Dr. Houston helps people and institutions move from asking, “What's wrong with people?” to asking, “What conditions made these outcomes more likely?”
Drawing from more than a decade of clinical experience and an interdisciplinary background in medicine, sociology, and spiritual care, Dr. Houston challenges narratives of individual blame and restores the context too often missing from conversations about health, chronic disease, and human flourishing.
She earned her Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine from National University of Health Sciences, a Master of Divinity with a Concentration in Pastoral Care & Counseling from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Howard University.
Sociology taught her to examine the systems and social conditions surrounding individual outcomes. Pastoral care and counseling deepened her understanding of meaning, identity, suffering, and human experience. Medicine showed her how those conditions can appear in the body. Together, these disciplines shaped her distinctive ability to connect biological processes with the historical, cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions of human well-being.
As the author of the award-winning book Black Wellness Barriers: Understanding the Root Cause of Disease Vulnerabilities as a Pathway Towards Restoring Health, the foundational text in her broader body of work, Dr. Houston examines how historical injustice, social conditions, chronic stress, and disrupted human needs become biologically embedded across generations.
She created the Racialized Hierarchy of Needs™ to translate this body of thought into a visual and teachable framework. RHON™ helps audiences understand how chronic disruptions to health, safety, identity, belonging, and purpose can produce survival adaptations that increase disease vulnerability and constrain human potential. It also directs attention toward restoring the conditions necessary for health and flourishing.
Dr. Houston also brings other valuable past experience as an adjunct instructor and hospital chaplain. Across classrooms, organizations, healthcare settings, and community conversations, she translates complex scholarship into accessible insights that invite reflection, dialogue, and more context-aware approaches to health and well-being.
Her longstanding passion for social justice and human services has guided her work across every stage of her career. Experiences serving people through community, spiritual-care, educational, and clinical settings deepened her understanding of how social conditions shape both opportunity and well-being. That commitment has culminated in her work as a cultural wellness educator, where she brings medicine, history, culture, and human behavior together to help individuals and institutions understand why certain outcomes become more likely—and what becomes possible when the conditions for human flourishing are restored.
When she is not working, Dr. Houston enjoys spending time in nature, listening to live music and spoken word, and watching psychological thrillers.