The 5 Pillars of a Successful Functional Medicine Practice

So welcome to the Kish Institute. Dr. Dan Kish here. We're going to talk about building successful functional medicine practices. Uh, something I sort of fell into, and I've gotten quite good at. I've built three practices of my own, I guess, and, uh, I have helped now hundreds of people build practices. So, not what I expected to do with my life, but that's something I've, um, become pretty good at.

So, just a little bit of history. I think in practice for a long time, over 20 years. I've worked with thousands of patients, um, using functional medicine quite successfully. I, um, have, you know, have a training program I've been running for nine years. We'll talk more about that later. I'll show you guys actually the training program, um, for those of you that haven't seen it before. I'll show you that in a little bit.

But about six, seven years ago, a group of doctors at the Mayo Clinic took my class. They loved it, and we started to talk about doing a research study. And in about three weeks, we will have completed, we will have completed, uh, a six-month research study on the Kalish method, conducted by the Mayo Clinic. We're going to write it up and have it published later this year, which is a very exciting moment for me. Um, I'm not really, I've always been interested in science, but I didn't think I'd ever have, you know, be a principal investigator in a research study with Mayo Clinic. What a fun and great thing that has been, and it's been a really great experience. And took these 25 women, ages 30 to 50, put them through the basic functional medicine protocols I use in my practice, and just getting great results, great feedback. And I'm counting on the study results coming out pretty good. Of course, I'm, like, as an investigator, not supposed to see all the data, and I never do. But I can just tell talking to these patients that they're getting better. So I'm sure the results are going to be really positive, which is wonderful.

Um, I did spend a couple years training in monasteries in Japan and in Thailand when I was quite a bit younger, and that's something that's sort of coming back, uh, around. I meditate two hours every day. Um, it's sort of a big part of my life, and, uh, something I always just like to acknowledge because the whole spiritual aspect of this work, to me, is really critical that we have our own spiritual lives, you know? So, um, what I, what I want to talk about today, um, is the, the actual things that I see really frequently that are pitfalls in terms of running a functional medicine practice that maybe will save you guys some time and money. Um, talking about where to start, and talking about, you know, this whole idea of being all cash. What does that mean, and how's that going to work for you all?

And the, you know, really key component here is you, as a practitioner, right? And I talk to doctors all over the world. We, right now, in the current program right now that, that we're untying, we have, uh, doctors in Singapore, Bolivia, Australia, all throughout the United States, Canada. It's an amazing group of people. And there's one characteristic that we all share is that we're all burned out. And we test every doctor's adrenal glands as they're coming into the class. It's one of the basic things we do in the class is test your adrenal glands. So, and it's out of this last year, we've had one practitioner who had perfect adrenal glands coming into the class, one guy. And everyone else burned out, crispy, beyond belief. So I'm, you know, in the same camp too. I mean, I work too much, just like you guys work too much. And what I'm worried about for all of us is that we're burned out, and that, you know, a burned-out doctor becomes not the best doctor. And that, um, part of my effort now in the training program is to make sure that we fix everybody as we're coming in and starting to do the class, and that we avoid this sort of exhaustion and cynicism and doubt that can creep in when physicians get burned out. This physical exhaustion, um, wanting to have something better, wanting to have a life that's easier, and that you're not working as hard.

Um, you know, the really cardinal signs that you're extremely burned out are that you become cynical towards your patients, of course, and that you start to, um, you know, doubt why you even got into this business in the first place. We lose that kind of crisp edge that we had when we were in our 30s about, you know, enthusiasm and joy of the job and whatnot. And so one of the ways you can do that is by getting your business really organized and making a boatload of money, and not having to work as many hours, right? And so I'm really a strong, strong advocate for us not overworking so that we can have careers that stretch out into our 70s and 80s and 90s. You know, I have no intention of ever retiring, and I love my practice. Um, I would never stop practicing, but I want to make sure that I can do it in a way and not, you know, be a victim of my own success, in a sense.

So there's a business book I read over the Christmas break called "Good to Great." And this, it's a well-known business book. If you, if you go out and read business books all the time, I'm sure you've heard of it. But, you know, his, his things that he's really focusing on are, you know, figuring out what you're the best at. And we'll talk more about niches a little bit later, but you don't have to be all things to all people. You know, what are you the best at? What really drives your economic engine? What's, what are you profitable at? And then what are you deeply passionate about? And finding the intersection of these three things. Three things: what you're the best at, for me, that was functional medicine. I'm a chiropractor by training, but I was really great at functional medicine. Um, in terms of economics, when I looked at the numbers, when I had a chiropractic clinic that also did functional medicine, I made four times more money, four times more money from my functional medicine practice patients than I did from my chiropractic patients. So I realized, hey, I can make four times more money per hour if I do functional medicine than if I'm a chiropractor. That made economic sense. And then I have always been passionate, passionate about functional medicine. So for me, this was a perfect confluence. I was great at doing functional medicine, it made a lot of money, a lot more money than I could make as a chiropractor doing chiropractic, and I was passionate about it. And so I put that together, and that's sort of what has created my business. And so the same thought process for you all, you know, just start to think about this.

And then what I see on the flip side is that, you know, we're usually all of us a little bit confused about what our clinical model is. You know, in terms of training programs, we all go to too many seminars, we go get too much information. In general, is the problem. And if we do get a model, you know, it's difficult to reproduce it on a larger scale. So we, everyone, you know, tends to treat each new patient in functional medicine as a fresh, brand new case and want to reinvent the wheel, literally, you know, creating a whole new series of labs, ordering special supplements for every single patient. And I really want to get people away from doing that.

And then the super successful doctors that I talk to, and the ones that join our training program that have been out there for a while and are really quite good at what they do, always end up in a high-stress, low-profit chronic illness practice. And we know this because when we're doing the, the initial round of labs in the class, when the doctors are submitting labs to the clinical case, you know, portion of the training program, we're talking about cases. And you'll see doctors who have 20 stage three adrenal cases in a row, you know, and you don't even, everyone they're working with is chronically ill. And most practitioners that I talk to that have this kind of a practice don't want their whole lives to be dominated exclusively working with chronically ill patients. And one of the things that I really try to coach people about is how to get out of that model and move into a more sustainable model that you could work with.

So I want to talk about three different kinds of practitioners. And, you know, the newcomers, people who are on transition, and then veterans. And these are the three groups of people that I see when I talk to folks. The, the first group, you know, I'm thinking of like newcomers is like your first five years in practice, usually not so sure how to get started. Maybe you're in school, you're getting out of school, you just have your first year or two under your belt in practice, and you don't have tons of cash. Usually, that phase, you know, you've got student loans you're dealing with, you've got super saturated with way too much information, and you're wanting to get started generating revenue, you know, pretty quickly. Um, often times there's not a whole lot of clinical experience that you've had, so you're not really sure exactly what's going to work and not work. And so practitioners like this, and when I was in this stage, and I was in this stage obviously for five years, like everyone is, um, it really helps to have a mentor, and it really helps to have a community of experienced doctors who can kind of show you how all this stuff works.

And when I was at this stage, I was in San Diego, California, which was, uh, in Del Mar, a little bit north of San Diego. And I had Dr. Timmons, who was a lab expert. I had Dr. Banni, who was a lab expert. I had Dr. John R. Lee, who was one of the world's leading experts on progesterone, on my speed dial, on my cell phone. I had Dr. Lioz, Michael Lioz, who was one of the best chronic illness treaters I have ever met. I mean, this guy's, I had like five or six doctors that I could call day or night that would just tell me what to do with every new case. A new female hormone case, I'll pick up the phone, call Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee, what should I do? A new adrenal case, pick up the phone, call Dr. Timmons. We talk for two or three hours about an adrenal panel, and he'd tell me exactly what to do. And what I'm trying to do with a training community that we're building is recreate this situation for all of us, so we can all have access to experts who you can, this is all through the internet these days, obviously, instead of the phone, who you can ask questions of and you can get information that you need, especially when you're starting out and you're in that critical beginning stage.

The other type of practitioner I, I work with a lot are people who are in transition. General practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, plastic surgeons, medical doctors who want to get out of hospital-based, insurance-based medicine, and they're moving towards doing functional medicine models. RDs, NDs, licensed acupuncturists, chiropractors, nurse practitioners. We have a bunch of physical therapists. We have a whole, um, bunch of physical therapists that have taken the training program that I teach, right? And these are people who have been in practice for 5, 10 years. They really know their physical therapy, they really know their psychiatry, they really know oncology, they really know whatever field of specialty they have. They're great chiropractors, they're great acupuncturists, but they want to transition, and they want to do this functional medicine thing. They want to not just be a chiropractor all the time, but they want to include functional medicine into their protocols. They may want to do 100% functional medicine like I do. They may want to run an acupuncture clinic, do acupuncture three days a week, and do functional medicine one day a week. You know, there's different ways that people mix and match this. But we work with a lot of transitioning practitioners, and their needs are much different than someone who's just starting up. It's also easier to work with people who are transitioning in a lot of ways because they have existing patients that we can work with. That, um, as the saying goes, it's my favorite saying from Silicon Valley, they call it they're working the install base, right? You already have, you're selling to your install base. You're taking your existing clients, your existing patients, and then selling them on a new kind of program, this functional medicine thing that you're doing.

Then we also get practitioners who have been in practice for a long time, you know, 10, 20 years. 20, we had Jay last year, been in practice for like 45 years. Uh, we had another doc who had been in practice like 37 years. People have been around for a while doing functional medicine, doing natural health, quite well, you know, very, very successful, but, you know, almost always overworking and trying to find a simpler model that they could implement. So we have newcomers, we have people in transition, we have people who've been around for 20, 30, 40 years, and we're all kind of looking for some similar kinds of things. We're looking for a clear clinical model. And let's try to show you, um, some more detail on that a little bit. So, and then when I talk to doctors and I hear about the different concerns they have, you know, one common concern is that they just need more patients. You know, I'm in this area of Oregon, and it's a small town in Oregon, and we don't have a lot of people that can afford my services. I hear that all the time. You know, I'm in Idaho, or I'm in Chicago, it could be anywhere, really. I just, we don't have enough new patients. Or it may be that they have patients kind of floating around, but it seems like no one wants to do this, no one can really afford to do it. They're not really sure. Often times, we have people who are moving from an insurance-based practice and they want to go all cash, but they're not sure exactly how to do that.

And then the biggest challenge, and this is the biggest, easiest mistake to avoid, is people who, and I did this, everyone does this, 100% of people do this. You start to get into functional medicine and immediately you want to apply it to your most difficult patients, right? And that just creates this huge barrier for getting things going. Because when, you know, you know what I mean, okay? You're sitting in a seminar, and it's like Saturday, and it's like 2 o'clock, and you've been in this weekend seminar, and then there are all these speakers, and you're about these five patients who you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, that environmental toxicity talk, I'll bet Susan has an environmental toxicity problem." And you go to the adrenal talk and you think about Blair, you're like, "Ah, Blair, I should have tested Blair's adrenals." You know, and you're thinking about your most difficult patients who you couldn't help, and you want to apply this work to them. That, and that ends disastrously. And it's exactly what we all do because you're creating a really steep learning curve for yourself. And we try to get people away from that. That, in a really, really simple way.

Number one, having a successful practice means that you got to be enthusiastic. This has got to be fun, and it's got to have a pretty significant financial return, so you want to keep doing it. So right out of the bat, to be successful, you want to pick super simple cases in the very beginning. That's what I call the Big Five, right? So it's fat, fatigue, depressed, female hormones, and digestive problems. People who are overweight, tired, or depressed, have a hormone problem, or a digestive problem. Those are my five sort of target markets that I work with in my practice. And why those five? Okay, well, first of all, most every person that you talk to has one of those five problems. So you're not going to have a shortage of people if you're working with. I had this patient, I always talk about her, and she was like, maybe five, six years ago. She came in and she had tuberculosis of the spine and lupus, okay? And I had never had a patient with tuberculosis of the spine. I've had a lot of lupus patients, but I certainly never had someone with both those problems. And I was really interested by her. It was a great case, I helped her a lot. But did I want to have another 20 tuberculosis of the spine and lupus patients come in? No, because that's not a really great market. It's a complicated case, it's going to suck up a year of your time, and it's not a way to run a business to work with people that are that complicated. At least in the beginning, when you're first learning how to do this work, stay with really simple, targeted approaches. You don't have to use my Big Five. You might want to focus just on fertility, or just on, uh, executives who want to, you know, perform better athletically, or kids, or women who want to get pregnant, or professional athletes. Whatever your niche may be, but you want to pick a group of people in the beginning who are going to be relatively easy to work with, who you're going to be able to fix quickly, so you can, you know, learn this work quickly. Because a lot of the learning of this work comes with volume. The more tests you do in a year, the more you're going to, more quickly you're going to learn this work. And as I've watched over these last 20 some years of working in this field and training doctors, all the doctors that drop out, they drop out because they never get enough testing done to see how well this stuff works because they pick their hardest patients. And they only tested those really hard cases. If you pick your 10 hardest patients and you just test them, you might just throw your hands up and go, "This is ridiculous, I could never make this work as a business," because you picked the wrong first 10 people to work with, right? So start easy. That's one of the biggest, most common mistakes we all make is we work with too hard of a patient population in the beginning. Once you're good at this, after you've been doing it for a couple years, you can work with all the hard patients you want, but don't start that way. It just makes it, it's a barrier for entry. All right, it's just too hard.

The second thing that I always want to focus on is a reproducible model, a methodology. I always talk about Franco. He's my acupuncturist. When I go to see Franco, he's hands down one of the best healers I've ever met. I walk into his clinic, I lie down on the table, he's got the music going, it's relaxing. And Franco always comes up to me and he says the same thing. He says, "Stick your tongue out, hand me your wrist." He checks my pulses, he looks at my tongue, and then he always says something that I don't really understand about my liver chi or my kidney chi or whatever. And I don't really care at that point. I just know he's going to do the right thing. I don't care what he thinks is wrong. But does Franco, you know, occasionally grab my hip and check my pulses in my hip? No. He has a method, he has a system using Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, to analyze me. It's a very consistent, reproducible model. It works really well. It's worked for 5,000 years. And what I want for us to have in functional medicine is the same exact kind of reproducible model. And this is what we're studying with the Mayo Clinic. We didn't do different things with all 25 Mayo Clinic patients. They all did hormone and a gut test, and they all did the same hormone and gut protocols as indicated on the labs, based, bet the testing, and they all got better. And they all followed the same lifestyle changes. So I'm really kind of emphasizing this as a focus.

And what I call the condition description technique is a way to shift a patient over to a a system that, that we're trying to do. So, for example, let's say someone comes in, they're overweight. You can tell them why you want them to do this adrenal test in relation to fat burning. If they come in and they're tired, that's their chief complaint, you can tell them why you want them to do this adrenal test in response to fatigue. If they come in and they're stressed because they just got a new job, you can talk about stress hormones and how you want to do this adrenal test because of stress. So whatever their condition is, whatever their condition is, you want to describe the labs that you want to do in regards to that condition so they're motivated. But it doesn't mean you have to do a completely different protocol in every patient because they have a different condition. The analysis is the same. Just like in acupuncture, Franco always checks my pulses and my tongue. The analysis is the same, but we're describing per condition why we're doing that particular kind of analysis. And that works really well in terms of motivating patients to do the testing. Okay, so condition, uh, having a clear niche, number one, you know, your Big Five or whatever your focus is going to be. Number two, a reproducible model. That's what I teach. I'm trying to hand you guys a model. And then the third here is new referrals from results. So that's the mining to install base, right? That's the Silicon Valley terminology. We want to make sure that every single new patient you have gets great results, and they refer one or two new people. Well, you have a referral-based practice like that, you don't have to worry about marketing, you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Everything gets really easy. And I've been running a referral-based practice for over 20 years now. It's, it's, it's beautiful. It's simple, it's beautiful, and it's very, very profitable.

So now, I don't know if you guys ever watched this show. It's my favorite show on TV. It's called "The Profit," P-R-O-F-I-T, The Profit. And Marcus Lemonis is the profit. If you have Hulu or whatever, you know, get on, get on tomorrow night and watch "The Profit." And what the profit does, Marcus Lemonis, he goes into small businesses and he analyzes them, and he kind of tells them what they're doing wrong, and then he fixes them. It's a really great show for business skills. I, I mean, I love it. Uh, I'm just dying for the third season to come out. But, and you hear in Marcus Lemonis has these three Ps, you know? But my three elements of a successful practice, I stole this from Marcus: People, that's you and your staff. The Clinical Model, that's everything that you do with your patients. And then probably the most important part, the Business Operations. The business operations. So we have People, that's you and your staff. Your Clinical Model, how you're interacting with your patients, how you're educating them, the supplements you're using, the labs you're using. And then the backend Business Operations. And these three elements have to come together, and you have to put about equal time into each one of them. You have to put time into yourself and your own training, your own health, and the health of your staff, and the functioning of your staff. You have to put time into understanding your clinical model and working with your patients. And you have to put about an equal amount of time into business operations. Every week for the last 20 years, I spend about as much time with my patients as I do running my business. Okay? I spend almost exactly the same number of hours with patients as I spend running my business. And if you have that equation down, you can have a very profitable business. And when it's profitable, you don't have to work that many hours. Right now, I spend 10 hours a week with patients, five hours on Tuesday, five hours on Thursday. I spend 10 hours a week with my staff, making the clinic run, doing all the meetings, and doing all the accounting, all the stuff you have to do to make a business run. Okay? And that's it. It's a 20-hour week commitment to run my practice right now. Now, back in the day, I used to work 25 hours a week with patients, and I had about another 20 hours a week to run that clinic. It was a much larger clinic, much more complicated model. But people, the model and operations, we're going to talk about this and mentioned this earlier, you know, physician burnout is a big concern. Are you living a healthy life? Is your work meaningful? Do you feel like you're, you know, on track with whatever your mission is? None of us are going to be here very long. There's no time, really, to spend a year doing something that you don't believe in. So you want to make sure that you're okay, you know, and that your staff is okay. And then in terms of the practice itself, you, that's the business operational part, and that's where most of us are lagging. I find very, very few practices that are set up exactly to suit what the doctor needs. It's very rare to see that.

And then the life-changing results. I mean, most of the people that take my training program are really good practitioners, and they may need some information, you know, clinically. But, you know, we get just the best healers in the world, you know? So I, I don't find that's usually a problem. Maybe, you know, people need a little bit of a clinical model tune-up, they can learn that in six months or a year. Most of the time, where I see things falling apart is on the practice side or on the doctor's side. Either the doctor's burned out, or the practice isn't generating enough money. And often those two things are related, right? If you're working 60, 80 hours a week, and you're not bringing home enough money to support every financial need that you have, then, you know, you're going to get burned out.

So in order to work with all this, I have these five pillars. And if you do these things in the right order, and it's pretty much going to work, you know, um, it could take a year or two to figure this out. I'm not saying this is going to happen overnight. And the best of the best students that I train, within a year or two, they get this figured out. Probably around the two-year mark, they're feeling pretty comfortable, and, and they, they've got this down. Okay.

So the first item is figuring out who the patients are that you're going to work with. So, you know, I had this crisis, and this happened to me, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years ago. It's a total crisis. Went into this restaurant out with his friends, and I think it was like before a show or something like that, you know, we're going to go see a music show or something. And so there's some time pressure, like we had to get in and out of this restaurant in like an hour. And I sit down and open up the menu, and it was one of those restaurants, and it had the menu was just so long and so complicated that I just got overwhelmed, and I just didn't even know what to order. And so I just looked at my friend and I said, "Look, could you just order for me?" You know, if you have too many choices, it's not a good thing for the human brain. And most of us are trying to work with every single patient that could possibly come through the door. So on one day, you might have a, a 2-year-old that has eczema. The day after that, a 79-year-old whose memory is failing. And then a 53-year-old who's worried about recovering from their cancer treatment. And then a 17-year-old girl who just lost her period, right? Most of us have a general practice, and we're working with all kinds of patients. And most of us drift towards working with chronically ill people. So those are the two things to be on the lookout for when you're trying to build a, a successful business. You want to have a niche, and pick a niche that's going to be fun, that you're good at, that you're going to love. I, I've seen every niche you can imagine, just depending on the person. Some people only want to work with kids, that would drive me crazy. Some people love that. Some people only want to work with women who want to get pregnant. I've even seen a niche, this one guy in New York City, he only worked with brides. He only worked with women who were going to get married in the near future, and he did weight loss programs with these women. It was the most highly motivated on top of a group of humans you've ever met, because all these women want to fit into the wedding dress on a certain date. And if he said, "Do this exercise, eat this food, and take these supplements," they would do it. And they would spare no expense either, right? So you can pick any niche you want. It doesn't have to be my niches, but there needs to be a niche. And the more niched you get, the more focused you get, the easier this gets.

The second of the pillars is focusing on a three-body system. So we'll look at that in a minute. Speaking the patient's language, talk a little bit more about that as well. Choosing the right labs and supplements, and then making sure that you apply efficient business practices. Okay, so the patients, the body systems of the clinical model, patient communication, choosing the right products, and then applying the basic business principles that most of us are really horrible at.

So first pillar, choosing the right patients. This is my niche. You can steal this if you want, that's the whole point of me doing this talk. If you like this as a niche, I mean, it's really worked well for me. You can work with the Big Five. That is, weight gain, fatigue, depression, GI problems, and hormone imbalances. You could pick one of these. You could just do female hormones if you wanted to. You could just do weight loss. Weight loss is really popular. You just do weight loss. You could just work with GI problems if you want to niche out even more. I like these five again because they're so common, and functional medicine fixes these problems really, really well. So you'll have a great success rate if you're focusing on these five issues. But anyways, just take the example, whatever niche you want to have, you want to pick five like this. Want to pick two things, want to pick one thing, make sure that you're focused so you really know what you're driving towards, at least in the first few years that you start your practice. That's the most important advice I could give in the very beginning.

And then the second pillar is having a diagnostic system, having a clinical model. In my clinical model, we keep it really simple. This has worked really well for everyone involved: hormones, GI, and detox. Three lab tests, three body systems. It's very easy for people to wrap their minds around that. It's not a million different body systems, it's not this really intricate, complicated thing, it's three body systems. And then the question that we get asked the most by doctors who are learning this work is, you know, "Okay, what order do I work with these systems?" You know, "I know there's hormones and gut and detox, but, you know, should we do the hormone thing first? The gut thing first? I heard you should detoxify people before you can do anything else, etc., etc." So the simplest model, and this works really well, is to correct the problems in the order in which they originally occurred. And most people are stressed. That messes up their stress hormones, then they get gut problems, and eventually they get pretty toxic. So, and in terms of the, the treatment order, this is flawless and works beautifully. I promise, this really works well. Most people end up getting sick because of some major emotional stress, because we're spiritually disconnected. And then someone dies, and then we worry about us dying, and then we don't know what's going to happen to the dead person, and we don't know if we're going to see them again, and we don't know about our spiritual lives. So you go through a divorce, you're in a long-term relationship, all of a sudden you split up, you lose your identity, you lose your partnership, you don't have a strong spiritual grounding. So all of a sudden you're thrown into this massive stress response. Maybe you just had your second or third kid, or you're working two different jobs, whatever it is, that's a major stressful event that disconnects us, pushes our adrenal hormones over the edge. The body system, one thing falls apart, right? We're cranking out all this cortisol, the GI system starts to fall apart because the adrenals become unstable. We then pick up pathogens or start to react to foods, and all of a sudden all that junk gets dumped on the liver, and we get toxic. So most health conditions that we work with in functional medicine have the beginnings in a spiritual or emotional crisis that triggers this cascade of hormones, gut, and detox systems falling apart. So all we're saying is, we're going to correct the body systems in the order in which the problems occurred. We're going to head on deal with stress first, testing and correcting the adrenal hormones. We're going to fix the gut, and then we're going to detox people towards the end of the program. So again, it's a very simple, very clear clinical model. It's worked for me, it works great for all the people in the training program that are learning it.

Okay, so first pillar, we talked about is getting a niche, choosing the right patients. I've never refused a patient in my whole career. I'm not talking about turning people down, talking about directing your energy in the right way. How could you do that? Maybe you start giving lectures on female hormones, and that's the only lecture you do. When you talk about female hormones, you know, once a month in all these different venues, all of a sudden you're going to build a female hormone related practice. Maybe do a weight loss lecture, all of a sudden you're going to build a weight loss related practice, right? So you're focusing your energies on attracting the right people.

The third pillar, I, the second pillar was getting a clinical model. So choosing the right patients, having a clear model. There's all the efficiencies of that. You're not having to carry 79 different supplements, you only need 20, 25. You don't have to have 10 different kinds of lab kits, you only need three or four. Makes it very efficient. So your staff is doing the same thing over and over, you're doing the same thing over and over. And then the third pillar is figuring out how to talk to people in a way that motivates them. And there's two ways to look at this, and you can look at it either way, depending on your personality. One way to look at this is as, uh, basically sales, because we're selling stuff. We're selling lab kits, we're selling supplements, and we're selling our services. The other way to look at this is as patient education. And it just depends. When I was in my first 10 years of practice, um, I thought sales was a bad word. You know, I grew up in Berkeley, California, you know, a really liberal family, and sales and corporations and money was all kind of bad. And I was trained as a kid to be interested in social justice, to be interested in, you know, not being the man, but taking the man down, you know, whether it's riots in Berkeley or whatever it was going on in the late '60s, right? And so the idea that I could run a profitable business made me really uneasy for the first five or 10 years I was in practice. And then one day I woke up and I realized, you know what? I'm not going to help anybody for very long unless I start to make some money in this practice. And if I can do that in a, you know, socially responsible way, have a decent profit, I'll be able to help people the rest of my life. And so then, you know, the last maybe 12 or 15 years of my practice, I really focused on business skills and developing how to do all this stuff. So I learned how to speak to patients as patient communication, education, right? I went to communication seminars and learned how to do patient communication. But what I realized in the last 10 years or so is this is the same kind of communication skills that people use in sales, right? We're talking about educating people about the underlying causes of their problems, talking about the three body systems, and ultimately telling them, you know, how their symptoms have come about because of these particular body systems breaking down. So the person's overweight and tired and depressed, and you can say, "You know, I think a lot of this is coming about because you're stressed, and you got really stressed when you went through the divorce, and your dad died the same year, and that your cortisol levels are probably abnormal. And if we test and correct your cortisol, we should be able to help." So you start to, and we do this in the training program. The first month, we just give you scripts that talk about how to do this, and they're really sales scripts. Or if you don't like the word sales, like I didn't used to like it, you could call them patient education scripts. We're educating people to the point where they want to take some action, which in our culture means they're going to have to buy stuff, you know, they have to buy supplements, they're going to have to buy labs, they're going to have to put some money down to make this happen. And once you get that buy-in, and people are buying labs and buying supplements, you're going to get the lifestyle changes to happen, you're going to get the person well. I mean, that's really, unfortunately, in our culture, it's, it kind of all revolves around money. I'm sure you know, a couple thousand years ago, all of us healer types were, you know, we are doing this in a village setting, and I, maybe someone bring you a chicken or something if you, if you cared their mother. But you, now it's all unfortunately going through money. So we have to deal with this money issue. So simple patient communication scripts. We have new patient scripts, we have new patient education scripts, we have, uh, scripts to use when your labs have come back in. All this stuff is scripted out, okay? And, um, it's pretty straightforward how to do all that once you practice it a little bit. The main thing to focus on if you want to start to script yourself right is think about it from the patient's perspective. So if they're overweight and tired, they want to lose weight and get more energy. They're not really that interested in anything else. But I'm getting results, so you have to explain how their tiredness and their weight gain originated during that time of stress. We go back to this clinical model, right? How that originated during this time of stress, and how you're going to be able to fix it if you can run this simple adrenal panel. And if they run the adrenal test, you're going to see where their stress hormones are, and you'll be able to fix their metabolism and their energy as you work with their adrenal hormones. So we're always explaining the labs in the context of the patient's symptoms, but we're not treating different symptoms differently. That's the tricky part. We're running the same three labs on everybody, but we're running them for different reasons. And so you have to explain the reasons for running these labs differently to each person, but you run the same labs, three labs, that's it. It's my whole practice. Three labs: adrenals, gut, and detox. You can get fancier if you want, but that's enough to keep a really successful practice going, okay? And then you can refer out for other stuff.

So the fourth pillar is choosing the right labs. And kind of can see where we're heading with this, right? So if you're working with a Big Five, if you're working with a simple practice, even if you're working with a complicated practice, like if you're working with, um, I don't know, eating disorder or alcoholics, or if you're working with people with Lyme disease, or even if you're doing something complicated, you can still start people with the same basic test. You may need to add to that. But if you're starting simple with simple conditions, this is all a lot easier. So I'm going to show you some case studies about how this plays out in real life, so you can see. And it's, it's really, it's not that complicated when you see it. It takes a little while to learn all this stuff.

So here's a patient of mine from a couple years back, Jenny. Classic case of adrenal burnout. 30-year-old woman, couldn't sleep, had really bad PMS, exercised a lot, ate really well, trying to get pregnant. She didn't have all the lifestyle problems, she didn't need all the, you know, coaching about diet, all that kind of stuff. She's pretty straightforward on that side. Now, we ran our adrenal test. How hard is this? It's like $100. It's a saliva sample, all right? And here she was, completely burned out. You can see her cortisol and DHEA levels are both really low. So she's a stage three. Young woman to have that advanced problem. Now, we know what do we know? Well, we know that adrenals are burned out, and we know that her symptoms of insomnia, PMS, and infertility are obviously related to hormones, right? And the adrenal hormone cortisol controls our circadian rhythm and our sleep cycle. Also helps direct and control the female hormones. And if we can just test and correct her adrenals, we're going to get all those body systems working better, and all her symptoms will start to get better. Her sleep better, her PMS will go away, and she'll become much more fertile with an adrenal program. And we, I mean, I know this, we have, we have patients all the time who are doing an adrenal program, and before they even get to the point where they're doing the fertility part of the program, they're pregnant. And I hear that from doctors in my training program all the time. Stuff really works for fertility.

Now, Jenny's other problem, a gut test. Remember, there's three body systems: hormones, gut, and detox. We ran a hormone panel for the adrenal. We ran a basic pathogen screen. These are all from this lab company called BioHealth. You may have your other favorite companies as well, okay? She had H. pylori, classic infection, right? So all of a sudden now we have a gut problem too. Now we have to clear the adrenals and deal with the gut. And we ran the third body system test in this case for heavy metals. She had lead and mercury. So all of a sudden, poor Jenny has got insomnia, PMS, and wants to get pregnant. And we've got to deal with not a treatment for insomnia, and then a separate treatment for PMS, and then a separate treatment for infertility. We're going for body systems on the treatment side. We're going to fix her adrenals, her H. pylori, and detox her. And what that's going to do, that's going to eliminate her PMS, her insomnia, and make her fertile, and make it easy for her to get pregnant. So the symptoms that she's coming in with, insomnia, PMS, and infertility, did not dictate the lab testing that we did. We just explained to her, when, when people are toxic, have gut infections, and their adrenals are in stage three, it's pretty hard to get pregnant and sleep well, and you're for sure going to have PMS. So the symptoms aren't dictating what we're doing. We're doing the same labs every time, but we're explaining it in different ways for different patients.

Okay, communicating the results and administering the protocols. So again, a lot of this is just basic patient education, communication skills. And, you know, I grew up in kind of a checker family. I was in Berkeley, California, you know, like late 1960s, early '70s. My dad was Jewish, kind of a professor guy from New York, you know. My mom's from Hawaii, Japanese, Portuguese. My dad was talking all the time, my mom was never talking. I didn't really learn communication skills. And my parents got divorced when I was like 10 or whatever. I never learned communication skills at all. My family, communicating was pretty random. And I find that most of us, you grow up in families that, you know, unless you're both your parents are communication experts, you know, you're probably not going to have great communication skills. So you got to learn how to do this stuff, right? I mean, I did. I had to get trained by a, a bunch of doctors.

And how to communicate well with people took a little while. You do some seminars, you do some one-on-one training, and you know, eventually, you can figure this stuff out. You get really good at it after a while. This is a major job skill, I think, that we all need, by the way. So if you're not good at patient communication, don't feel bad. You just have to learn how to do it. I'm a good example of someone who started off pretty not so good at it and ended up being extremely good at it, just from practice.

Okay, so again, you, you got to look at it from the other person's perspective. You can't tell people stuff. You got to, like, tell them the right thing in order for them to make the right decisions. So you got to explain what supplements are for. You got to tell them how it's going to help them. You got to explain the labs and what the lab means and how that directly relates to their problems. And then the hardest part of this job, as you guys know, is getting the lifestyle stuff going. So like, why would someone stop drinking alcohol, drinking caffeine, and all sugar and gluten for like six months? Like, what human being would volunteer for that? So just figuring out what's the way that you're going to get that person to make those changes? What's the leverage that you have over that person? Uh, and that, to me, is really the core of what we're doing. It's the lifestyle changes. And so the patient communication skills come in really strongly when you're trying to motivate people to make these changes that you know are going to really be what makes a difference for them. And I think, by the way, that the most important part of that is just knowing that it's going to work.

So like, with the, the Mayo Clinic St., we had 25 women, except for three of them. So 22 of them went gluten-free, stopped all alcohol, stopped all caffeine, and stopped all sugar. And guess what happened? In the first month or two, one of them started to have her cycle. She hadn't had a menstrual cycle since she was 17 years old. Three or four of them, migraines were gone. All of them, increased energy. How hard is this to figure out, right? All we did was pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, communicate, communicate, communicate, get them to make the lifestyle changes before they even started the supplements. We were getting results that were really quite remarkable.

Now, the last of these pillars is the, uh, trickiest one. And you know, I was at a meeting, uh, a seminar a couple months ago, and I was, you know, teaching this group, maybe, I don't know, was a small group, maybe 15 people. And I said, okay, it was a group of doctors, right? I said, okay, which of you in this group know what your margins are? And not a single person put their hand up. Half the people in the room didn't know what a margin was. My best advice: watch *The Profit* on TV because that's all Marcus talks about is, what are your margins? What are your margins? How are we going to make these margins better? What's a good margin? Your margin should be between 40 and 60%. What does that mean? That means if you collected a total of $100 grand last year, you should have walked away with somewhere between $40 and $60,000. So if you collect $100,000 and you keep $60,000, your margin is 60%. Means the margin of, you know, the total amount that you're collecting that you're keeping. If your margin is like 20% and you made $100,000 of collections but you only kept $20,000, that is not sustainable. So we want to get people to these margins that are good. Our business, our industry should be around 40 to 60%. That's kind of typical. I mean, you could do a little better than that, you can do a little worse, but it's really the range that you want to be in. Every industry is different, but that's where around where we should be after we paid out all our expenses. So make sure you do that. If you don't know what your margins are, talk to your accountant tomorrow and say, "Hey, what were my margins last year?" Don't know what that means. I'll be able to run the numbers for it.

Okay, you want to hire the right staff. And, um, we have this, we just added a new feature, a new business module to the training program where we're doing this. But I can tell you the short version of it is that we recommend that people do, you know, personality testing, the Myers-Briggs test. Figure out the personality that you are. Figure out the personality that you need to add to your office. If you're disorganized like I am, you want an organized person, right? If you're a big broad thinker like I am, you want someone who thinks about details. You want to hire people not like you, but people who match and complement what you have and who, in my case, are highly organized and highly detail-oriented and can run that part of the business because I'm not like that. So Myers-Briggs testing can be really helpful.

And then I'm kind of a computer-obsessed person, and I love computer equipment. So we have a lot of IT stuff. I just bought a whole new server setup, and that's kind of my thing. But it's pretty important. You know, we have online scheduling in my clinic. That allowed me to cut one whole full-time staff member. We don't. I mean, everybody schedules online now, and all the reminders go out online. It's really amazing. U, we have patient management software that makes everything easy. We have a VPN that means I can log into my server at work from anywhere if I'm traveling. One of the biggest things we did last year is we switched over to a WordPress-based website. So it's so great. I mean, it cost a couple thousand bucks to set it up, but now we can update it on our own. We don't have to call our web person to update all the time. So if you don't have a WordPress website, I'd highly recommend that. If it cost a couple grand to set it up, you'll then be able to manipulate it and change things all on your own. You won't have to call your web guy every time you need to change things, and it's really easy to use. It's not particularly complicated.

And then I really recommend a business coach. I've always had a business coach. Um, in the last 10 years or so, I've gone to a lot of business seminars, read a lot of business books. And, um, you know, I have, um, just a really strong respect for business people, and, and they've taught me so much in terms of, you know, making my practice more sustainable and workable.

So I want to talk a little bit about, um, let me show you one thing first, okay? And then we'll talk about money stuff. I want to show you this first, and this is really cool. So now in, um, we've created a community, an online community, right? So when you sign up for the training program class, you get access to this. And what is this, you say? Well, it's like an, it's like a, think of it as like a Facebook. We have a community here. We have all the classes here, and we have content here. So if you look at just what's been going up, um, uh, here's a, a student that just posted something about perimenopausal and postmenopausal courses. We have someone earlier today, uh, oh, we posted this interview with Dr. Amy Myers, who's a great autoimmune doc, based out of Austin, Texas. Uh, we have Linda Lee, who's a medical doctor in Upstate New York, and she's making some comments answering a question from Darla, who's an RD in Texas. We have Anna, who's asking questions about placentas. We have, uh, Amy Myers, who's a, Amy Buers, I'm sorry, who's a great practitioner talking about health waves. So people are, oh, someone want to know about Krait's syndrome. Oh, there's a detox thing that we were talking about. So people post things, they answer questions, they post questions. You can access all the other people in the community here, okay? You also then also have your classes here as well. You can see all the different class groups that we have, and you can click on your class and you can see all the information about your particular class that's posted there, okay? So it's a really great and active community. We've got several hundred practitioners in the community now.

And then we have this content, which is pretty intense. I'll show you that too. This is all the stuff you get when you sign up. So in the content section, we have Quick Fix protocols, lectures, case studies by the hundreds, right? So like, for example, if you're just wondering, you want to go to the case study library and you're thinking, "Oh man, I wonder if there's been any cases that we've gone over, uh, on fertility." You can type in fertility, and up pops all the different cases that we've gone over related to fertility. And then you can click on one of these cases. "Oh, what female with low estrogen and progesterone? It sounds like my patient." And the video pops up, and this is exactly the case that we talked about in the class, and you can watch the video, and the whole video is transcribed here, word for word. So you can also just read the transcript, and if you have questions about it, you can post a question down here. So we have, I think about 600 cases now in the database, covering just about every condition you could possibly imagine, and you can listen to cases all day long from other doctors that were presented in class. It's an amazing learning tool.

So you have classes, you have the community. Community is the fun part, too, because I don't know, you might be in, I don't know, in New York, and Aaron's in New York, and you want to say, "Hey, Aaron, you know, we should refer patients back and forth." At the last meeting that we had, uh, oh, this was really cool. So Miles, who's an acupuncturist, has posted this thing, and he says, "Hey, a PT, PT told me that the trap and lader have estrogen receptors, and that's why people have cyclical migraines." And I'm like, "Wow, that's kind of interesting." And then Anita chimes in, who's an OBGYN, media says, "Well, you're kind of right about that. They have estrogen receptors on mast cells, major mediators of inflammation, and when estrogen levels flux or erratic, they stimulate mast cell degranulation, which dumps a lot of neurotoxic chemicals in the bloodstream. So it turns out that men don't have these receptors, and women do. So part of the inflammatory sort of migraine cascade for women has to do with these mast cell degranulation things that happen because of estrogen and certain muscle receptors." I didn't know that. Anyways, you can post things, you learn things from other practitioners. We've got acupuncturists sharing information with medical docs, and chiropractors chiming in, and all that as well, okay? So that's the community.

And in addition to that, oh, that's my profile. That's my favorite bicycle. That's an early 1960s, uh, Cinelli. If you're into road bikes, that's a really beautiful bike. Um, it's in the shop right now, but that's not what I was trying to show you. This is the actual mentorship itself, okay? So when you pay us our exorbitant fee, you get access to this intro to adrenals module one. Here's all the classes laid out. Um, you go through, obviously, you know, one at a time. You click on each one of these classes, and you'll see a series of videos, reading assignments, regular assignments, tools. There's homework baked into all of this. And you watch your videos, you go to your end of the module, and you finish that. You go back and you do module two. And each module is about a month. And each module has videos, PowerPoints, all kinds of generalized information, reading assignments, regular assignments. We have these tool sections here as well. And you're going through and learning in a stepwise fashion.

And then, of course, everybody also has a live call. And that's what I was showing you earlier, where they have a live time each week that they select. And you might, uh, depending what class you want to be in, you might choose like the, I don't know, Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. call, or you might be in the Wednesday at 9:00, or whatever the different times are. You know, each one of these times has a group that's associated with it. We have these live calls within this group, and you can see who else is in your group and what they're posting and do all your homework and all that kind of stuff. So we have an interactive community, which is pretty amazing. And we have the actual modules for the course, which are built in online as well. There's a ton of information. It's a pretty exciting class, okay? So I just wanted to show that to you guys. Oops, there's my profile.

All right, so let's think about the money part. And, uh, just from a really simple math standpoint, this doesn't have to be overly complicated. And I'm figuring this is doable for most of us. Five new patients a month. That seems pretty doable. That's like one and a half, one and a quarter. It's, I guess it's one and a quarter new patients every week. That seems totally realistic. And that's a month, not a week. Five new patients a month. And let's say, just to keep it simple, you, you know, you spend an hour with them when they first come in, and you charge them $300 for an hour. That's sort of about average. Say, maybe you're a little higher, a little lower, but say around $300 for an hour. And then let's say they need to do a bunch of follow-ups, which they always will, of a half an hour each, and you charge $150 for the follow-ups. They need the follow-ups. So you can see here are the numbers. This would be what you would make in terms of your services. And on average, when you're doing a simple functional medicine program, nothing complicated, you're going to sell them a $61 supplement program. They're going to spend about $1,500 per person. It's probably at the low end. And so you're going to generate around $7,500 a month in revenue from the, from the supplement sales for those five people, right? And you, I'm sorry, you can generate around $7,500 for a six-month program from those people. And these are the fees you're going to generate from your consults. And you add all that up over the course of a year, five new people a month, it's around $153,000. And I see most of the students that are successful hitting these kinds of numbers. Once they've been in the class for like a year, you see by their second year, they're getting 100, 150, 200. They're really successful. People are usually at 200, 250, uh, a year once they get into their second year, third year, fourth or fifth year, most people are up around the $400 to $500,000 mark if they're being really successful. And again, we're not talking about crazy things where you get a million people in the door. We're talking about five new patients a month and building primarily because you're getting referrals. You get five new people every month, they're sending you five people, and it builds and it builds and it builds. And this is a very stable, consistent model. I've seen most of the people that we work with be able to pull off. All right, this is not a crazy pie-in-the-sky unrealistic version of it all.

So when I, when I talk to people too, and this happens almost every, every week, I'll talk to someone who really thinks that they want a marketing and sales help, a approach, you know, and I don't want to be arrogant, but I really don't think you guys need that. I think if your clinical skills are really sharp and you have a small number of patients, you're going to build a referral-based practice really quickly, okay? So the marketing, in my mind, isn't just, you know, like an advertisement or bringing in new people. It's, it's all the things that we talked about. It's the patient education. It's having a clear model. It's being able to explain to a patient why they have this problem and how you're going to fix it. It's all these different clinical tools that really are the marketing tools for your practice. Remember, a clear message that differentiates you, you know, having a niche, having a targeted audience, a clear model. Just use my model. That's the whole point of me teaching is to use the model of adrenals, gut, and detox. Confidence in your communication. You use the scripts and start to think about the condition description technique I mentioned. An easy, repeatable system. Remember three labs. Just test the adrenals, test the gut, and test the detox pathways. Just three labs. That's it. And then doing it over and over again until you get really good at it, okay? And it takes people a little while to get all this.

So this is really the conclusion, right? Is that the business model is the clinical model. So in fact, when we're teaching the clinical model, we're teaching the business model all together at the same time. You could call it patient education or patient sales. You could call it a clinical process or a sales process. It doesn't really matter. It's the same thing. And if you're good at the patient education, you're going to be really, really good at the selling. And this is going to start to happen. And then you don't have to worry about the clinical results. That's all taken care of for you. All the stuff that I teach in this class was taught to me by some of the best and brightest people in functional medicine, and the stuff works really, really well. You don't have to worry about, is this going to work or not? And these are not my personal ideas. I teach exactly what I was taught. These things have been around for, you know, generations, literally 40 years, more, minimum, minimum of 40 years of people doing these protocols. So you don't have to worry about the results. That's going to happen. Can be pretty much guaranteed you're going to get good results. It's not me, it's not my personality. You just learn these protocols. That part is pretty easy to do, okay?

So I'm going to talk briefly about this, and then we'll open it up for questions. I have a program starting. It's next week, you guys. It's coming out really soon, okay? Um, the next most common question I always get asked is like, "Oh, you know, I've been online, I'm looking at all these classes. How's yours different?" So I totally support you guys doing other programs, and I want you to know where mine fits into all of this. So mine is 100% clinically oriented. It's all clinicians. No one's taking this, you know, just out of intellectual curiosity. Everyone's either in practice or starting a practice and is working their butt off and learning how to do this while they're working their butt off in their practice or starting their practice. So this is like action-oriented. I just talked to one of our doctors last week. He did 200 labs, 200 labs during the six months. That's a little bit of an overachiever, but I was pretty impressed by that. Maybe you do five or 10, but this is an action-oriented group of people. We want people doing this work. This, this isn't just something kind of interesting to learn about. We have weekly lectures every week, right? I showed you in the, in the, um, online class, you learn about the body systems. You go through it at your own pace. You need at least three or four or five hours a week. Some people put in 10, some people put in 20. You can go at your own pace. The course is designed to be done over six months, okay? And then we have practical application sessions every week. We meet online in a small group, 10 or 15 doctors. You send in all your labs, you ask all your questions, and we go over all of them. In between the weekly classes that are live, you have community interaction with me on the online community. Everything is recorded and transcribed, so everything is, you know, put online for you so you can remember what's happening and what's going on. And then my job here is to be like the mentor and kind of like the coordinator for all this stuff. Although it's getting to the point now where we have so many experienced doctors that you're going to learn as much from the other students as you will from me, most likely, over the course of the class, okay?

So I teach basically, um, how to design lab-based programs and supplement programs, how to sell this, how to make this whole thing work from a business perspective. And I've become very good at that. So I'm a good clinician who's managed to be very successful in business. And I spent my first, you know, 10 or 12 years just on the clinical side, not realizing that I was running a small business. And then I decided that I wanted to get my kid into a good college, be able to pay for it, and be able to buy a decent house in Northern California. And, and those two required a fairly large income, believe it or not. Just buying a house in San Francisco and putting your kid through college, you know, ended up being a lot more cash than I was generating with my practice. So I put my mind to the business and figured out how to drive that and make all this work. And what we're doing is basically teaching you a clinical model which is so successful that you're going to get referral-based business from it. Again, we've got the online training that I showed you a minute ago. This is what the modules look like. We've got the community. And once you've gone through the training program, certain things happen. And I do exit interviews with everyone. They feel really confident about what they're doing with their patients. They figured out this whole, like, "What test am I going to order? What company? What supplements?" thing. I don't sell my own supplement line to you all. I just sell my supplements to patients. But we talk about different supplement companies so you can get connected with the right companies, order the right products, okay? Um, you should be able to be very comfortable designing supplement protocols and know exactly how well they're going to work. We want you in the business module, specifically. This is a new module that we've developed just this year, getting all the business information you need to get your practices up and running, in addition to all the clinical information. And then results that are going to speak for themselves. So you just build referrals and build referrals. That's really the goal, okay?

If you mention this webinar, you sign up, you get $500 off. I don't know about you, but I always like a discount. I give my patients free shipping. We always give people who listen to this class, uh, a discount. And then, you know, just on the final thought side, oh, you know, one other thing. I, I always like to talk to people. So if you're interested in this class and you're serious about it, schedule a time to talk to me, and we can screen each other. You can see if the class is right for you, and I can see if you're right for our community or not. And we're pretty picky because we have a really great group of people. And, um, 100% of the people in the class are really pretty amazing healers and human beings, and we're trying to keep a standard that's extremely high. You might be brand new in practice or still in school. That doesn't matter. You know, what we're looking for are people who are healers at heart and really want to make a go of this in functional medicine and are passionate about the work, okay? And I don't think any of the people in the community would, would, would say anything different. I, I think they would all agree with me that they would say, "Yeah, you know, everyone in this group is is targeted and right on, and we all really trust each other." And it's a small group. We don't take a gazillion people every year, you know, we're talking about 10 or 20 doctors in each class. It's a pretty small group, right? And I teach all the classes myself, every single one. I'm on a, the moderator teacher for. I completely believe anybody can have a, a thriving practice. There should be no limits. There are more patients out there right now that are interested in this work than there are practitioners. So if anything, there's an absolute shortage of well-trained practitioners.

The second factor that I always want to emphasize is that I didn't figure out how to do this on my own. I had five or six doctors that I could call day or night that stepped me through this, and they've all put several years of time and energy into training me. And, you know, this is, this class is my way of trying to extend that exact same experience to other people, just by putting it online and getting it organized in a curriculum. We're really trying to mimic this mentorship experience where you can ask me questions, you can ask Dr. J questions, who's been, who's been in practice for four years. You can ask Anita questions if you have hormone-related stuff, right? You have a community of people that's led by myself, who you can rely on to get really accurate information from. So that when you're out there, you know, about to go the next morning and meet with a new patient, you have really developed a sense of confidence that you know what you're doing, right? So if you're interested, set up a consult. You can go to kishinstitute.com and do all that. The next class starts next month, next week, I'm sorry, uh, on the 18th. All right, and you get a discount for $500 if you tell them that you were here. So if there are any questions, I'm going to open it up for questions for a couple minutes and see, just fire them away in there, or actually, you can raise your hand too. Um, first question from Gary, uh, will you be able to? Yeah, this is recorded. I was asking if there's a recording. We will automatically send all you guys who are signed up for this copy of the recording, so you get that for sure. I'm going to get Jody here. Jody, can you hear me? Hey there. I can see your hand is raised. Nope. Okay, let's see. She might not have her phone hooked up. Oh, Jody, I can hear you. No, okay. If your phone's not hooked up, you want to ask a question, you can type it into the little box thing, too. Uh, okay, another question, um, yes, so in terms of practitioners, we do have in each class, it's all mixed together. So like in any current class, you'll have a couple of medical doctors with a couple of chiropractors, a couple of acupuncturists, naturopaths, a nutritionist, a therapist, and a physical therapist, all in the same group. And we don't segment out the groups at all. It's actually worked out really well, um, because we can have a discussion where you have input from so many different professionals. It's really been great, but we're all studying the same curriculum. We're all doing the same basic work. Uh, okay, one or two more questions. Our next one is, okay, we do start, if you can't make this class, we do start a new class every couple of months, about every 60 days, every two months. So if this one is not available to you timing-wise, there'll be another one in two months. Um, the big feature that's starting with this class is we have the, the community now, and the business module. So we got a bunch of new stuff coming in. And let's see, oh, what test do you use for detox evaluation? So for detox, we use, um, the easiest one is the organic acids test, and you can get that from Great Plains or from Genova. So it's again, organic acids test, and it measures the detox pathways in a really elegant way. It also measures methylation, neurotransmitters, all this stuff. Well, by the way, when you, um, when you finish the six-month training program, we then have an ongoing clinical rounds call, which most people end up joining for a while, meaning that, you know, it's not just six months and then you're out in the wilderness. It's six months, then you get into a more advanced group of students who are still meeting once a week. And then I do have an advanced class that we teach as well for people that want to go on into a second year doing this kind of work. All right, in the advanced class, uh, the, the mentorship class covers, uh, adrenal and female hormones and gut-related protocols. And we introduce liver and brain in the advanced class. We get into four months of hardcore detail about neurotransmitters and detoxification. It's much more detailed, and we cover the organic acids test in both of the classes. We introduce the organic acids test in the original class, and, um, and then we do it much more extensively in the advanced class. Oh, and the test kits for the adrenals, from Andrea's question, um, I order, I'll show you the lab here. There's lots of really great lab companies, and I'm partial to this one because I've been using them for so long, um, but there are other companies that are equal quality. This one right here, this lab report is from BioHealth, BioHealth Labs, and it's bioh.com, and it's a test panel number 2011. So it's a 2011, that's their basic adrenal test, and it's from BioHealth, and it's bioh.com. They're a great lab, they're very accurate. I don't think you'll find anyone that's a, you know, more accurate than they are. bioh.com. Sorry, it's kind of messy handwriting there, okay? They also have stool testing, and then again, it's the organic acids test for detox. So start running these, run an adrenal panel and a gut panel, a stool test, and then the organic acids, and you'll start to see what I'm talking about, okay?

Um, next question, do you have to be a licensed professional to do functional medicine in this program? Absolutely not. And so we have nutritionists, we have personal trainers, we have people who do not have a medical license. The best example of this was last month in San Francisco. I took a group of students out for lunch, and we had a medical doctor sitting right next to one of the nutritionists. The medical doctor, obviously, is highly licensed and he's a brilliant MD, absolutely not interested in doing nutritional coaching, and honestly, you know, not really great with his business skills. The nutritionist sitting right next to him had an MBA, an advanced degree in business, super sharp businesswoman, super sharp nutritionist. During that lunch, they decided to work together. And how great is that? They both taken my class, and the doc, the medical doctor is like, "Hey, could you do the nutritional coaching?" And she's like, "I would love to." And they're going to, you know, share an office together now. So I strongly believe the chiropractors need the MDs to help us with prescriptions. The MDs need the nutritionist to help them with nutritional consults. So when we mix it up, when we have these groups of licensed and unlicensed people, we try to connect people so that those of you that don't have a medical license can work under someone that does. Even myself, as a chiropractor, constantly I'm referring out to MDs to help with prescriptions, etc. We have, I refer out to acupuncture every week. So I'm constantly referring patients to acupuncture, to medical doctors, etc. And I receive a lot of referrals back from nutritionists and non-licensed people. So it's very much a community that we're trying to build. And usually about 20% of students are non-licensed. And, um, again, we try to pair people up so they can work in conjunction with licensed people. It's much more effective for everyone that way if we can do that.

All right, you guys, I think we're good on the questions. I want to thank you for joining. If you're interested in the class, let us know, and we'll send out a copy of the recording for everyone. If there's anything you want to refresh your memory about. All right, take good care now. Good night.