How to Start Your Functional Medicine Practice

Hey everyone, Dan Kiley's here. I hope you guys are doing well, and I'm excited to be here today talking to you all about how to start a functional medicine practice. And this is one of the projects I've been working on for the last 20 years, and I'm happy to share what I know about it with you all. Get you kind of inspired, hopefully a little bit, to take some action steps and make this happen.

So, some of you may have run across me before at some of these IFM events where I teach. I'll just give a little bit about my background, talk a little about about the practice journey that we're all on, and then see where we come after that. And then I'll tell you one little story too. I just got off the phone talking with one of our practitioners. I'll show you that in a minute.

But yeah, so a little bit about me. So I'm the lead faculty now for the Institute for Functional Medicine's Practice Implementation Program. So they approached me about three years ago. They did an analysis of all the training programs in the eco-space of functional medicine, and they had a whole panel of doctors that reviewed me and a bunch of other programs and decided that I was the one that went to partner with. And so I'm very excited to have spent the last couple years at all the IFM events speaking in these evening sessions and putting together a year-long curriculum for IFM on how to develop practices. And probably one of the greatest pleasures of my life to meet all the IFM faculty and worked with them so closely these last few years.

I'm also been involved, heavily involved in lab interpretation and analysis and workups. I work with Richard Lord right now, who's the main scientist that developed most of the labs that we use in functional medicine. So he's the scientist that developed the GI FX test, if you've used that, and organic acids was his project 35 years ago. Fatty acids, amino acids, is really quite a scientist, and he and I've been working together quite closely on curriculum development for the Kaos Institute courses. We're doing a Clinical Nutrition in Primary Care course that we're going to be offering in a couple of medical schools next year, it looks like right now. So anyways, lots of exciting things happening in the curriculum side.

I've done some research projects, really only one, to be honest about it, but it seems like it lasted forever. It was like a year of my life working on a research study with the Mayo Clinic looking at functional medicine and the protocols that I teach and the mentorship program. We analyzed with the functional medicine, with the integrative medicine department at Mayo Clinic, and published a study on that to show how well they work. And that was sort of my foray into academic medicine, which I retreated from very quickly because it took so much time and, you know, I didn't really enjoy that, to be honest. But I persevered and got through it and published a study. And mostly, you know, spending my time now in practice. I practice two days a week and training programs, so training doctors on how to make all this stuff work and how do you even get started. So that's kind of the subject for today.

And a little story on me. You know, I was a practitioner fresh out of school 25 years ago, really didn't have any idea what was happening, how to get started, how to find the right labs and the right supplements to use, and how is this all going to come together? How do I set up a business? No idea how any of that worked. And I grew up in Berkeley, California. My dad and my mom were liberal, anti-corporate, anti-business people, and the idea that profiting a profit was kind of a bad word in our household. You know, all my friends growing up, their parents were professors at Cal Berkeley, and the idea that money was important and profit was important was, you know, absolutely looked down upon. And so when I found myself in this rather awkward position of running a business, I had no idea how to do it. And in fact, I was in denial about that in a pretty serious way. I didn't have any idea about business planning, financial planning, or any kinds of things like that.

So where where I kind of broke through professionally was in the mentorships. And I'm in my first mentorship with Dr. Bill Timmons, who was one of the pioneers in functional medicine many decades ago, passed away a while ago. And through that process of working with Bill and working with some other teachers over the years, I developed a clinical model, right? And this took a long time to do. And I realized at some point that I would never have developed my clinical model if I hadn't have had that formative experience with Dr. Timmons and with him as a mentor and with someone that could offer me regular support.

And so what I decided to do around the time that he became sick and died was to provide that same kind of mentorship experience, but to do it in an online format. Because I knew from my personal experience that you can't figure this out reading a book. You can't just go to a three-day conference and then understand how to deal with gut problems. You need this regular, ongoing, weekly support of a mentor. And you need to be working within a clinical model that's effective, that's efficient, that's gonna work. You've got to know the labs to order, how to interpret them, the supplements to use, the dosages, the company that you're going to use. And it all has to be handed to you in a format that you can start to execute.

And what I found in my experience, you know, growing up in this industry, was that I had these senior doctors to do this for me. But that in the current environment, you know, 10, 12 years ago, that it was very hard for practitioners to find that relationship. And so I created a mentorship program. So, and in fact, I've been very successful, you know, financially in my own practice. And I've used my practice to support myself and my family and pay for my kid going to college and all that kind of stuff. And then I've been able to teach, you know, almost full-time and practice part-time as a business model, which has really been wonderful.

So when I look around also and I think about problems with current functional medicine training, this is frustrating for me in a lot of different ways. And it was for me, you know, 25 years ago when I was trying to learn this work. Was that there's a lot of good training programs, but they're not integrated with or evolved from a successful practice model. So you learn things that are not necessarily what you can implement, and that are practical, that you can actually do. And so you may learn about glutathione, but you don't know that you should order it from X company and that the dosage should be, you know, three pumps three times a day based on a sulfate marker on a lab, right? And that a lot of the courses that we interact with, they're fine courses, the quality of the information is good, but it's based around academic information, or it's based around either a sales model or some kind of marketing model, or there's something going on there. But it's not based around someone who's actually in practice, that's doing this for real, that's been doing this for a while. And I think that lack of a clear clinical model is absolutely confusing. And the more stuff that you learn without having a container to put it in and organize it with, the more confused you get.

So what ends up happening is practitioners are super well-trained, but they have no idea how to start. And that has been sort of a bottleneck issue for functional medicine as a field. And I find that that's incredibly frustrating because we want practitioners out there doing this work in an active way. And so having a practical system, and this is what my one-year mentorship is about, having a practical system and a turnkey model that you can put into place saves you the first few years of normally frustrating experiences. It gets you your first 50 or 100 or a couple hundred patients under your belt with successful outcomes. You get your confidence up. You realize, hey, I can totally do this.

And I'm going to show you this conversation I just had. This is 11 minutes ago. I got off the phone with this fellow, and this is so exciting to me. So this is Rob Downey, and he took the class last year. And honestly, I lost track of him. He's a medical doctor, he's up in Alaska. And it is Rob. And we just were on the phone for an hour doing a podcast interview. And I lost track of him. I didn't know what happened. And then we have a mutual attorney, Peter Hoffman, fellow who helps both of us with legal stuff. And Peter was like, "Hey, did you hear about Rob? What he's doing? He started this whole amazing functional medicine program at this hospital in Alaska. It's all based on your format in your class, Dan." I was like, "No, I didn't know that."

So anyways, Peter got Rob and I back in touch. And I, I just spoke with Rob for an hour. He's taken the clinical model and training model that I taught him last year and he put it into his hospital in Alaska. And he is changing the world in Alaska. And he's got total buy-in with his whole medical system and he's rocking it with functional medicine. Not just in his own private practice, but in a medical system that when we were working together, he and I working together last year in the training program, he was really sketchy on whether it was gonna work. He just took my model, stuck it in his hospital, and now he's up and running. That is to me like the ultimate and amazing and wonderful thing that can happen to practitioners, to take my courses. And I feel like now Rob's gonna be out there for the next 20 years till he retires, helping thousands of people throughout Alaska, you know, because of the inspiration of being in the course.

So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to, we're, what my mission is really, is to get people like Rob into an action position where they're making changes in their community, they're really changing the healthcare model in a significant way. And if I can do that, you know, a couple times a year, great. We have a very limited number of doctors to take this course, the mentorship, usually 60 or 80 doctors per year. And as many more Robs as we can get out there, that's really kind of what this is all about.

Okay, so again, educational issues. You know, we talked about this for a second already. We're really trying to get you up to speed fast, right? Why go through that three to five year sorting out period and take someone like Rob, who's ready to go in the course, and a year and a half later, he's got a full-on program with a medical assistant integrated into this big hospital system in Alaska. You know, that's what we're really trying to do to cut this time frame down so that you don't get incredibly frustrated. Where we find most people coming in who are classes is in that really, you know, kind of vulnerable place, to be completely honest. Usually people are going through some kind of professional transition, some kind of emotional and spiritual transformation. They're looking for something more from their work, like Rob was, right? Don't just want to be this family practitioner doctor in this Alaska hospital system. He was in love with functional medicine and he wanted to make a big impact on his community and he just didn't know how to get started and how to make that work.

A lot of docs that we work with are exhausted, fed up with their existing work. You might be a medical doctor, or a nurse practitioner, or chiropractor. We have all kinds of acupuncturists running around, a lot of different kinds of practitioners. But they're usually at some point in their career where it's just not really exactly what they want right now. Or they may be starting off new, you know, if you're fresh out of school, it's another group. But most of the practitioners that we work with have been in whatever practice they're in for, you know, 10 or 15 years. That's a little more typical. They know it's, you know, they feel deep down, you know, that this is they could do better, they could do more, and that there's more that they could offer. And they're looking for a fresh start.

And so where we see concerns in, again, that we, I've done polls on this with hundreds of doctors. I've been talking to doctors every week for the last 15 or 20 years. And where everyone is frustrated is with where they're going to get started, how I'm going to get this thing off the ground, where am I going to get my new patients from, how's this whole thing going to come together? And so I want to just talk to a few things. And these are sort of general pieces of advice that I have found to help people a lot over the years in terms of getting started. Even if you don't take my mentorship class and you go out and you do other programs, that is a wonderful thing. I hope you're successful. But I just want to plant some seeds in your brain now, not just as a way to get you to take my training program, but more importantly as a way to get you to start to think through the overall process that you're going through so you have some kind of coherent outcomes at the end of this whole thinking cake, this whole thing. I don't know what I mean by that, by your lifetime or something like that.

So right off the bat, where we see some big problems are choosing the right patients. And what everybody does, everybody does this. It's not unique to you if you're doing this or have done this. Everybody starts with the most difficult patients. Say, look in their practice and they think, "Who are the 10 people if I could never help, I'm going to use functional medicine on these 10 impossible to heal patients." That is not a good idea. That's frustrating. It's especially if you have only been in practice for a couple years. You know, it's like it would be like taking a first-year medical student and having them perform pediatric neurosurgery. Probably not a good idea. You probably wait until they get all the way through medical school and their residency and, you know, they have a little bit more experience under their belt. So you don't want to start with really complicated cases right away.

In fact, one of the most important things I can give is general advice: just start with easy patients. People want to lose weight, maybe they're tired, maybe they're depressed, they have GI problems, some female hormone imbalances. These are things that are easy to solve in a functional medicine context almost all the time. Okay? And I call them the big five: fat, fatigued, depressed, GI, and female hormone issues, because you're so consistently responsive to functional medicine and it doesn't take that long. And you don't have to be, you know, the Michael Jordan of lab interpretation. People to make these programs work, right? They're pretty straightforward programs usually. And then once you've done 50 or 100 patients and you've got some confidence and some basic skills, lab interpretation, supplement program design, and patient communication, and all the kind of key elements of running a practice, then you can expand up to more complicated cases if you want to. You don't have to.

The problem I think we see in functional medicine is when you're looking at the really great functional medicine teachers on stage, they tend to all have incredibly complex practices and work with the sickest, with the sick people. So when you're aspirational leaders, and you know, for me, this was Dr. Timmons. He had a horrible practice in my mind. It was just like the sickest of sick people. He worked with a lot of terminal cancer patients. And there's one time I walked into his clinic, this is a true story, and there were two people sitting in the waiting room, and they both had tumors in their throats that were like the size of grapefruits. And I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if this is really what I want to sign up for. What I want to sign up for it, right?"

And so I think that because most of the leaders in functional medicine have these horrible, complicated practices with horrible, complicated patients, we think that we have to do that. And I, you know, what I find with students in the Kalish Institute is that like we have Kim. She's got a diabetes practice. She loves working with diabetic patients. She can reverse diabetes in months, you know, and she's really good at it. And that's kind of her niche. We have other people that might focus on female hormones, or people that really get into GI workups, or autoimmune problems, you know. But having a focus on a relatively narrow area that it's not incredibly complex, and you're not trying to solve, you know, advanced cognitive decline in your first year of practice, is probably a better idea. And then once you get more experience, then people branch out and start to do a lot of things that are much more stimulating for them, right? But we want to make sure that in the beginning, that you stick with simple cases. You don't want to get frustrated. And also, if you start with really hard patients and it doesn't go well, you're gonna think that this stuff doesn't work. It's frustrating for you as well. And we want to make sure that you're successful, that your first 10 patients get better. So we want to lower your degree of difficulty and make sure that you are not stressed. Because if you're working above your skill level with really complicated patients, you're gonna get stressed and you spend hours and hours researching every case, and you're gonna burn out. The model just won't work that well, okay? It's really about maintaining your health as much as anything else. And it's frustrating if the first 10 of your patients all get worse under your care. You might just get frustrated and give up. We don't want to have that happen.

And so another key aspect, I think, in addition to, you know, being focused and thoughtful about the first year or two of patients that you work with, is to think through what we really mean by a systems-oriented approach. And this, I find, is pretty tricky. So in the Kalish method mentorship, I've been teaching this work for almost 20 years. I have a very simple system. Doctors love it because it takes this mass of information. So in functional medicine, insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress can cause anything. You could have arthritis, or diabetes, or cancer, or toenail fungus because of insulin resistance, oxidative stress, or inflammation. You could have depression because your gut is inflamed. You could have gut inflammation because your mother-in-law is visiting and you're stressed. You could have stress hormone problems because of a toxin, right? Everything causes everything, and it's very, very confusing to operate a model where everything causes everything.

And so one of the things that I think is very helpful for the first couple years of having a practice is to have a really simple model. And I teach this one model, and I'm very open to people modifying it as it suits you. The point of the next couple of slides is just that you need a model, not that you need to use my model, okay? And so I want to show you the example. And this is what we do in the mentorship. Is we do three tests: salivary hormones, GI microbiome, and organic acids. Boom, boom, boom. That covers so many things, right? Three basic tests. It's just like if you see a regular doctor for your yearly annual checkup, they run a blood chemistry and a CBC or whatever. They might do a physical exam. There's like a regular series of labs that are done. So in the model that I teach, we have this regular series of labs that people do. So you're not trying to come up with an entirely new clinical model for every patient. You have a clear clinical model based on these three body systems. And I'll show you again the rationale behind this. You're welcome to use this. A lot of practitioners use this for the first few months, and then once they're kind of figuring out what they want their model to be, they may adjust, you know. But the basic concept here is that we have a description of why people get sick, a description of how they get better, and a description of what labs should be ordered. And that it all is sort of unified together in a way that makes sense.

So starting off with a major event, a death in the family, a divorce, childbirth, overwork, there's some sort of major stressor. This is the beginning of the model, right? A major stressor that causes a neuroendocrine system breakdown. You've got stress hormones surging, and the brain chemistry is not doing well. Lots of things are taking a hit. My mitochondria have fallen apart, my thyroids not doing that great. And eventually, if there's enough stress, that gut lining just gets chewed up from catabolic physiology, and you start to pick up GI bugs or food intolerances, or your gut gets leaky. That goes on for long enough, and then toxins can build up. So this three body systems: neuroendocrine, GI, and detox, shows people like, "Why am I sick? Like, why do I have all this fatigue?" Well, we believe that stress triggers a failure of these different body systems, the neuroendocrine, and the GI, and the detox. And so the nice thing about the model that I like a lot is that we correct the problems in the order in which they occurred. So we have a test for neuroendocrine, have a test for the GI, and we have tests for G for detox. So salivary hormones, GI microbiome testing, and organic acids covers all of this, and it makes sense in a nice, neat model.

And then when you're getting to the treatment side, then you're starting to think about, well, you're going to treat these things in the order in which they occurred. We're going to work with your neuroendocrine system. As that starts to function competently, we're going to clear up all your gut problems. And towards the end of this program, we'll run in the detox protocols that you may need. So you have an explanation about how people get sick, why they get sick, how you want to test them, and why you want to test them. And then how you're going to work in terms of sequencing the treatments so that you're not doing an aggressive detox program on somebody who's got a major gut problem because that makes people really sick. And you're not, you know, just working on and not addressing all the stressors in their life and all the lifestyle factors. And 80% of this, as you know, is lifestyle driven. So we're kind of baking into this model lab testing, lifestyle, and then a way to explain this to patients.

And here's another blow-up, a little more detail on a body systems model. So you can see how I break it down. And again, like a lot of people might substitute thyroid for adrenals, so you don't have to use this exact model. The idea is that you have a model. And the different kinds of treatments that we review in depth in the mentorship program look at the neuroendocrine system. So we do a lot of adrenal programs using DHEA and pregnenolone and whatnot. That's what we did the Mayo Clinic study around. We use neurotransmitter support based on organic acids. A ton of work around mitochondria based on organic acids, really fix those energy production pathway problems. And then hormone issues, female hormone issues if they're there. And then on a GI side, what do we do? When we look for pathogens, get the food figured out, fix the microbiome, and repair any leaky gut issues. With detox system, again, that's done with organic acids. We're looking at detox pathways, oxidative stress, methylation. Are they inflamed? Do we need to replace some nutrients? And so you're going through a program design process that's you're picking out these things so that once you've got the labs back, and this is, I don't know if you guys remember Garanimals, but you know, when you're kind of mixing and matching things for kids' clothes or whatever. So you get an adrenal program and a GI pathogen, and they have an oxidative stress problem. So you do an adrenal program and a pathogen program and an oxidative stress program. You've got a test for each thing. You find all these things. You might have somebody with mitochondrial and energy issues, so you fix their mitochondria, work on their leaky gut, and then replace a bunch of missing nutrients that you see on the labs.

So pretty much every program that I run in my clinic and have done for almost 20 years, probably 16, 18 years, is on this one slide here. Just about every thing that I do is here. And it's very rare that you need to go outside of these basic things if you're doing this along with a lifestyle. People are gonna get better. And then also have some treatment timelines. This is one of the more frustrating things usually in the beginning for practitioners. Is they're just not sure how long things are going to take. And when they're designing programs, it gets a little haphazard. And I see a couple of really common mistakes. Because a large number of my patients have already seen a functional medicine doctor, probably half of the new patients that I get in my telemedicine practice have already seen at least one functional medicine doctor. So I get to see all the programs, right? And this probably happened to me twice earlier today. And my pet peeves on what people are doing wrong is that people order, sometimes they order the right labs. Even this just happened. I had a patient, she's from Glasgow. She had the Dutch test for hormones, she had a GI Effects test for her microbiome, and she had a new travell. She had all the right testing done, but the doctor didn't know how to interpret it and put it together. And so the programs, and I see this all the time, it just drives me crazy. The programs were too many supplements, like 20 of them, and none of them were at a therapeutic dose. That's just not gonna work. You know, if you have an ammonia detox problem like this woman did, and you give her 500 milligrams of arginine in the morning and 500 milligrams of arginine at night, that is never gonna help anybody ever. It's just massively underdosed. You need three grams or six grams or nine grams of arginine to get a therapeutic effect, not one gram divided it up. So often times practitioners set up programs and they have the right intent, but they're just massively underdosing people because they don't know what they're doing. They're like looking at the lab report and thinking that the lab recommendations are right. The lab recommendations are done by the lab company, they're not practitioners. They're just putting something on the page there that, and they don't want to get sued, so they make the dosages ridiculously low and they won't ever do anything. So that's one of my main issues now is too many supplements combined with ineffective programs because they're too weak. And then the other is that they're just not sequenced right. So we'll see people doing a liver detox program first, which is against all the rules of sanity once you've been doing this for a while. Or even worse, they'll go after a GI pathogen right away. It just always ends badly. So you have to sequence things for, you know, in the right order, get the lifestyle changes going, and then put these programs in an order in which the patient is going to be ready to receive what you're doing, okay? So sequencing is very important. Treatment timelines, dosages, and all of these things kind of add up together to really make a program work. And so this is what we're teaching basically in the mentorship. And I'll show you a little bit about the format and how all this works.

Oh, and here's some fun facts for you. 78% of our practitioners apply the Kalish method in their practice in the first couple of months of the class. That's our goal. It's an action-oriented group of people. It's very community-based and very supportive, but a little competitive in that, you know, if you're three months into the class and you haven't submitted any labs yet, you know, you're gonna feel like you're a little behind. So it's again, it's a supportive community environment, but there's a little bit of pressure because everyone else is testing and getting people better. A little bit of pressure on you perhaps to get you motivated so that you, you know, get out there and run a bunch of labs.

And I'll show you. I can just show you what we did this morning, or no, what is it, a couple days ago on Tuesday morning. I might show you here. Here's a typical class. Yeah, this is from a couple days ago. And so the way that the curriculum is set up, we have a year of lectures that are laid out that you listen to online. And then every week, we meet in a small group and people present cases and they ask questions. So here's Stephanie is asking about adrenal labs and what does this mean. And let's see. And Kelly's asking, what's the treatment for Rendall I Mason Anna? And that's great. I love it when people ask questions and we get things going that way. And then people submit labs. And I'll show you here. Anna submitted a lab here. Her, there's a page, 50-year-old, a 60-year-old nanny, house cleaners, allergies. And we review the adrenal panel, right? And we've set up some protocols. I remember this one from Tuesday. So we're gonna bring this cortisol level up, some supplements to do that, bring that one down, figure out how you get that one down here, get some DHEA into this person, the right dosages, pregnenolone. So we literally give you protocols for exactly how to do this. So there's no mystery in all this. And you know exactly what to do, what company to buy it from, kind of many different supplement companies you can work with, lab company you want to work with, and get people off and running.

Then Anna also submitted a GI MAP test on her patient. So we looked at that, a whole bunch of commensal bacteria that are high, some dysbiotic bacteria we had to fix. And then sometimes the students will submit a protocol, sometimes not, you know, sometimes I'll just develop the protocol in class. Monserrat, another one of the doctors, got a 65-year-old social worker's patient, fatigue, dizziness, insomnia. Again, she's submitted a Dutch test for the adrenals. Forget it, figure out program for that, some other labs in here as well. And though we spend an hour every week where you're submitting your labs and we're going over them. You can see this was a pretty active group. The labs, CVS, Jason submitted a lab. Oh, this was a good one. So this was cool one. So this was a patient, let's see, top three complaints, some improvements are a little too. Let's see where do you have it here? Oh, here she is. I feel she's finally on the right track. Main issues at this point of signs of estrogen dominance. She had been on this adrenal program and her fatigue was all but gone and better. But then he just submitted a more advanced lab and wanted to know, you know, what he was going to do about that. Again, more GI testing, their GI testing. Here's another adrenal lab. That's the person with insomnia. We talked about. So we go through, if you, if you stick around for the whole year, you'll go through like two, 300 cases minimum, just live in the calls alone. And of course, then we also review all the cases that you submit as well.

Alright, here's another one that's submitted there organic profile. Let's see, who is this? I think this is still Jason. Yeah, this is still Jason's case. So he submitted a whole bunch of labs. Let me just go over him and tell him what to do. And, you know, half the time the students already know what to do. They're just looking for, you know, verification from me. Let's see, this person, this is their organic acids. Oh, yeah, this is easy. Look at this. You could have figured this out. Easy, massive problem with norepinephrine and epinephrine and an inflamed brain. Okay, pretty straightforward. I'm gonna fix their gut, get them on a whole bunch of tyrosine. And again, a lot of times the docs will submit a program. So here's Jason's program. He put together magnesium, potassium, EPA, you know, we just go over it in class and make sure that it makes sense. DHEA, pregnenolone for the adrenals and so on. Okay, so we're reviewing cases.

Is another one. Kelly submitted. Private chef, female, 47-year-old. Questions from Genova, what should I do based on this phase therapy? She didn't know what phase therapy meant. I was like, okay, just use, you know, pro-bio phase type supplements. It's pretty straightforward. Went over the adrenal lab, looked at the gut problem, enter a, enter oh, her hemorrhagic E. coli, you know, and just review lab after lab, case after case. So that. And here's Kelly's program. She put together. I'm just kind of signing off on it. She had another lab. And so on. You get the idea, right? So there's an hour a week of just case review. There's tons of lectures. There's a community where you can interact with people. And the goal here is to get you guys testing patients.

In the very beginning, in general, in terms of the cost, it's a little bit expensive. It costs a fortune to run these things. I don't even take a salary at this point. Kind of volunteering my time. I make all my money from my private practice. And what we were, our hope is, as we run these programs and I teach all this stuff, is that you're gonna be able to repay the course fee within the first four to six patients that you do a workup on. So hopefully before the class is over, if you're active and involved, you've already paid for the course. Typical patient cases, usually the income on your side is some around $3,000 per case. So six cases into this should have around $18,000 of income that's come in, which should pay for the class. So we're not working with people who are incredibly wealthy. I know the class is expensive, but it's a very high-touch course. I'm involved in it every day. I have a lot of staff. My staff get health insurance, retirement, which cost a fortune, and, you know, sick days and all that kind of stuff. So brilliant, all the money, tuition money, basically goes, probably 85% of it goes to paying the staff that run this thing. Okay? Most of our students, and this is my goal, you know, are gonna pay for it before it's actually over.

So the live view, live Q&A sessions, I just showed you a little touch about what that's like with lab review and program design. This massive curriculum that I've been building. We're working with Dr. Lord every week now. So every week, there's new information coming into the curriculum on more advanced lab interpretation, focusing a lot on the microbiome and organic acids, as well as the usual adrenal hormone things that we do. You also are thrown into this group, and I find this is one of the more helpful things for people. Then you're gonna have, you know, a community, a sense of support, which is very hard to do this in an isolated way, okay? And we're really kind of trying to focus on that.

So let me grab Claudia. Had a question. Let me just grab Claudia and we'll talk a little bit more about this. Claudia, are you there? I guess I'm here. Alright, you had a question about all the different classes. Yeah, I had a question, um, because I was interested in in both of your courses, the mentorship, yes, for more clinical practical kind of guidance, but I was also interested in your practice management course. Oh, but I was wondering, I mean, it seems that you're, it seems that your mentorship course also teaches the practice implementation part. So I was wondering if, you know, if you're getting the same information in that in the mentorship course that you would if you did, you know, the practice implementation course.

Yeah, this is a really good observation. So what I right to do with the mentorship is put all the clinical stuff. So we really do review labs every week. You learn how to interpret labs and exactly what supplements to give, right? But at the same time, I'm trying to teach the business model that's integrated into that. So we're trying to do it simultaneously. So you get everything that I use to run my clinic is part of the mentorship. Every piece of paper, every four maybe questionnaire, every frequently asked question thing, every script, every follow-up thing that we do, is all in the mentorship program, okay? And so it's kind of a, it's kind of both. It really is the business model and a clinical model simultaneously because I don't see them as being different. In my mind, you can't have the one without the other, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. Now, separately, there we do offer some other classes, but the bulk of the practitioners that take the mentorship are up and running in a clinic based on that. Mostly the other classes that we teach are kind of lead-ins to the mentorship. And then when you're in their mentorship program, I'm going to be working with you one-on-one directly every week. We're talking on the phone, right? In the groups. And if there are things that you need, let me think of something that's come up. Like Lars is always asking me questions. Whether Lars asked, oh, yeah, like you might just wonder, well, this guy's in Germany, it's not the best example, but you know, he's like, you know, I'm in Germany, how am I gonna get this and that supplement? And so I connected him with one of the supplement companies that has these distribution programs in Germany. Or we might get a doctor who's in St. Louis and she's like, "Do you have anyone else in St. Louis? I wouldn't mind being able to talk to someone who's local." And we'll try to connect them. So there's a lot of interactive stuff that's business-oriented that happens in the mentorship because we're, we're basically trying to make sure they have a successful practice. And I know that a lot of that revolves around Asians with supplement companies, business decisions about signing leases, how are you going to distribute supplements, you're gonna use Fullscript, you're gonna use ManageX, you know, all these kinds of things. In my mind, you know, are part of the implementation. So that kind of naturally comes out basically throughout the course. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Yeah. You bet.

Okay, now what's happening coming up for those of you that are interested is that if you enroll by August 15th, I guess that's a month or two from now, a month and a half from now, you can get a thousand dollar discount on the one-year mentorship if you use this code. Tried to make it easy to remember. AFMCP. If for some reason you forget this, we can send it to you again. And let me see. Oh, wait. Hang on. This thing. We got a question from Christopher. Let me grab him. Christopher, you there? Kress, you there? Yeah. Okay, you had a question about are you just starting your practice now? Yeah. Yes, I'm actually RDoc did sports med fellowship and then did the IFM fellowship the last few years. It's good. Was it for my exam in November? Just preserved, you know, I just had the case report off. So, so yeah, I just launched about three weeks ago, strictly telemedicine for the time being. Well, I will have an office space eventually, but there was some delays with, as it's a new construction. Yeah. So yeah, just trying to see, you know, poor obviously, like you said, I'm one of those people you described in the career transition phase, going from ER and sports to to functional medicine and private practice setting. So an F1 would, you know, you would highlight or verse the other, you know? Yeah, you're like my perfect mentorship person. Okay. Yeah, because you already have, you know, the rapport with even working with patients for a long time. Yeah, that part is not gonna be like hard. And you're just looking for a business model, clinical model that you can start now. Plus, the other thing that's really important for the mentorship is that you gotta be, you have to have a passion for functional medicine and really want to do it to be in the mentorship. The only failures that I've seen in the mentorship are people that just didn't really want to do functional medicine for real, you know, and so they get to the end of the year and they're not doing functional medicine. I'm like, "Well, what happened?" They're like, "Well, I don't know. I just kind of went back to my hospitalist job or whatever." Because it didn't have the passion and interest in really wanting to start a practice. That seems to be the main glitch. So if you're already there and you're kind of, well, you're three weeks into this, right? Yeah. You probably should have taken this class like, you know, three to six months ago. But you just jump right in. One of the things that we do for everybody is when you sign up, the day you sign up for the mentorship, you get access to the entire year-long curriculum. Okay? And I've had many doctors in the last month because of COVID, I think, who have gone through, they just blown through the whole year-long curriculum in like a couple of weeks because I've never ever seen before because most of us in the old days, everyone had a job, right? They're kind of fit this in between work. But some of these folks are not working right now. And so you can absolutely jump right into the mentorship, go through kind of like a speed learning thing to get to catch yourself up. And then we can do a private call. I talk to everyone personally, one-on-one, but right when you start the class, and kind of gets you oriented to the materials so that you can start, since you're gonna need, you're gonna be wanting to implement these like immediately, right? And it's much easier to get off on the right foot and to keep a simple, clear model like I was trying to describe. Well, you're like, "Okay, I can just get away with these three tests." I'm like, "You know, pretty much start with these three tests." You know, this get you an account with one of the supplement companies. Here's the 50 supplements you need, you know, from that company. It's not really more than 40 or 50 you need in the beginning. And get that whole infrastructure built out for you pretty fast so you can be up and running. Yeah.

With Christopher, also kind of run through the, I guess some best practices it relates to, you know, practice growth and, you know, marketing aspects, things of that nature. Do you discuss any of that stuff as well? Well, yeah, so you can, we do have a business class which is purely about sales, marketing, business planning, financial planning, and that kind of stuff. And we're starting that, I think it's, it's our bootcamp, we're starting that in July. It's like a thousand bucks and it's just kind of like a crash course in business stuff. But you can just ask those questions during the mentorship calls and just say, "Hey, you know, you know, so we review one of the cases like I just showed you, and then Kelly's done with her case, and then you just raise your hand in class and say, 'Hey, you know, what do you think about marketing plans?'" And then I'll just like give, and it's helpful for the whole group. I'll give you whatever amount of time you need to get you oriented on best practices for marketing, how you can get started, resources. We have a ton of stuff over all these years. I've developed PowerPoint slideshows, general strategies for YouTube and Facebook and all that. Costa. And so that can become like part of the class discussion and the weekly calls. And then the cool thing about that, the cool thing about that is like, like I know everything, you know. So like what will happen is obviously my level of knowledge will, and then Sarah will raise her hand and say, "Get on the line and she'll say, well, you know what I'm using now, Chris, is this bloody boss software, and I just got this, and happened in my web designer just did this." So it's this collaborative environment, right? Where everyone's sharing the stuff that they're doing that's working. What about you? Yeah. Yeah, this really works. I mean, that's the hard thing to explain is that, especially when people are new to me and new to this whole process, is that, um, you really build practices. It's not.

Like some fake out thing. And what maybe one of the things that helps a lot if people are seriously interested in signing up for the year. So we usually try to connect you with a doctor who's either in your area or has your same specialty focus or something. Someone like Rob that I just showed you who's, you know, a couple years past this, who can just give you a reality check and what the class is really like, you know, and what their experience was. Because it's hard for me to even be credible sometimes in explaining all this because I obviously have a self-interest in it or whatever, you know.

But, um, there's a reality to what we do. And when I walk around the IFM conferences, or when I used to walk around the IFM conferences, every conference I go to, there's maybe four or five students that took this program that will come up and say, "Wow, you know, I have a successful practice now." That's the goal, you know. That's kind of our ultimate goal. It's kind of how I judge myself in terms of success. Any other questions, Chris? Is that good? Yeah.

No, I appreciate it. Sounds like it's pretty, pretty all-encompassing, which, which is key. Yeah, like you said, the community aspect, I'm sure, pays dividends and getting the different perspectives that folks that are within the class. Yeah, the isolation of functional medicine practices is one of the biggest pitfalls, you know. It's really nice to have a group of people you can bounce your ideas off. And as I was saying, when when people submit, like Kelly submitted those protocols in class on Tuesday, she knows that stuff. She's already done like ten or twenty of them. She was just submitting it because she just wanted to make sure that everyone, including myself, was like, "Yeah, that looks right." And there's something, um, I think really nerve-wracking in your first couple years of practice when you design a beautiful protocol and you really like, "Is this gonna work? You know, I'm not really sure it's gonna get this person better." And having other colleagues and peers look at it and go, "Yeah, makes a huge difference." Or maybe they say, "Well, why don't you use a different kind of magnesium because I think this other brand works better." You know. So it's not just emotional support, but it's also, you know, kind of constructive feedback on making things better for everybody. Sure. Okay. All right. Thanks, guys.

And then they see me wrap up. I, you know, you guys got to go in a minute here, but, um, there we go. Okay. So you get a grand off if you sign up in the next month or so. Use the AFM CP code. We talk a lot about the immune community already. And there's contact information here. You can get in touch with us through info at cato institute dot com. Which just go the website. And then we also have, if you're not ready to do the mentorship, totally get that. Takes most people, you know, months and months, but after they learn about us before they want to sign up. So we have a Kalish method 101 class, which is a really simple introductory class. I think it's like $99, but it gives you a really good understanding about the clinical approach and the clinical model. So you can get that with this link here. Kalish institute dot com backslash 101. And if you're kind of on the fan series, just thinking about it, maybe next year, whatever, then this is kind of a helpful thing. Oh, we don't have time to look at case studies. Think we ran that time. I was talking too much here, but, um, what was it? One other thing I was going to mention before we wrap up. Well, we have like four or five minutes. Let me just show you guys a really quick case study. What the heck? Why don't we use one of the ones from this morning? Let's use Jason. Jason is, I think he had all three labs in his. Yeah. I just want you to see how a case can roll out. Yeah. Okay. So I'm gonna just shortcut this cuz I remember from this morning. So this is Jason's patient. Fatigue, sleep problems, and have a low-level hormone issue, but mostly sleep and fatigue problems. Okay. So in here's the different labs. He did a Saliva, aged members, three labs, Saliva, renal and GI microbiome and organic acids. And on this particular patient, he did his cortisol rhythm test. You can see the very high cortisol at night. How hard is that? You give Foss serene, lowers that high cortisol at night. This woman started sleeping within a couple months. This was a follow-up presentation because he was asking some questions about other details on the test. And then on a portion of the test, let me sorry, I'm gonna go, they're out of order here. Here's the GI part. Was a GI map. People also do a lot of GI effects tests in the class from Genova. That was really popular. And then this patient had nothing on that page. I think this was a dysbiosis case. Yeah. So a whole bunch of dysbiotic bacteria that he had lemonade 'add. Again, he was resubmitting this, someone. So he'd already done that. So she's better with the gut, better with the adrenals, sleeping well, and the fatigue is gone. And he wanted to just get some insight on the organic acids test. Oops, going the wrong way here. And this is one of the harder tests to, you know, digest and incorporate to your practice. So it's an organic acids from Genova. Also very similar to the Nutri-Eval live. You've probably done Nutri-Eval's. I'm almost identical. And so we're looking at fat burning, car burning, energy production. Not much going on there, to be honest. I'll skim through there. Looking at the B vitamin markers, a little bit with B6. And then, in voila, we hit. Oh gosh, this is her next problem. We're gonna have to fix, man, oh man. Delayed is low. That's epinephrine and norepinephrine being low. And she's got two of the three inflammatory. I know. I'm sorry, she's got a serotonin marker that's quite high. And then a canary name marker that's quite high. That shows there some inflammation going on in the brain. Okay. So we want to fix the neurotransmitters, get the inflammation down, and take care of the brain related problem that was an issue. And see, is one more portion of the test? Is just see cuz I can't remember. She didn't have any detox problems. And a little bit going on with the gut still, primarily a fungal or yeast overgrowth. Okay. So adrenal programs rolling along. The gut tests, we did Jason's already got those things corrected. Now we're gonna kind of do a deep dive into getting her neuro chemistry balanced out. And that makes a huge difference. Let me. She'll be a super happy. She thinks she's happy now. You get her epinephrine and norepinephrine up and you get her information and the brain down. Got a super happy patient. And again, you know, sometimes practitioners, practitioners will submit a program. Here's his program. Sometimes, you know, we'll do it together as part of the class. And that's kind of, you know, in a nutshell, how it all works.

Okay. So if you guys are interested, please check out the website. Contact us. You can sign up for the Kalish method 101 if you're curious. We'll be sending out an email. I'm sure it. I just remind you about that. It's $99 if you just want to kind of see what we're doing, how all that works. And then if you're more curious about the mentorship, you can talk with the staff. You can set up a phone call with myself and we can talk specifically about your practice and what your needs are. And if it's appropriate, get you sign up. And the last thought I'll end on here is that, you know, there's a huge push to telemedicine now. And we're adapting to that. And we have done quite quickly. So we're well first. So I did our free telemedicine course. And we have all that recorded. If you're ending up signing up for any of these other classes, we can get you access to the free telemedicine classes. Tons of information there. Telemedicine. And more importantly, we're just incorporating the whole concept of telemedicine into the mentorship. So you can do salivary, no stool testing, and the organic acids, urine sample. People can do all the samples at at home. They don't have to get their blood drawn. You can talk to them on the phone and guide them through a whole functional medicine program on the phone, basically with telehealth or telemedicine. So for the next year or so, we're probably all stuck to a certain degree, certain amount of the time, doing telemedicine. And the training program lends itself to that. I personally have had my own telemedicine practice for over 15 years. Salivary hormones, you know, microbiome testing, in urinary organic acids, that's really been, you know, my brand and butter in my practice for a long time. Without the blood draws, it's pretty easy for people to do everything, even in a COVID environment like we are right now. Okay. I'm gonna wrap it up for tonight. But I hope you guys are doing well. And I will just see some of you in class. To just get in touch if you have questions. All right. Have a good night, everyone. Oh, and Nita had a question. Hearing say before I hang up here. And you know, did you have a question there? I saw your and go up. But no. Okay. I I think we're good. Okay. Take care, everyone. Bye for now.