Nancy Fong-Edwards

Why I do this

Before The Longevity Society, I spent years in OB/GYN in Belle Glade, Florida. It is one of the poorest communities in the state, and it is a place where too many of the people who are supposed to care simply don’t.

One visit I still think about: during a routine exam I felt masses by hand that should not have been there. I sent the patient to the emergency room that day. A couple of months later she was back for her scheduled checkup, now in pain. I asked what the ER had found. They had told her they didn’t see anything.

I wrote her a note, and I told her as plainly as I could: go back, and tell them what I said.

She went back. It was a large malignant tumor. They removed it.

I have many stories like it from Belle Glade. That is the standard I brought to concierge care, and it is the reason I built this practice the way I did.

Still in the community

Concierge medicine did not replace community medicine for me. Alongside The Longevity Society, I continue to practice as a nurse practitioner at Broward Community & Family Health Centers, a federally qualified health center serving patients regardless of their ability to pay. The people I see there and the people I see in their homes deserve exactly the same attention. That is the whole point.

Sunshine Women’s Medical Center, Montego Bay

During the pandemic, my cousin in Jamaica had bleeding that would not stop. I kept telling her to get to a hospital. There were no flights, no elective procedures, and every time she went in they sent her home. When the restrictions finally lifted and she was able to be properly examined, it was stage 4 cervical cancer. She died in the hospital not long after, in terrible pain.

Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable cancers there is. A routine Pap and HPV screening catches it years before it ever becomes dangerous, and a vaccine prevents most of it outright. She did not need a miracle. She needed someone to take her seriously the first time, and a screening that costs almost nothing.

That is what I could not accept. So I opened Sunshine Women’s Medical Center on Orange Street in Montego Bay and funded it myself, staff included, out of my own pocket. No nonprofit, no grant. Just a place where a woman with a symptom gets taken seriously the first time, and where the screening that would have saved my cousin is routine.

It is also why The Longevity Society is built around prevention. Prevention is better than cure. Take care of yourself before a chronic illness takes the choice away from you.

Roots in South Florida

I lived in Loxahatchee for years and still keep a home there, so Palm Beach County is not a service area to me, it is where I raised a family. The Longevity Society serves Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties from our base in Broward.