FOUNDER, MIDLIFE METABOLIC MEDICINE
Denise Erland, FNP-C
Board-Certified Nurse Practitioner | Metabolic & Hormonal Medicine
Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner · 18 Years Clinical Experience · BS Kinesiology (Exercise Science)
I built Midlife Metabolic Medicine around one clinical question:
what is actually driving this patient’s weight loss resistance — and what must shift, and in what order, for results to become physiologically sustainable?
That question is not answered in a 15-minute primary care visit — or even asked by telehealth platforms prescribing GLP-1s off of an intake form. My practice exists to ask it properly — and to build your care around the answer.
Twelve years in critical care. An early career in exercise science.
I am a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner with 18 years of clinical experience — twelve of them in critical care, where you learn to read complex, multi-system physiology: patterns that only surface when you evaluate the whole picture at once. That discipline is how I practice today. I read your labs, hormone panels, symptoms, and history to find the disruption most upstream of the others — so we pull the lever that moves everything else.
My early career was in kinesiology, and I still build my patients' strength programs myself — protecting muscle is more than half the outcome in midlife weight loss. My educational and clinical training spans institutions including Bryn Mawr College, Indiana University, Rush University, Northwestern Medicine, and St. Luke's Health System. I am licensed to provide telehealth across Oregon and Idaho.
CLINICAL BACKGROUND
I have spent my entire life resisting systems that fail women.
Raised in a fundamentalist, authoritarian religious community, I learned early what it felt like when a woman's value was measured in submission and domestic servitude — when her access to education, healthcare, even her own identity, was gated by male authority.
I left that community while still in high school. Through stretches of housing and food insecurity, I remained driven by a single conviction: that education was the door to a life rooted in autonomy and self-determination. I committed to it accordingly, putting myself through college on scholarships and full-time work.
I learned the cost of misogyny early, as a girl being told what she was permitted to become — and those formative experiences left me with a deep intolerance for systems that erase, silence, or ultimately subjugate any human being.
I built this practice at a moment when women's rights and equitable healthcare access are being systematically dismantled in this county — and when too many of the institutions delivering that care have aligned themselves with the dismantling, either by policy or by silence.
So I built a practice outside of those institutions: a metabolic and hormonal medical home that centers women in perimenopause — a stage of life when the healthcare system is most likely to dismiss a woman’s experience, minimize her concerns, and offer solutions that fail to match the complexity of her biology.
Putting my expertise to work in a practice that prioritizes patients whose access, economic security, and civil rights are under attack is both an act of service and an act of resistance. I do not separate the two.
WHY I CHOSE THIS WORK
A solo telehealth practice.
This care is longitudinal and data-driven — telehealth does it exceptionally well. A solo practice with a defined panel means I know your full history, and that I am the same provider at your first appointment and your fiftieth.
Midlife Metabolic Medicine is woman- and LGBTQ- owned: an inclusive, affirming, trauma-informed environment welcoming patients across the full spectrum of gender and sexual identity — because resolving metabolic resistance requires a foundation of safety.
If you are ready to address your health with the same rigor you bring to the rest of your life, I built this practice for you.
BY DESIGN, NOT DEFAULT
Ready for a different kind of care?
A Discovery Visit is a no-charge, 15-minute telehealth conversation — ask questions, describe what you are experiencing, and find out whether this is the right clinical fit.