Tarek was born in Cairo Egypt in 1973 and moved to the US at age 2. He remembers learning about physiology in the 6th grade, when they were being taught about the digestive system. He was amazed and stayed with the teacher during lunch to discuss and was then asked to teach the class. He realized early on that he wanted to get a doctorate degree in medicine and narrowed his focus to pharmacy while in college and graduated from the University of the Pacific School of Pharmacy with a Doctorate of Pharmacy in 1998. He has been in gorgeous San Diego ever since. In the first 8 years of his career, he worked for different companies and struggled with the lack of clinical involvement that he craved. He bought his first pharmacy in 2006, and was finally able to practice clinical pharmacy the way he wanted. A few years later the challenge of that started to fade. He started to realize there was not much more to learn or accomplish in the limited realm of retail pharmacy and western medicine so he opened up Carmel Valley Pharmacy in 2013 with the intent to learn more about compounding and find a more interesting approach to treatment. He found this with functional/integrative medicine. He has learned an immense amount and feels that he still has so much more to learn. He finds himself able to have a much deeper and long lasting impact on a patient’s health and is able to work much more closely with practitioners. He enjoys coming to work each day, and leaves work with such a great feeling of fulfillment.