Healing chronic symptoms increasingly draws on knowledge from across medicine, psychology, physical therapy, functional medicine, somatic work, movement, rehabilitation, and our growing understanding of the brain and nervous system.
But no one discipline holds the whole picture. Practitioners develop deep expertise in their own fields while regularly encountering challenges that extend beyond them — and there is no easy way to access what people in adjacent disciplines are learning, ask questions of one another, or find trusted people with complementary expertise.
There is also knowledge to be gained by looking closely at lived experience itself. Researchers and other people skilled in understanding human behavior and experience can help surface patterns, identify unmet needs, make connections across different sources of knowledge, and—importantly—help uncover the questions worth asking.
A physical therapist who uses Pilates wants to know how to help clients challenged by chronic fatigue syndrome.
A functional medicine doctor with a year-long waitlist wants to give her patients something that will help them before they ever meet her — a way to start learning about the mind-body connection.
A doctor of psychology keeps noticing that her patients with a history of trauma are having a hard time learning to experience safety in their body because of chronic pain.
Every profile is designed to make it easy to understand someone's work, see what they're thinking about right now, and reach out directly.
(Illustrative profiles — not real members)
Works with complex chronic illness, including Long COVID, MCAS, dysautonomia, and post-viral syndromes.
Works with emotional processing, protective patterns, and nervous-system regulation.
Focuses on hypermobility, chronic pain, stabilization, and movement retraining.
Some of the most useful learning happens when people working on the same problem from different angles simply talk to one another. The Collective is here to make those conversations easier to start.
Send it to us privately. If someone in the Collective comes to mind, we can point you toward them or help make the connection.
A private space for practitioners to bring questions to the network, learn across disciplines, and share what they're seeing in their own work.
In 2014, I became chronically ill and disabled.
Over years of trying to heal, I gradually assembled an exceptional, cross-disciplinary team around me. Their work spans very different areas, but each, in their own way, recognizes the relationship between mind and body in chronic symptoms and healing.
For over 13 years, I've found myself at the intersection of those disciplines — learning across them, making connections between ideas, and piecing together an understanding of healing that no single field could have given me.
My professional background includes behavioral and design research for product innovation — work that involves understanding people's experiences and unmet needs, asking the right questions, and drawing connections across different sources of knowledge to solve complex problems. I found myself bringing that same way of thinking to healing.
As I moved between practitioners and disciplines, I also became a conduit between them. Something I learned in one place could deepen another person's thinking or help with a challenge they were navigating. A question of my own could lead to a useful connection elsewhere. Sometimes I shared what I'd learned or a resource; sometimes I connected people who should meet.
I experienced the value of cross-disciplinary exchange firsthand and realized there should be a structure that enables more of it — helping practitioners do their work better and, ultimately, helping more people heal.
So I created the Hele Collective (pronounced "heal") — a cross-disciplinary peer network of health practitioners, researchers, and self-healers working to understand how to help people heal from chronic symptoms, built to make it easier to find and learn from one another, make connections, and move the work forward.
— Founder, The Hele Collective
I've chosen to leave my name out of this. Not because the story isn't mine — it is — but because the Collective was never meant to be about me. It's about the practitioners, researchers, and self-healers who make up this network, and the work they're doing together.
The Hele Collective will grow largely through word of mouth — because good practitioners tend to know other good practitioners.
The goal is to build the network through the people already doing thoughtful work: each person bringing in others whose work they respect, are curious about, or think others here should know.
That way, being listed isn't just about visibility. It's a way of becoming part of a trusted network of people whose work is worth knowing — and helping shape who else becomes part of it.