Functional Medicine Fundamentals Q&A

We're going to talk tonight about my new class that I just designed, Functional Medicine Fundamentals, and I'll tell you the origin of the class because, why not?

So, we wanted, you know, my regular training program is really expensive. I totally get that. You know, a lot of people can't afford it, or they just don't want to spend that much money, or they don't want to spend that much time. You know, and so we're looking for creating a class that was less expensive, you know, notice things around $2,000 instead of around ten or twelve or whatever any other courses are.

And we're, but looking for, you know, and I originally, I'll just tell you the truth, originally I was just going to do a watered-down version of the other class. You know, and then my staff looked at me, and both of them, and then that is not very often that both of them criticize me. It's the same room with, they both looked at me and shook their heads and they're like, "That's not going to happen." And they said, "Dan, you're going to create a new class." And then I got all whiny and I was like, "Oh, I don't want to do another." And anyways, they just shook their heads long enough, I realized, "Okay, I have no choice."

And okay, so then I was sitting there, I'm thinking, "Okay, like, how am I going to create a whole new class? How is that going to work?" And so I went to this multi-month process where I thought about all the stuff that I've never taught before, ever, that I know that practitioners really need to know. And I sort of reinvented my whole conceptual framework of teaching. And that's what ended up coming out as the Fundamentals course.

So, you know, as I've taught doctors over the last 20 years, and taught health coaches, and nutritionists, and acupuncturists, and chiropractors, and everyone you can imagine is taking my courses, I kind of BAM, you know, tracking the things that are not part of a regular curriculum in any regular course that people really need to know. And then in the mentorship programs, I try to communicate all this stuff over the course of six months or a year. And what I want to do with this class was be able to communicate this other side of what I see is missing most often with practitioners, and in a structured course. And that's what this class is.

So we are really, oh, all of this to my staff, and they're sort of inspiring me to push myself a little bit, you know. And I'll show you what the curriculum looks like, and we'll talk through like the logistics and how, how it's structured, and why it's structured this way.

So we start off with Module 1, and this is the fundamental purpose. And, you know, the reason why I put that first is because a lot of us in functional medicine don't think about why we're doing this, from what we're doing. We just jump in and start doing it. And so, and I know when I was in, in college, you know, lasting purpose, so the senior doctors would always talk about finding your purpose, what's your mission? And I would always roll my eyes and I'd be like, "My mission is to get out there and start practice. What are you talking about, old man? You know, get out of my way." But now I'm my old guy, and I realize, "Hey, it really does matter." If your purpose is X, Y, Z, you know, and you end up creating a practice that's, you know, A, B, C, you're going to be pretty unhappy. And many of us jump into this work without really defining why we're doing it. And so I put that first. And again, I'm reverse-engineering this over the last 20 years. If I look at all the practices that have failed, it's because people build something that was successful, but it wasn't what they really wanted. I can't tell you how many people I know who have built practices that were really successful, but weren't what they wanted. And I don't want that to happen to you. So I put that first. Figure out what your purpose is. And there's a series of lectures about that, and, you know, some honest soul-searching hopefully on your part to figure that out.

Then Module 2 is the fundamentals of patient interaction, mastering the patient relationship, patient intake, sales and follow-up, lifestyle coaching. And, you know, these are the skills that I learned at the feet of two masters who were just, you know, absolutely fluent in the language with which you need to speak to a patient. And it's a different language than we use in any other situation. It's not like you would talk to your spouse. It's not like you would talk to your kids. It's not like you would talk to your coworkers. It's not like you would talk to a teacher or student. It's a really unique relationship because it's an intimate relationship. You know, you're really connected at the deepest level to this other person, but it's a distanced relationship because you're not their friend, you're not their lover, you're not, you know, going to think about them when they walk out the door. You know, the relationship is in this context of a healing relationship. And there's some really unique things about that relationship that I think are required for us to develop in terms of skills. And if you are really, really good at patient interaction or client interaction skills, this will drive your business and the dollars and the financial success, you know, as far as you want to take it. As much money as you need will show up. If you don't have good patient skills, good interactive skills, then you're always going to be struggling for sales. You know, every single doctor I've ever talked to, every single health coach or nutritionist I've ever talked to that's struggling financially, this is one of the main reasons why. So I put this in the class because it's a really important skill. It's kind of a softer skill. It's not like analyzing complicated lab tests.

But, you know, and I, I talk to senior doctors all the time now. And this is, this is one, this one senior doctor, his name is Bill. He's, you know, been in practice 20 years longer than I have. He said, he said this to me the other day. He said, "You know, when I started out practicing, I thought it's all about ability, ability." Let me write that word out. Ability. What's my ability? You know, what's my skill set? The better I am at doing this, you know? And that has nothing to do with success. Success comes from affability. You know, how affable are we? How friendly are we? How much do we connect with people? Patients don't really know how much we know about the clinical and technical side. Patients don't really care how much you know about the clinical and technical side. They connect, they connect with you because they connected with you on a human level. Now, there's an assumption of a certain amount of knowledge that you should have, obviously. But still, that human-to-human connection is what's key. And we were joking about this in class the other night, is that the most successful doctors are typically in school mediocre students at best, mediocre at best. They're the ones that are in the hallway skipping out on the class because they're talking to someone. You know, maybe their friend's mother died, and they're the one that's in the hallway talking to the friend saying, "I'm sorry about your mom. You know, I can't, you know, and em, you know, maybe this, you know, physiology class is going on inside. You know, that eighty students are sitting in the front of class taking notes. But that affable person, that person that can connect with other human beings, is going to be the successful practitioner. And that, the really funny thing about the work that we do is that patients really have no idea what we know. They can't even tell if the plans that you're making up for them are any good or not. You know, they don't have a way to assess that. What they assess is you as a human being, and how much they trust you. All right. Now, I'm not saying that you want to be poor practitioners by any means. We want to be top of the class in terms of clinical skills. But the main clinical skill is is how we get along with people. So I talk about that because, you know, what I'm really, really, really good at this, and this has been responsible for 99% of my success. You know, I was, well, it's not, I was never at the top of my class in terms of academics because I was skipping school. And I did this all throughout my career. Like when I started Chiropractic College, I was working full-time in a chiropractor's clinic, seeing patients from the very first year I was in school. So I would leave class early, like at two and at three o'clock, I'd be at Charlie's office working on patients from three o'clock into the late at night. And, you know, that's the kind of attitude that we want to have. You know, really focusing on patient interaction and downplaying our current obsession, you know, with more and more knowledge. You know, we're in an era right now where people know too much. Most patients that come in know too much. We want to try to focus more in the people skills. So that's Module 2.

Module 3 is something that I wish that I had been taught. Not honestly. I had to figure this out the hard way. I was not taught this very well. It was not consciously, you know, maybe for through observation, I learned about this. But this part of supplement prescribing and program design. You know, there's a real art to this. There's a real art to this. And again, you know, you do something for 25 years, you get pretty good at it. And there's, this is, you know, kind of a psychology of prescribing supplements. Like a simple tip for you guys, the number one way, per person, the number one driving force in prescribing a supplement is that you have to tie that supplement into something that's an achievable goal for that person. So let me give you an example. I always use this example. You might have heard before, but it's a good one because it's true. It's my mom. So my mom is a nurse, was a nurse, she's retired now, you know, but she was a nurse and a nursing supervisor, and she ran hospitals. She was a hospital administrator for like 30 or 40 years, whatever. She worked for a long time. And so, Mom is like on it. When she hears instructions from a doctor, she's like, "Okay, this is life or death. We're going to do this." You know, it's not like, you know, variable or anything. So I can, the hospital, you have to take his medication. Okay, you take this medication. So I said, "Mom, I'm going to give you these amino acids based on your, you know, lab tests." Every ran, but they really don't work very effectively, or they're only going to work effectively if you exercise for 30 minutes before you take them. So I gave her these amino acids, and they helped her brain chemistry, obviously, because I had the lab to prove it. I knew that was going to happen. But really, what Mom did every time she took her amino acids, like five days a week, is she went out for a 30-minute walk. And guess what happened? Like three months later, Mom dropped like 15, 20 pounds. Mom feels amazing. Mom's blood pressure is better, and her asthma is better because I used the supplement to manipulate her into exercising. If I had said, "Mom, here, take the supplement. You're going to feel amazing in a few months," and then I said, "Oh, you know, by the way, exercise is really good for you. You know, you should exercise 30 minutes a day." Which give the exercise? No, of course not. Knowing what you would have taken us up in Shwetha felt great and she want to exercise. So the key to supplement, a key, a simple basic key to supplement prescribing, tie in a lifestyle change to the product. For another simple example, giving someone probiotics and digestive enzymes. You say, "Hey, these are really great. Your good digestion can improve, but they're only going to be fully utilized if you chew your food really carefully and make sure that you relax for two or three minutes after a meal and stop eating in the car, by the way." Okay. You give somebody an instruction that goes with a supplement, that's a lifestyle change that you tie in to the supplement to get a behavioral change. If you can master that behavioral changes that are tied in to supplement changes, guess what? The behavioral change makes a huge difference. The supplements kick in, and you're going to have a patient just loves you forever. And they're going to say, "I don't know, I took these enzymes with three other people. They never really helped this much." And you can just snicker and think, "Well, maybe they didn't trick you into chewing your food properly today." So that's just an example of the psychology of supplement prescribing. There's a, I don't know, the whole module on this. Every trick I've ever learned about how to make all this stuff work is built into this section on something they're prescribing.

And then the other big part of supplement prescribing is more on the logistical side. And this is more what I think of as like the architecture of supplement design, which is program design itself. So program design to me means like, how do you actually structure a supplement protocol so it's going to be effective in terms of relieving symptoms, but doable in the long term for that patient. And that, you know, again, you know, when I, when I first started my practice, I designed massive supplement programs. With, I can even show you an example of one if you want. This is a little embarrassing, but if you've ever done this, you'll kind of relate to it. Let me show you one quick example. And this is a, this is like not me making stuff up. This is actually what I used to do. It's amazing I made it as far. You guys, I've really made so many mistakes over the years. I can't even tell you. So here's like a Dr. Dan supplement program from what I was going to say the 80s, but it was more like the 90s. The 80s was I was still in high school or something, right? The 90s. So I would use DHEA, I would use pregnenolone, and I'm not even making up. This is like totally accurate. It's exactly what the protocols used to be. Minerals, but you know, you have to take your minerals at night because they better absorb. You have to take them away from your other stuff. And then I'll have the vitamins, but those have to be with meals. So that has to be like here, and then the here. And then antioxidants, you know, and those are if can give those with food, probably. And then maybe like a glandular, and then some herbals. But the herbals would always be, forgot, let's say on an empty stomach. So those would have to be like here, between meals. And then maybe herbal too, because there'd be a second herbal I'd always give. But that one also, they have so you can see. And there, but programs would get up to be 10, 15, 20 products. And they were all exactly what that person needed. But no one could ever do these programs. So when I get into program design now, we really want to consider the human being at the other end of this, and making sure that your program is going to work for that person. And so I have, gosh, I talked a lot about this. You can see 95 minutes of me talking about that. Wow, is that really true? Yeah, look at that. And then under your supplements, oh, I went through all the supplements. So this is all the stuff that I kind of always wished I had known about supplements. What are the really key supplements that I use in my practice consistently? And then, you know, how do you explain that to patients? There's a couple hours on that. And then I went crazy on this part. And I remember this, this was a weekend here. Here's a weekend of my life. Here, protocol classifications, 200 minutes of this stuff. So this is again, my attempt to just show you everything about how to design effective supplement programs, how to classify them, how to build them, how to explain them, how all this works, all the moving parts. To do, to me, this is kind of like the, in a sense, like the heart and soul of the whole program is section here, because this is a clinical driver of success, a financial driver of success. And, you know, I don't see anyone else teaching this stuff. It's kind of the softer skills. And honestly, to all the really good doctors that I know, are really good at this. But, you know, no one ever taught us. We always just kind of had to figure it out. And I just thought, you know, why not? I'm going to teach people how to do this. Why not save you a lot of time and hassle?

And then Module 4 is a token module. It's an afterthought module because I didn't want to freak people out. There's just a little bit of information in here about practice management. So if you're a little skittish about business, you don't have to freak out. But I do want to talk about strategy, planning, operations, sales and marketing, self-care, you know, just to kind of get your mind in gear for, you know, what that all means.

Okay, so that's the structure of a course. And then we'll go through some of the basics here. Will be, this is a review, but there's some slides on here that would be a little different than what I just covered too. Okay.

So we start off looking at you. I mentioned that, you know, the self, the, the bulk of the course focuses on applying clinical nutrition programs by making specific supplement recommendations. There is zero information here on lab interpretation. This is a course that's designed for people that don't want to or that can't, you know, use labs. So this is for health coaches, nutritionists, for doctors that are just starting out and they don't want to deal with labs. There's a fair number of doctors that we work with and they don't want to run a bunch of functional medicine labs, but they want to tell a patient in an educated way what they should do for a digestive problem. So that's all in here. Okay.

So, and I also wanted to have a course available for health coaches and non-licensed people who don't want the liability of ordering labs, or their licensing doesn't allow them to order labs, but who really want to make a difference and impact people's lives. And, you know, I ran my whole practice for three years without ever ordering a lab. You know, so you can be, you know, in the trenches doing this kind of work without tons of labs floating across your desk every day.

Oh, another big part is I forgot to mention, which I'm glad is in the notes here, is about treatment prioritization. People get this one wrong all the time. So how patients come in and they'll like, they're on a great treatment program, but they did it at the wrong time. Classic one from this morning. Woman did a heavy metal detox, liver support program. And it was a great idea, but she just did it before her gut was working, so it made her really sick. So you want to have, you know, sequencing is a really key component to all this. Really key component to make this work. Functional medicine, patient-centered, focused, you know, so again, this idea is, is worth repeating, is that you have to make the program work for the other person. It's like being in a relationship with a partner, right? You can't just, you know, just run your life as if you were unrelated to this other person. You have to check in and say, "Hey, you know, let's go to movies. What movie do you want to see tonight?" You know, you can't just say, "Let's go to movies. I want to see, you know, Conan the Barbarian, and I don't care if you like that or not." Even though it's probably the worst film that was ever made. You know, so when we're dialoguing with our clients and customers and patients, there has to be this give-and-take, and you have to design programs that are going to work for them. And that is often missed in functional medicine because we're all kind of obsessed on what we think is right, and we're not taking the other person's opinions into account enough to make this whole thing work.

Benefits of taking the course: I got these clear, easy-to-learn lessons. I did put a lot of work into this, you guys, like a lot of work into really thinking about it and then designing it. And then I recorded this whole thing, and then I re-recorded the whole thing a second time. We ended up throwing out a whole first version of this. I think it's a pretty good class at this point. I'm pretty confident it's going to meet a lot of the needs of people, and that it's not going to be like anything you ever studied before because these are, you know, the behind-the-scenes things that people learn after decades of doing this work. And that's not something you really find in a book necessarily.

Another thing to mention, and is that there is very little pure business information in here. And there's just that last little module, and it's kind of like a giveaway, kind of extra bonus module. But many of us have immense knowledge, but struggle to motivate patients to start or complete programs. We will learn specific patient communication skills proven to create an enthusiastic audience in each and every patient you connect with. So what this means is that for those of us that know a lot but struggle to get people to buy things and do things, there's this gap that I want to bridge for you guys so that you can use your clinical understanding to motivate that person. There's very specific ways you can do this. In the regular world, they call this sales. This is how people sell stuff. In functional medicine, we call it patient communication, patient education. You educate that person, they're going to buy. Now, if you educate someone well enough about why that particular car is better than another car, they're going to buy that car. So really, education and sales go hand in hand. But for a lot of us, you know, sales is kind of awkward, kind of subsequent, want to talk a lot about. But I can tell you, a side effect or a side benefit of this course is that you're going to be better and as a business person in terms of, you know, sell more stuff. And the reason why I think that's worth dwelling on is because if you're seeing clients on a regular basis and they're not buying things from you, they're not going to make the lifestyle changes that lead to the life changes. In other words, the way that our, our business works is the patient comes in, they have a problem, you educate them about that problem, that convinces them that they have a problem, and they understand what the problem is, and then they buy a supplement program to fix that problem from you. But then, as I mentioned in the beginning, that supplement program is primarily designed to get them to make a lifestyle change or behavioral change. And then you got a winner on your hands. If you try to skip one of those steps, if you try, the patient comes in and you just say, "I think this is what's wrong with you. I think you should do this." They're maybe do it for a month or, but they're not going to get really enrolled, and most of them won't do it. If you skip the educational step, if you skip the supplement step, and you just say, "Oh, you know, it's obvious that you have this and this going on, and I want you to start to exercise for thirty minutes every day." No, what he's going to do that? It just won't happen. But if you put a supplement into the equation, they say, "Oh, based on this particular side effect, this particular symptom, you need this supplement, and this supplement will work the best if you exercise three minutes a day." You're going to get someone enrolled. And so there's a process to this that I think is really important for us to learn. I also talk a lot about protocol design skills, talk about individual supplements quite a bit, and then the sequencing. I already mentioned.

Okay, now how is this course different? My full-on mentorship is for licensed doctors. It covers lab testing. We get into the depths of the pain of all the horrible things that happen to people. You know, and it's just lab after lab after lab after lab after lab. Okay, that's the mentorship. This class is for people who have licenses or don't, you know, health coaches, nutritionists, trainers, all those folks. You could even take this class. And when I was thinking about this, even if you're not seeing clients, this class will still educate you about the behind-the-scenes aspects of functional medicine. Okay. And then we're covering the softer skills, right? Goal-setting, communication, program design, basic business principles. And we really want you, and the purpose of me doing this is to build these foundational skills. And if you understand the concepts in this course, you can have a super successful practice without any labs being involved. And again, some of the doctors that we work with don't want to run tests, but they want to be educated enough to walk into the room and say, "Gosh, you have leaky gut? Well, here's three things that you can do, and here's why."

The course is easy to implement protocols. I spent, I think that one section we were looking at a minute ago, ideas like protocol after protocol after protocol after protocol after protocol. I mean, there's literally hours of this in there where, you know, you're going to want to listen to it more than one time for sure to get it to sink in. And I try to make it as much as possible like you were in my clinic, kind of looking over my shoulder, and what would Dan do in this situation? To do, into doing over and over and over and over again. Then we also have, as always, you know, various patient resources, downloadable PowerPoints, the kind of stuff that goes into the courses that we design. I have a really great team of people that help me design these. And so the graphics are nice, the videos are amazing, of course, I'm amazing and good-looking and handsome, and you're going to just love that too, right? So it's me just, wow, wow, how can that? Yeah. And then I also try to mix it up so you're not stuck watching me in the video all the time. And there's, you know, voiceover PowerPoint, lots of things with me drawing and typing and writing. And try to make it as interactive as possible. So I know if you're just sitting there and there's some ones as well, lalala, you can kind of start to fade out. But I definitely wanted to make this a class that's engaging. Let's put it that way. I wanted to make it so that it's engaging, and I think we achieved that in a way.

I kind of think of this as the best work that I've ever done because I've, it forced me to get outside the box of just literal lab interpretation and really think about the fundamentals. You know, hence the course name, the Fundamentals that make practices work. And the skill sets that if they're missing, you know, are going to make a practice fail. And again, whether you're a licensed practitioner or unlicensed, these are sort of the universal concepts, I guess, in a way, that that drive results in terms of this kind of a practice.

There's also a pretty big section, and, and this is something I mentioned earlier, I didn't emphasize it enough, I don't think. There's a pretty big section in here on just supplements, period. You know, like one of the key supplements that you just have to have knowledge about and recommend. In my practice, I use about 40, 42 supplements total for my entire business with very rare exception to that. And so I covered all of them in this class. I wanted you guys to see, okay, these are like the core products that really make up a functional medicine practice. And there's something to be said for efficiency, and something to be said for streamlined design, as you want to be in functional medicine as simple and clear and impactful as possible. And what you'll see with most protocols that are developed by most functional medicine doctors is that they're all over the map in terms of supplements involved. There's not a really clear understanding on the patient's part about why they're doing all this stuff. And then the programs fall apart, not because they're poorly executed. I mean, it's everything that that patient needs, but it's not what that patient wants. You know, and you just don't want you guys making that same series of mistakes.

So let's go through this one more time. If you guys have questions, oh, and look at this, you get $200 off with a promo code of wisdom. How cute is that? So wisdom, all caps, I don't think the caps matter, but to get $200 off, you want to do the class. And also, as you guys know, if you, well, I don't know if you're taking my courses before, but we massively underprice everything. So you're definitely going to feel like you got your money's worth, I promise you that. Usually, I usually price my training programs about half of what I actually think they're worth in the real world. And we do that on purpose because I want to, my business coach told me 25 years ago, you always under-promise and over-deliver, and that's the way to run things. I do that with patients as well.

Now, let's see if you guys have questions. You can raise your hand and enter a question in the question box thing. I do want to just review one other document. If you have a question, send it and I'll get to it. I'm going to bring up this one of the documents just so you can see it. And this is probably posted somewhere on the website, but here we go. Just another quick review of what you would actually get in the course. If there's $200 off, I think that's like a 10% discount. I think it drops it down to almost $1,700 something.

Alright, quick review one more time. What are you getting? You're getting Module 1, Your Fundamental Purpose. I know this is annoying, and I know that, you know, when I was first starting out, I didn't want to think about this stuff. But here's my little spiel about that. You want to travel somewhere, you need to have a sense of where you're going first. And believe me, lots of practices start to fail. Lots of start practices start to fail when the person is not on board with that. Let me see here. Let me just make sure this is working properly. Sorry, you guys can see my screen, can't you? I'm assuming so. Yes. Yeah, you can see it. Okay. So we can't see someone can't see the slides. Anyways, that's probably something on your end. I think everyone else can. So Donna, is something happening with your computer? Probably. So, um, fundamental purpose, again, a little annoying, but very important. Fundamentals of the patient interaction, patient relationships, patient intake, sales and follow-up, lifestyle coaching, all the things that I think of is really key to making all this work. And then supplement prescribing. And to me, again, this is like the most important part of it. Mastering supplement programs, the foundation of clinical nutrition. I think this is really important to be able to explain to patients well. Supplements themselves, just filling a huge subject area down to something that's practical and applicable. Program design, detail on the protocols. Oh my gosh, this is where I just went crazy. Protocol after protocol after protocol after protocol to the point where you there may be even more than you want to watch. I don't know. And then wrapping up with a, you know, addressing the issues of practice management, just to get you guys starting to think about that.

Okay, so now I think I'm going to wrap it up. And I will look forward to any of you guys with a curious about the class, you know, send us a message, sign up for it. If you have some more questions that you want to follow up, if they come pop into your head in a few days, you know, feel free to get in touch with us. And I'm really excited about it. I hope that you are too. And I think that you'll be the first group of people are going through it. And if you are going to sign up and you're thinking about it seriously, then go for it. Sign up by tomorrow sometime, you get your $200 off. And I'll be really happy to see you learning about it and get your feedback on the course as well.

All right, so again, thank you all. Have a good rest of your evening. And look forward to connecting with you soon. Okay, bye for now.