The Afterglow Mindset

The Departure

There was a moment I knew I had to leave the healthcare system. While that moment was profoundly impactful on my life, the circumstances that led to it were perfectly mundane in today’s healthcare climate. Pressures from “higher ups” to see more patients… and then a few more… and then just a few more per day. Chart a certain way to improve billing codes and reimbursement. Order tests that are known to be reimbursed well, even when medical necessity is questionable. Discourage or deny testing that is clearly needed because it isn’t covered. See walk-in patients. Review and order tests for patients seen by other providers in the practice.

The list went on, and the goalpost inched farther and farther away from patient-centered care and into profit-centered operations.

Oh, and additional compensation for the extra work and time? How selfish. Providers are supposed to care for their patients and sacrifice for the greater good, right?

Because here is the other truth: our healthcare system doesn’t treat its providers like human beings either. We became the vehicle for profit and the scapegoat when that system denies care.

So, while I did finally reach a breaking point and walk away from the career I had known for over ten years, I had started to lose my passion for medicine long before that. After years of quiet erosion, my passion for learning, for listening, for offering real care — the things that made me a great provider — started to feel like liabilities. My resilience to advocate for patient care dulled over time.

I was worn down by a system that tells patients to “get healthy” and promotes “preventive care,” then denies the very services that would allow them to do that. All the while, the responsibility falls on the provider or the patient, while the system continues to profit.

I saw patients denied labs that could give them answers. Relief from years of not knowing dangled in front of them with one test, and insurance said no. Best of luck finding a denial reason that makes any real sense. Patients were denied treatments that could provide relief from chronic suffering. All in the name of a bottom line, usually decided by a random person or an algorithm with no capacity to understand the weight of those denials on the actual patient.

Many were denied support because their symptoms didn’t fit the correct ICD codes that came with better reimbursement. Ironically, many of the codes providers are forced to use were built on research that excluded the very people we’re trying to help. Clinical norms were shaped around white, able-bodied men, and those norms still influence what gets covered, what gets denied, and who gets believed in our current healthcare system.

Time spent with the patient, listening and truly investigating their history, was suddenly “inefficient.” Digging deeper was viewed as “investigational,” and therefore not covered. Root-cause medicine became too slow, too patient-centered, too layered and nuanced to survive in a profit-based system that values volume over depth of care.

And with that kind of imbalance, someone always pays the price. In my experience, it is rarely the system itself.

I walked away from the traditional healthcare system in May of 2025 with no plan and no idea what I would do next. I just knew I had to make a change.

The Spark

While I don’t recommend quitting without any kind of plan, for me, it was enough of a break from what I thought I knew of myself that it forced me to examine my life in a way I never had before.

I had been in therapy for years. I read all the books. I did the yoga, the breathwork, the meditation, the supplements. Mental health was my career, and yet, even from within it, I couldn’t recognize how unwell I had become.

I started to understand how my life experiences, environmental exposures, and trauma shaped the way my mind and body functioned. Often separately. Sometimes in opposition to one another. My queer identity had been painfully and forcefully suppressed for much of my life, and many of the coping skills I developed as protective mechanisms had become the very behavioral loops holding me back from living authentically.

The life I was living felt more like the life I believed I was supposed to live, rather than the one I actually wanted.

After I quit and the dust settled, I was left in a moment of quiet reflection. My husband was out of town for work, and I was home alone, which was rare. As I braced for the wave of self-doubt, anxiety, guilt, and fear I expected to feel… it didn’t come.

Instead, I felt still.

For all intents and purposes, my life was falling apart. We were selling our house because of the economy. We had moved into the basement of a small rental while figuring out next steps. I was unemployed. It should have been a perfect recipe for an anxiety spiral. But I felt calm.

It was a calmness of knowing. That maybe, for the first time in my life, I chose myself. My actual self. Not the one I had curated to survive, or the one I had been conditioned to protect. Me.

That knowledge was worth whatever consequences were coming, because it was mine.

That moment became my Afterglow.

And the Mindset that was born in that moment became the foundation of this practice.

The Afterglow Mindset

We all carry histories. Stories that shaped us. Environments, identities, exposures, belief systems, traumas. I believe these experiences are as integral to your medical history as your symptoms are.

Afterglow Mindset was created to hold that context and to offer care that is integrative by design. Whole-person care doesn’t separate mental health from the body, the body from identity, or identity from environment. It sees them as inseparable, because they are.

Your mental health is not just “in your head.” It lives throughout your entire system.

If you’ve been struggling with medications or reactions, if you’ve felt dismissed, misread, or like your symptoms don’t match what you’ve been told is going on, please advocate for yourself. You deserve care that takes all of you into account.

If Afterglow Mindset feels like a good fit, I’d be honored to work with you.  

– W. Nathan Wormington, PA-C

Owner & Founder

Afterglow Mindset 

www.afterglowmindset.com