Dr. John Arango, ND

I grew up in a neighborhood where the Manhattan skyline glittered just across the Hudson River, but the streets around me told a different story. West New York, New Jersey, in the 1970s and 80s was a mosaic of immigrant families—Colombian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Italian, Polish, Irish—all building lives in cramped apartments with outsized dreams.

The diversity of my childhood wasn't a concept taught in a classroom. It was the sound of five different languages on a single block. It was my mother's Colombian arepa for breakfast and seventy-cent pizza from the neighborhood pizzeria. It was Jewish delis, bodegas selling pan con bistec, taco joints, and Chinese food takeout—all within walking distance. It was learning that family extends beyond bloodlines to the neighbors who watch each other's children when both parents work double shifts.

At twelve, my world shifted dramatically when my family relocated to Medellín, Colombia. It was 1990—a period when the city was globally infamous, caught in the chaos of the drug cartels. Suddenly, I was a foreigner in my parents' homeland, unable to read or write in Spanish, placed two grades behind where I should have been. The streets carried a different kind of danger than I'd known; the sound of violence was not distant.

Those years taught me something no textbook could: how constant uncertainty affects the body and mind. I watched how chronic stress—whether from life circumstances, trauma, or illness—changes how we think, learn, and connect. These weren't clinical observations then; they were simply the life we lived.

I returned permanently to the United States in 1994, eventually settling in South Florida. The years that followed took me through pharmacy into functional medicine, each step deepening my understanding of the connection between body, mind, and spirit. But it was those early experiences—navigating between two cultures, witnessing how stress shapes development, learning resilience from communities that had little except each other—that inform how I approach every family today.

When a parent tells me they're exhausted, that they feel like no one really listens, that they would do anything for their child—I don't respond with clinical distance. I respond because I've lived the uncertainty, the pressure, and the fierce determination that comes from loving someone through difficult times.