Nico Misleh

Nico grew up in Cincinnati, homeschooled by a mother who rejected the conventional model of education in favor of something slower, deeper, and more deliberate. Learning was for its own sake. Curiosity was the point, not the test. That did not go away when he went into medicine. His maternal grandfather was a private-practice physician. Visiting his office as a child, Nico watched what medicine looked like when a clinician worked on his own terms: present with patients, accountable to the person in front of him rather than a billing code. That image stayed.

He trained at the University of Cincinnati and earned his MSN from Chamberlain University. He entered practice the conventional way. And he felt, fairly quickly, what most clinicians feel: the distance between what the guidelines say and what the patient in front of you is actually experiencing. He discovered functional and integrative medicine. He built a practice around it. He learned that hormones were not a niche, they were foundational, and that most providers were never taught how to actually work with them in any clinical depth.

He and Cherrell built Apollo Health Optimization to practice medicine the way it deserved to be practiced. Outside the insurance model. With time to think. With room to treat the root cause instead of managing the downstream effect. And then he kept watching colleagues struggle with the same questions he had once struggled with. Providers who cared deeply, practiced carefully, and still felt uncertain. Not because they lacked ability, but because they had never been given a real framework. HRT University launched in April 2025. Not to sell a course. To close a gap that had been costing patients the care they deserved.