08/30/2026
Ever walk out of a doctor’s office irritated?
I did after meeting my next Person of the Week, Dr. Dana Cooper of N. Harmony Functional Medicine in DeLand. Not because he did anything wrong. Quite the opposite. I walked out irritated because after spending time with this guy, I found myself wondering whether I was being as good a human being as I could be. I had other plans that afternoon. A surprise moral inventory was not one of them.
I kind of knew who Dana was before I actually met him. I first came across him in a Facebook video talking about gut health, the connection between the gut and the brain, stress, anxiety and all the strange ways our bodies communicate with us while we are busy pretending everything is fine. I was hooked.
There are two people whose posts I will stop to watch or read when they show up in my feed: Dana Cooper and Bill from Bill’s Donuts. Functional medicine and donuts. That, my friends, is balance. Methinks the good doctor would approve. (I went Shakespearean there. Very long Facebook posts are high art, after all.)
Then one day I see Dana walk into the gym I go to. The photographic evidence would suggest we are participating in entirely different activities once we get there. I went up to him and probably made him extremely uncomfortable by saying some version of, “Hey, I love your videos. Can I write about you?” There was slightly more conversation than that, but not enough to make it much less weird. We set up a time to meet at his clinic after his last patient had left. He gave me the tour, we talked shop, and then we sat down and really, really talked.
First thing you should know about Dana: as evidenced by the attached pic-the guy is a stud. Strong as an ox, ripped, handsome, dazzling smile, the whole irritating package. Standing next to him, I look like the before picture and he looks like the after picture in one of those old bodybuilding magazine supplement ads. All that is missing is a grainy photo of me looking dejected, getting sand kicked on me at the beach, and a headline promising 30 pounds of muscle in six weeks.
So naturally I asked him how someone who looks like that became so interested in functional medicine and health. His answer completely changed how I saw him.
Dana basically told me, “I’ve always sort of looked like this.” Healthy, athletic, strong. But growing up, his gut health was awful. His stomach gave him problems constantly. Doctors, treatments, medications, more treatments, more medications. He spent years searching for answers, and despite looking incredibly healthy from the outside, he did not feel healthy on the inside. He told me that so many medications over the years even left him with slight permanent hearing damage.
Then he went to Costa Rica and met someone who completely changed what he thought he knew about health. Not through some enchanted berry harvested by monks every third solstice and available for $799 if you enter promo code WELLNESS at checkout on their ’Gram. The ideas were much more fundamental: food, eating closer to the earth, sleep, stress, movement, environment, the gut, the brain, and the rather obvious, once somebody points it out, possibility that all of these things might actually be talking to one another.
Dana changed the way he lived. He changed what he ate, how he slept, how he dealt with stress and how he thought about his own body. For the first time in his life, he told me, the problems that had followed him around for years went away. His exact word was "healed." That experience changed the direction of his life.
Somebody had finally helped him understand his own health instead of just giving him another thing to take, and Dana decided that was what he wanted to do for other people.
Once he told me that story, everything about the guy started making more sense. It explained why he listens the way he does, why he asks so many questions, and why he wants to know what you eat, how you sleep, what stresses you out, when something changed, how your stomach feels, what your energy is like, and why you keep saying, “I know the test says I am fine, but I do not feel fine.”
That ties into something Dana got me thinking about that I had never really articulated before. Most of us tend to think about health as having two settings: I’m sick or I’m not sick. If you are not actively coughing up a lung, running a fever or being wheeled toward an MRI, congratulations, apparently you are healthy. But what about the enormous amount of life between those two points? Maybe nothing is technically “wrong,” but are you sleeping well? Are you mentally clear? Do you have energy? Does your stomach feel good? Are you strong? Are you anxious all the time? Do you wake up rested, or do you wake up looking like you spent the night negotiating a hostage release? Are you actually feeling as good, strong, clear and healthy as your particular body is capable of feeling?
That is a much more interesting question than simply, “Are you sick?” The gut-brain relationship is part of what first hooked me on Dana’s videos. People casually call the gut the “second brain,” which obviously does not mean there is a tiny backup Rob somewhere near my intestines making executive decisions, but the relationship between digestion, stress, mood, sleep and the brain is fascinating. Anybody who has ever gotten nervous and immediately had their stomach respond with, “Excellent, I will now make this situation significantly worse,” already understands at least the basic concept.
What I like about Dana is that he does not seem interested in turning all of that complexity into one magical answer. He keeps coming back to the person. That got me thinking about the behemoth that is modern healthcare.
I want to write this carefully because I know doctors and nurses who care enormously about their patients. Most of them went into medicine precisely because they wanted to help people. But a lot of them now work inside systems where time itself has become a luxury item. There are more patients waiting. Somebody needs an authorization. Somebody needs a referral. The computer needs fourteen things clicked before anyone is permitted to move forward with civilization.
Meanwhile, a person is sitting there saying, “My stomach hurts. My hormones feel completely out of whack. I am exhausted. I am anxious. Something has changed. I know my numbers are technically within range, but I do not feel like myself.”
Tests matter. Numbers matter. Modern medicine is extraordinary. But the human being sitting in front of you matters too. You are not the theoretical person standing precisely in the middle of a laboratory reference range. You have your genetics, your history, your sleep, your stress, your food, your work, your relationships, your environment, your weird habits and whatever mysterious thing happens every Thursday at 3:17 that you stopped telling people about because they keep looking at you funny.
Dana seems genuinely interested in all of it.
And here is something I absolutely was not expecting. As naturally as this guy talks about food, sleep, stress, lifestyle and eating from the earth, his office also has some of the most cutting-edge machinery, testing and technology I have personally seen in a doctor’s office. I loved that. You hear Costa Rica, natural medicine and eating from the earth and half expect to walk in and find Dana diagnosing somebody beside a ficus plant while another person softly plays a rain stick. Nope. Serious technology. That told me something important about the way he thinks. Dana does not seem particularly interested in choosing sides in some imaginary battle between natural health and modern science. He wants information. If technology helps him understand somebody better, use it. If nutrition matters, look at it. If sleep matters, talk about it. If stress matters, deal with it. His allegiance seems to be to the person sitting in front of him, not to proving one philosophy right.
Dana describes what he is trying to create as a “climate for wellness.” As a writer, phrases like that normally trigger a small internal warning light because I start expecting someone to unveil a PowerPoint titled Synergistic Wellness Ecosystems and the Integrated Patient Journey. But Dana actually means it.
Then we got onto faith, which may have been my favorite part of the entire conversation. Dana is deeply Christian. His faith clearly matters to him. But when he talked with me about spirituality, he talked in terms of whatever Creator I believed in. That phrasing really stayed with me. There was no test, no judgment, no requirement that my path had to look exactly like his before he could respect it. His faith seemed secure enough to leave room for somebody else’s.
Naturally, I responded to this beautiful and thoughtful conversation about God with the theological sophistication everyone has come to expect from me. I told him I was raised Pentecostal and am a Christian and asked, “So where exactly do the rattlesnakes enter the faith and healing process for you?”
He laughed. Good. I have standards. Finding me funny is a hallmark of good taste. What I loved underneath the joke was how natural his faith seemed. Dana did not need to broadcast it at me. He did not need to tell me how faithful he was. It just kept showing up in the way he talked about people. That became even clearer when he started talking about his wife, Mila. The whole guy changed. He talked about her with so much love, then about both of their parents, people he said have been huge role models for them, and then with this unmistakable pride when he talked about being a dad and the family they’re raising.
(I absolutely love that stuff. There is something about being behind closed doors with a guy, when it’s just me and some other dude and there is absolutely nobody there to impress, and hearing him gush about his wife and how much he loves being a father. No audience. No Facebook post. No husband-and-dad-of-the-year campaign. He just lights up because he genuinely adores the life he gets to go home to. I always walk away from those conversations liking a man a little more. You can learn a lot about somebody by listening to how he talks about the people who will never know what he said.)
There is something powerful about goodness being modeled from one generation to the next. Faith. Hard work. Taking care of your family. Serving other people. Kids actually watching adults live those things instead of just hearing speeches about how important they are.
That distinction matters to me. I have never been particularly impressed by people who constantly announce how faithful they are, how generous they are or what wonderful values they have. Eventually I want to see the receipts, and I do not mean the ones you post on Facebook. How do you treat your spouse? How do you treat your kids? How do you treat somebody who cannot do one useful thing for you? How hard do you work when nobody is watching? How do you behave when you disagree with someone? What does your faith look like on a random Tuesday afternoon when nobody is applauding?
That is the interesting stuff.
Listening to Dana made me think about what I guess you could call generational goodness. He and Mila had people before them modeling faith, hard work, decency and what it means to take care of your family. Now they get to live those same things in front of the next generation. That is how values actually survive. Not because somebody puts them on a bumper sticker, but because a kid watches how the adults in their life actually live.
Faith gets considerably more interesting to me when it stops being something somebody broadcasts and becomes something you can quietly recognize in the way they live. That is what I saw in Dana.
The same values show up in the way he talks about coming home to Florida after practicing in North Carolina, building his practice and helping people who have too often been underserved or overlooked. He does not talk about helping people as though he is descending from a mountaintop bearing gifts. His attitude seems a lot simpler: I have the ability to help. Somebody needs help. Why wouldn’t I?
That probably should not be remarkable. Somehow it is.
There is another part of Dana’s story that I think deserves to be said plainly. Dana is a young Black doctor. That is not why I admire him. I would be absolutely thrilled if my own sons grew up to become the kind of man Dana is, and my sons are white. If they become strong without needing to dominate people, successful without becoming impressed with themselves, devoted to their families, secure in their faith without judging everyone around them, curious, kind, funny and committed to doing some good wherever they live, I will be one incredibly proud father.
But there is still something particularly powerful about a young Black kid seeing Dana. Not somebody in a movie. Not somebody from fifty years ago in a textbook. A guy right here in the community. Young Black doctor. Stethoscope. Business owner. Husband. Father. Built like a pro athlete. Giant smile. Successful practice. Helping people. Doing well while doing good.
Some kid gets to look at him and think, “That could be me.”
Sometimes we talk about representation until it starts sounding like an academic concept, when in real life it can be beautifully simple. A child sees somebody who looks like him doing something he may never have pictured himself doing, and suddenly the distance between “people like that become doctors” and “maybe I could become a doctor” gets a little shorter. Maybe I could own a business. Maybe I could build something. Maybe I could help people. Maybe someday another kid will look at me that way.
And perhaps that kid also gets to see something Dana learned from the generations before him: success and goodness do not have to compete with each other. You can work hard, build a business, be strong, be ambitious, love your family, have faith, serve people and still remain a decent human being when nobody is handing out awards for it.
Frankly, I think the rest of us need guys like Dana as examples too. I do. My sons do. Young Black boys do. Young white boys do. A bunch of middle-aged men who probably should have sorted some of this out already do. Because the thing worth emulating is not the stethoscope. It is the man wearing it.
At some point during our conversation, I realized I was not thinking about chiropractic anymore. Or functional medicine. Or gut health. Or testing. I was thinking about character. Dana is intelligent without constantly reminding you that he is intelligent, confident without being arrogant, strong without needing to establish dominance, deeply faithful without judging somebody else’s faith, and successful without seeming particularly impressed with himself.
And he listens. Actually listens. Which, frankly, is irritating, because being around someone who is that present forces you to start auditing your own behavior. Am I listening enough? Am I patient enough? Do I make people feel seen? Do I really make room for somebody who thinks or believes differently than I do? Am I doing enough with whatever abilities I have? Could I be kinder? More curious? Could I occasionally allow another human being to finish an entire sentence before I jump in?
(That last one feels unnecessarily targeted. And for the record, I am not interrupting you because I am rude. I am interrupting because, while you were talking, you accidentally made me think of something hilarious and now there is a very real possibility I will forget it if I wait another eleven seconds. So technically, cutting you off is your fault. Besides, what kind of friend would I be if I deprived you of a really good joke simply because you were still speaking?)
I am working on this. Dana, apparently, has already figured it out. I suspect this may be the real reason Melissa wants me to switch to him as my doctor, which was already my plan by the time I walked out of his building. And, of course, if I become ridiculously healthy, Melissa will take credit for convincing me to switch doctors. Um, excuse me. I am the one who walked up to a nearly perfect stranger at the gym -no Dance of Joy, by the way-and had the awkward conversation that got this whole thing rolling. She can have partial credit. At best.
I went to interview someone in order to write an inspirational column and left thinking about whether “not sick” is really the standard any of us should be shooting for. Maybe the better question is: how good could you actually feel? And maybe there is an even bigger question: how good of a human being could you actually become?
Dana made me think about all of that.
Every once in a while, someone comes into your life who seems to embody nearly everything you hope people can be. For me, Dana is one of those people. He may very well be one of the finest human beings I have ever had the privilege to know, and he is very deservedly my Person of the Week.
-Rob
