Meet Marta Banuelos
Marta Banuelos is a Hashimoto’s Functional Medicine Practitioner and Clinical Nutritionist with a Master’s in Functional Medicine and Human Nutrition from the University of Western States and Advanced Practitioner Training through the Institute for Functional Medicine. She works with one kind of patient: women with Hashimoto’s who have already done everything right — the medication, the diets, the endless supplements — and are still exhausted, still gaining weight, still told their labs are “normal” when they feel anything but.
If you’ve already tried the basics and you’re still not better, you haven’t run out of options. You’ve just never had someone look deeper than anyone bothered to look. That’s the work — and these hard, “nothing-has-worked” cases are exactly the ones Marta takes on. Practicing Genetics First, she begins where standard thyroid care never does: your DNA, mapped through the Hashimoto’s Genetic Blueprint, and works backward to the real reasons your body hasn’t responded the way you were promised.
I Have Been Where You Are
Not that long ago, I was you.
I weighed 192 pounds and I felt awful. I was exhausted every single day and battling chronic anemia. My hair was falling out, and I couldn’t lose weight no matter what I tried. I started to feel like a shell of the person I used to be. And every doctor I saw told me the same thing — “Your labs are normal.” Or worse, they refused to look any further.
But I knew something was wrong. So I started digging.
When my thyroid finally crashed into full-blown hyperthyroidism, my doctors gave me two options: destroy my thyroid gland with nuclear medicine, or take a medication that had a 50% chance of working and could damage my liver in the process. Neither made sense to me. Frustrated by the system I’d trusted, I asked how much time I had to decide — and I chose a third path. Using my then-limited clinical nutrition and functional medicine knowledge, I went to work on what was actually happening in my body.
Within 22 days, my thyroid had completely normalized. I was stunned — at that point, I didn’t even have the formal training yet to build a proper functional medicine approach. But that experience showed me the path to my life’s work. From that moment on, I became obsessed with the WHY: why autoimmune disease takes hold, why the thyroid breaks down, and how our lifestyle — and even our DNA — shapes what happens to us next.
This Work Is In My Blood
I grew up in Poland before moving to the United States at seven years old — in a region still living with the aftermath of Chernobyl. Decades later, the radioactive fallout from that disaster continues to echo through the thyroids of the people who were there, even those who long ago moved away. Autoimmune thyroid disease followed many of them across oceans and generations.
I’ve watched it up close my entire life. My mother had Graves’ disease. So many of her friends — women from Poland and across Eastern Europe — have been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Thyroid disease was never an abstract specialty I chose from a textbook. It’s the story of the women just you and just like me, and it’s why I take the autoimmune thyroid process so seriously — including the way patients can quietly shift between Hashimoto’s and Graves’ over time, each demanding a completely different approach.
Why I Take the Hashimoto's Cases Others Give Up On
I come from a family of lawyers, and I inherited the part of them that can’t leave a question half-answered. I love the research. I love the hunt. I treat every difficult case like a detective treats a cold file — convinced the answer is in there, refusing to stop until I find it.
The truth is, I don’t switch off. I think about my patients at home, in the car, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon — turning their cases over, streamlining solutions. Some of my best ideas arrive at one in the morning, when my brain has been quietly stewing on a problem and finally hands me the answer. I’m always reading, always studying new labs, new strategies, and new developments in functional medicine and nutrition, because the women who come to me have usually been failed by everyone who stopped looking too soon. I don’t stop looking.
I built this practice because I refuse to let another woman be dismissed, gaslit, or told “everything is fine” when it clearly isn’t. I don’t guess. I test. And I don’t treat lab ranges — I treat the person in front of me, because the labs are only ever part of the equation.
You've Landed in the Right Place
If you’ve made it this far, something in your gut already knows you’re in the right place. Hard Hashimoto’s cases don’t need another practitioner who skims the surface and hands you the same advice you’ve already exhausted. They need someone willing to truly investigate — to keep digging, keep questioning, and refuse to stop until the real answers surface. That’s exactly what you’ll get with me.
I know what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own body — and I know what it feels like to get yourself back. It changed everything for me, in every area of my life. That’s what I want for you.
My practice is fully virtual, so we can work together from wherever you are. I’m currently able to see patients in most U.S. states, with a few exceptions due to licensing — you’ll find the current list on my Contact page. If you’re tired of being handed dead-end answers, let’s finally find the real ones, together.