Dr. Brandy Zachary (“Dr. Z”) is the founder and CEO of TDZ Functional Medicine Academy, a triple-accredited education and clinical-technology platform on track for $10M+ in 2026 — CPA-verified growth of 2,095% over three years.

In 2026, she won four American Business Awards Stevies, including Gold for Best Female Entrepreneur — the inaugural award in that category in the program’s 24-year history — plus three Silvers. She’s also a 2 Comma Award winner, an honor given to the top 1% of online educators and coaches, and once took a new functional medicine offer from $0 to $7 million in under a year.

She is the founder and creator of:

• TDZ Functional Medicine Academy — training more functional medicine practitioners globally than any other independent platform
• The Mentorship (TM3) — the clinical and business mentorship program that has pulled practitioners back from the edge of collapse
• The Complete Clinical Mentorship (CCM) — the all-access membership that puts the full TDZ ecosystem in a practitioner's hands
• LabDX — the first functional medicine lab-analysis software of its kind worldwide, covering 65+ lab panels in one unified clinical report
• DiagnoseThis — a consumer platform that generates personalized "WHY Reports" and connects patients directly with credentialed functional medicine practitioners
• Eight books — including six #1 Amazon bestselling clinical textbooks and an award-winning personality-profiling system published by McGraw-Hill

She’s trained thousands of health entrepreneurs and regularly teaches multidisciplinary audiences (MD, DO, DC, ND, FNP, RN, PharmD, LAc), having taught for or been interviewed by IFM, Rupa Health, Designs for Health, 3x4 Genetics, SIBO SOS, and more. Her work has been featured by Fox News, NBC, Forbes Health, Entrepreneur, New York Weekly, and CEO Weekly.

A chiropractic physician (DC, IFMCP, FMACP) and 5th-generation female entrepreneur, Dr. Z will tell you she’s “not a fan of sales” — despite outselling Disney in their own park and generating $850K+ from the stage at a single event. It’s that efficient, patient-centered, high-integrity approach that’s made her one of the most sought-after trainers in functional medicine.

After earning her DC, Dr. Z practiced as a chiropractic physician until an injury forced her out of clinical work. She assumed that chapter was closed.

It wasn't.

She built a separate seven-figure consulting business advising health entrepreneurs & business owners on branding, marketing, sales, & speaking — the business side of healthcare, not the clinical side. She expected to do that work for the rest of her career.

In 2012, she published her first book, How to Read a Client from Across the Room, with McGraw-Hill New York. The book introduced The Character Code System — the world's first visual personality profiling system (created in 2008) — and hit #1 in nine Amazon categories. It won the Bronze Axiom Business Book Award in sales. The Character Code System remains a working component of TDZ-FMA's daily operations today, informing the branding, marketing, sales, and client fulfillment strategies behind the company's growth.

In 2013, she woke up sick and couldn't get well. What followed was one of the most expensive failures in modern medicine — and it happened to someone who was already inside it.

Seven specialists. Eight prescriptions. Nearly a million dollars a year in medical care. Her brain was electrocuted 20 times for what turned out to be an infection. Not a single specialist found the answer. The gaslighting was, as she has described it publicly, profound.

So she found the answer herself. PubMed. Midnight. A 450-square-foot converted garage on a miniature pony rescue ranch — in bunk beds, with her daughter, in her forties. She traveled to Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF as a patient fighting for her own diagnosis, not as a practitioner with credentials to wave around. What she eventually uncovered was a primary immunodeficiency affecting fewer than 12,000 Americans.

She was placed on Social Security disability. $927 a month. Single mother. No child support. No alimony. No co-parent. A decade-long predatory divorce with eleven attorneys on the other side and two traumatic brain injuries somewhere in the middle.

She did not stop. That part is important. She did not stop.

Most people in her position would have called it enough. She called it a starting point.

She reactivated her chiropractic license in 2014–2015 — not to return to practice, but because she needed to order her own labs to solve her own case. In the fall of 2016, she opened a functional medicine clinic in California. Her disability payment was $927 a month. Her clinic lease was $700 a month. There was no backup plan. No investor. No safety net of any kind.

She made $3,000 her first month. By the end of year one: $240,000 in cash revenue. No loans. No outside help. Just the thing she had figured out, and the patients who needed it.

Patients started referring practitioners. Practitioners started asking how she'd built it. She started teaching what she'd learned — first informally to MDs, DOs, PAs, and NPs, then as a structured program.

That became TDZ Functional Medicine Academy. Built the same way she built everything else. Because it had to exist, and she was the one willing to build it.

In February 2026, Dr. Z founded Core DT Solutions LLC in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands — the parent company of DiagnoseThis.com.

DiagnoseThis is the product she needed in 2013 when no one was coming for her. She knows what it feels like to sit alone at midnight, symptoms that don't add up, a stack of normal lab results, and a medical system that has already decided you're the problem. She knows what it costs in years of your life when nobody looks at the whole picture.

Dr. Z built DiagnoseThis so that this never has to be someone else's story. It's a patient-facing platform that turns chaotic symptom searches into clinician-trained reports — what's happening in the body, what labs to consider, red flags to watch, a doctor-ready summary, and a direct connection to vetted functional medicine practitioners who actually know what they're doing. The kind of resource that would have changed everything for the woman sitting alone at midnight, wondering why nobody believed her.

The company signed a 15-year contract through the University of the Virgin Islands Research & Technology Park. Her attorneys reviewed it and said, quoting directly, "this is brave, we'll prepare your defense." She signed it anyway. She relocated to St. Croix with her family.

She is not building this because it is the safe move. She is building it because she looked around and nobody else was.

Dr. Z splits her time between Playa del Carmen, Mexico and St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands — two places she did not grow up dreaming about, because she was too busy surviving to dream about geography.

She raised her daughter alone for 15 years. No co-parent. No child support. No backup. She did it through a decade-long divorce, two brain injuries, a primary immune deficiency that went undiagnosed for years, and a stretch where her monthly income was $927 and her rent was $700.

She met her husband somewhere in the middle of building all of this. She will tell you, without being asked, that she hadn’t known what having a partner to support you could feel like before he came into their lives.

TDZ-FMA's business headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming. The team spans 10+ countries, all remote, all real. When the company exits, she has committed to distributing 20% to her staff — the VAs in the Philippines, Colombia, and Pakistan, the directors who showed up and stayed. Not because it's good PR. Because it's the right thing.

The universe, for the record, has tried to stop her twice with tires through car roofs at freeway speed. Different incidents. Same woman. She finds this moderately funny at this point. You probably would too, if you'd built what she built in between.