I spent my career in pharmaceutical science. With an MSc in Translational Medicine, I worked with some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer, Takeda, Shire, AstraZeneca and GSK — translating research into real-world medicine.

I believed I understood health. Then my son changed everything.

As a toddler, my son regressed and lost his speech. The abruptness of it puzzled me. As a scientist, the "wait and see" approach I was offered didn't sit right — I needed to understand why. So I did what my training had taught me to do: I started digging.

What I found was a discipline that did exactly what my pharmaceutical training had taught me to value: it looked past the surface symptoms to the underlying biology. Functional and biomedical practitioners working with children weren't asking only "what is the label?" — they were asking what was happening in the gut, how the body was handling everyday toxins, where nutrients and biochemistry had fallen out of balance, and how the immune and nervous systems were being affected.

The work of leading biomedical practitioners in children's complex health — whose four-pillar approach has guided thousands of families — gave structure to what I was learning. The model is simple and methodical: support the diet, replace what's missing nutritionally, address the digestive system, and support the body's detoxification and biochemical pathways. It mirrored the rigour I knew from research, applied to one child at a time.

Through functional testing, I came to understand my son as an individual: his gut health, how his body processed and cleared what it encountered, his nutrient status, and where his biochemistry needed support. We worked methodically over many months — diet first, then targeted nutrition, gut support, and gentle support for his natural pathways. It was slow, demanding work.

Today my son is a happy little boy with his voice back. I can't promise any family the same journey — every child is different, and I'd never claim otherwise. But that experience showed me what becomes possible when you stop guessing and start investigating.

It's why I built Zaytoon Health: to bring scientific rigour, a functional-medicine framework, and a parent's understanding to families and women, anywhere in the world, who deserve answers.

Zaytoon means olive — the tree that lives for centuries, heals, and regenerates from its own roots. It felt like the right name for work that begins, always, at the root.