Dr. Brooke Breitbach of Brookview Wellness and Holistic Realtor Raleigh
I’ve known Dr. Brooke Breitbach for about ten years, which gives me a slightly different vantage point for this Lantern Spotlight.
We first met through a business mastermind, when we were both somewhere in the ongoing process of building, changing, experimenting, and figuring out what came next.
Years later, Brooke became the very first client of my freelance business, Lighten CX. By then, business acquaintanceship had long since wandered into friendship.
Over the years, I’ve watched her work evolve more than once. And if you know Brooke, that tracks.
She is interested in too many things to stay tucked neatly inside a single professional box.
Her résumé includes chiropractor, functional medicine practitioner, Realtor, and real estate investor, BUT she used to be a city transit bus driver, sheriff’s dispatcher, retail manager, sales rep, and fashion design major who studied in London.
Outside of work, she paints, sews, kayaks, tackles house projects, travels, catches live music, and rides an Indian motorcycle.
“Many lives,” she calls them. Indeed.
Looking at what she’s doing today, though, those lives seem considerably less random than they once might have.
Because Brooke has spent much of her career paying attention to the relationship between people and their environments. These days, that work happens through two businesses, Brookview Wellness and Holistic Realtor Raleigh, connected by a deceptively simple idea…
Where you live belongs in the conversation about how you live.
The First Clue Was Her Own Health
Brooke found her way to chiropractic after a back injury in her twenties.
She had a torn L5/S1 disc with bilateral sciatica that she says was initially misdiagnosed. Her experience with the care she received left her wanting a deeper understanding of what was happening in her body and why.
At 30, she returned to school to study chiropractic. While there, she also began pursuing functional medicine training, partly in an effort to address her own health.
There was another piece of the story that would become more significant with time.
The home she lived in had a basement that flooded frequently. Looking back, Brooke believes mold exposure there exacerbated the inflammatory issues she was experiencing.
Years passed. Brooke built a career helping patients investigate factors that could be contributing to their symptoms.
Then houses started showing up in the story again.
When the House Becomes Part of the Case
Brooke began identifying moisture and mold concerns in the homes of some of her patients.
For someone trained to look for underlying contributors to health, that presented an interesting problem. A person’s daily environment could be relevant to the symptoms they were working so hard to address.
Brooke also happened to have another professional interest (of course!) in real estate.
Suddenly, the overlap was difficult to ignore.
She saw families trying to make thoughtful decisions about their health while living in homes with moisture or mold concerns. On the real estate side, she saw buyers making one of the largest purchases of their lives with little guidance about what might make a home healthier to live in.
So Brooke did what Brooke tends to do when she finds an unanswered question.
She learned more.
She became a Conscious Healthy Home Certified Realtor™ and began combining that training with her work in real estate.
Through Holistic Realtor Raleigh, she now helps buyers and sellers consider the health of the home itself, bringing another layer of awareness to the usual conversations about location, layout, price, and condition.
It’s an unusual intersection of expertise, but in Brooke’s world, it makes perfect sense.
A home is an investment, certainly.
It’s also the place where you sleep, cook, recover from illness, raise children, breathe, work, rest, and spend an enormous portion of your life.
And that deserves some attention!
A Practitioner Who Keeps Asking “What About...?”
That same instinct runs through her work at Brookview Wellness.
Brooke is a Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner™ through the Institute for Functional Medicine. Her work focuses on helping patients identify underlying factors affecting their physical and mental health, then developing personalized recommendations that can include food, supplements, and peptides.
What makes the work especially suited to Brooke is the detective element of it.
She likes questions with another question hiding behind them.
Research catches her attention. New findings send her down rabbit holes. Success stories make her want to understand what worked. Her own health continues to be part of that learning process.
At the end of her Lantern Spotlight questionnaire, Brooke described what keeps her wondering as all the mysteries still left in health and the universe.
Her shorthand for that curiosity was perfect:
“What about _____?”
That unfinished question says quite a bit about the way her mind works.
There is always another connection worth considering. In life, in health, and in home buying.
The Butterfly Effect
Brooke has a particular affection for clients who take their health seriously and then carry what they’ve learned into the lives around them.
She calls it a butterfly effect.
Someone learns something that changes the way they care for themselves. Their family benefits. They share what they’ve learned with a friend. Better information makes its way into another household.
For Brooke, helping people has always had a ripple beyond the individual appointment or transaction.
Her recent reading of The Go-Giver resonated for much the same reason.
Its emphasis on generosity fits the philosophy she brings to her businesses: give freely, care for people well, and build a life around work you genuinely love.
That outward generosity has also taught Brooke something about its limits.
“I need to prioritize my own health over everything. It often gets overlooked because I so fiercely want to help others.”
There is something refreshingly human about hearing that from a person whose work revolves around health.
Knowing what matters and consistently making room for it are two different skills.
Brooke is still practicing, too.
A Life With a Little Horsepower
Any profile of Brooke that stayed entirely inside exam rooms and real estate listings would miss quite a bit.
She grew up in Iowa. She studied fashion in London. Creativity still has a firm foothold in her life through painting, sewing, decorating, and house projects.
She loves the outdoors, kayaking, traveling, concerts, and live music. Her preferred cup is matcha with coconut milk and a little honey. When she wants a true escape, she heads for Sunrise Chateaux in the mountains.
And then there’s the motorcycle.
Brooke rides an Indian.
This is apparently something people are surprised to learn about her, although after reading the complete inventory of Brooke’s careers, interests, and reinventions, I’m beginning to think the motorcycle may be one of the least surprising entries.
There is a certain restlessness to Brooke, in the best sense of the word. She likes learning. She likes making things. She likes finding connections. She has built a life spacious enough to contain several versions of herself at once.
Perhaps those “many lives” were never separate lives at all.
Health, Home, and What We Build Around Ourselves
There’s a temptation, when telling an entrepreneurial story, to make the path look tidier in hindsight.
Brooke’s is better left winding.
A back injury eventually led her toward chiropractic and functional medicine. Her own experience with a water-damaged home gave her another lens through which to think about health. An interest in real estate became an opportunity to help families consider their living environments before the moving boxes ever arrive.
Even fashion school belongs somewhere in there, alongside the motorcycle and the matcha.
Brooke’s work today is built around two of the biggest investments most of us will ever make: the body we live in and the place we call home.
She believes both deserve care, attention, and better questions.
And knowing Brooke as long as I have, I suspect there will always be another question coming.
What about _____?
She’ll probably find out.
Find Dr. Brooke Breitbach
Brooke works with patients through Brookview Wellness and with home buyers and sellers through Holistic Realtor Raleigh. Her current offerings include the Revive Program, an entry-level functional medicine intake and review of findings, along with healthy-home resources and services.
Brookview Wellness
Dr. Brooke - Holistic Realtor
