2012, she was already following his work closely and adopted the platform right away, calling it "a game changer." Getting started was straightforward for her, "super easy" in her words, and she says she liked getting hands-on with the software early by manually inputting values herself to learn it inside and out.
How she uses it day to day
The Optimal DX report is the foundation of D'Amico's practice. She spends 60 to 90 minutes per client walking through the report marker by marker, explaining what each one means and why it matters, describing herself as more of an educator than a practitioner. Beyond individual biomarkers, she relies heavily on the platform's clinical dysfunctions report (a practitioner-only report) to identify where a client's body may be struggling and where to direct further testing, and uses the historical comparison feature for annual screenings to track whether an issue is chronic or acute. She also partners directly with several MDs, some of whom run labs for their patients and then bring D'Amico in specifically to deliver the Optimal DX review.
Results
The clearest shift D'Amico has seen is in patient engagement, particularly with men. She found generic lifestyle advice alone rarely moved them. Once they could see their own numbers on a chart, that changed enough that she now requires male clients to complete blood work before she'll take them on, because seeing the data up front makes them more likely to follow through. Drastic time savings followed too: preparing a single client portfolio used to take her 2 to 3 hours, and today, uploading a PDF and generating the report takes minutes.
D'Amico also shared a specific case that stood out to her. A male client with liver disease, borderline cirrhosis, had been told by his conventional doctors that his fatty liver was permanent. As she put it, he was basically told, “You have fatty liver; you're going to have this forever; there's nothing we can do.” He wasn’t especially open to a holistic approach, and he wasn’t taking his condition seriously. D'Amico ran his labs through Optimal DX and added markers not typically included in a standard liver panel, such as ferritin, which pointed to a likely underlying cause his doctors had never tested for. Over time, his numbers moved back toward the optimal range.
That kind of outcome hasn't gone unnoticed by the physicians D'Amico works alongside. One doctor, who runs a hospital in San Diego, asked her how they could get the report into standard care for every patient.
She runs a range of other diagnostics in addition to blood work, but Optimal DX remains her starting point with every client:
"[Optimal DX] is my step one for everyone."
Danielle D'Amico built her practice around a single report, and it's now the reason clients and physicians seek her out by name.
Optimal DX is free to join. Create your account at optimaldx.com/pricing and pay only for the reports you run.
