The nurse practitioner who calls herself a witch

The women's health nurse practitioner who brings the pharmacology and the candle, and refuses to choose between them.

Jane Riccobono spent years inside the mainstream medical system trying to give women the care she knew they deserved, and slowly becoming the rushed, burned-out version of herself she never wanted to be. So she left and built her own practice around the one idea the system kept training out of her. Part of the medicine is in telling the story and being heard.

Jane is a women's health nurse practitioner and a former midwife. She runs a private practice in Manhattan's Flatiron District, sees patients by telehealth across New York State, and does health coaching for women anywhere. She's the founder of Wise Body Women's Health, and she writes The Wise Body on Substack, where she describes her work as the place where medicine meets the sacred.

The center of the conversation was the midwife model, and what happens when you stop limiting it to birth. Midwives, she explained, approach birth as a process that mostly happens on its own. The job is to support it, to watch carefully for the thing that genuinely needs intervention, to trust the body first and intervene second. Then she said the line that turns a birth philosophy into a way of practicing all of medicine. We have more information than we've ever had. Getting information isn't the problem anymore. Knowing what to do with it is.

She had the research to back it up, which mattered to her. She told us about Centering Pregnancy, a kind of group prenatal care where a midwife sees a whole group at once. There's a study, she said, that found the more facilitative the midwife was, the less she talked and the more she drew the participants out, the better their birth outcomes were. Being listened to and being able to share with each other had a real, physical effect on how the births went. "If you need the science," she said, "it is there."

She holds the science and the invisible in the same hand, loosely, without letting either one cancel the other. The placebo effect is her favorite example. Even people who know they're in the placebo group of a trial tend to do better than people who got nothing at all. Maybe, she said, that means our intentions and our inner energy have something to do with what physically happens in our bodies.

On her own About page, Jane calls herself the nurse, the midwife, and the witch. Not witch as charlatan. Witch as in the wise women healers who knew you can't separate the body from the spirit. She brings the hormones and the anatomy and the pharmacology, and she brings the candle, the breath, and the willingness to sit with someone for longer than fifteen minutes. She won't accept the choice between real medicine and real reverence, and she's building a practice that proves you don't have to make it. Carolina said it plainly in the conversation: she'd want Jane as her own doctor, because Jane gets the invisible and is actually qualified to speak to the science.

If you've ever sat in a fifteen-minute appointment, telling your whole story to someone typing on a computer who never looked up, and walked out feeling like a collection of symptoms instead of a person, this conversation is for you. And if you're someone who has quietly carried both a clinical mind and a spiritual one, and assumed you had to keep them in separate rooms to be taken seriously, this one is for you too.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why she left the mainstream system, and the trade-off between her own wellbeing and her patients' that she says burns good practitioners out.

• The "secret light workers" she remembers on the labor and delivery floor, doing quiet blessings between deliveries.

• What she means when she calls industrialized medicine a game of telephone, even when it looks efficient from the top.

• Phil's own cancer scare at the Mayo Clinic, and the new doctor who reversed everything twenty-four hours before surgery.

• The circle she wants to build into her practice, where patients heal in a group instead of one at a time.

• The one thing she says she's most proud of, and it isn't a result.

• Who her health coaching is actually for, no matter where they live.

You can find Jane at her Substack, The Wise Body, where she writes about women's health, yoga philosophy, and what she calls practical mysticism.