The Evolution of Medicine podcast is back – weekly, longer-form, and laser-focused on giving practitioners the news, tools, and frameworks to reverse chronic disease at scale. In this premiere of “season two,” host James Maskell introduces the big idea shaping the next chapter: solving “network insufficiency” at three levels – inside the body, across communities, and through a nationwide network of high-functioning practices.
Borrowing from Dr. Dale Bredesen’s framing of Alzheimer’s as a “network insufficiency,” James maps the concept onto the functional medicine matrix (clinical networks), the social fabric that shapes health (community networks), and the operational capacity of clinics themselves (practice networks). It’s a unifying lens—and a rallying cry for the next five years to build the capacity required to bend the chronic disease curve.
Along the way, you’ll meet this season’s mission partners – Fullscript, TruNeura, Freedom Practice Coaching, and Big Boost Marketing – each spotlighted for the role they play in turning “network insufficiency” into “network sufficiency,” from streamlined labs and cognitive-care platforms to scalable operations and patient pre-education.
🎙️ Tune in to learn:
- What “network insufficiency” means clinically (via the functional medicine matrix), socially (community and group visits), and operationally (clinic capacity)—and why solving it is the master key to reversing chronic disease.
- Why this really is “the moment”: the podcast shifts to a weekly, studio-based format to track pivotal ideas, tools, and policy conversations shaping the movement.
- A practical playbook for capacity building:
- Fullscript’s evolution toward turnkey lab logistics so any clinic can offer “Function-Health-style” testing.
- TruNeura’s clinical implementation platform and why precision medicine for cognitive decline is poised to scale.
- Freedom Practice Coaching’s Scalability Assessment and how to use it to grow from one provider to ten.
- Big Boost Marketing’s education-first marketing to generate qualified discovery calls at the lowest possible cost.
- How broader public-health debates – and a widely discussed HHS-hosted conversation—signal a cultural inflection point for our field.
If you’re committed to systems-level change in integrative and functional medicine, this kickoff episode sets the agenda for the year – and equips you to start building true network sufficiency in your clinic and community.
👉 Listen now or wherever you get your podcasts.
James Maskell:
The next five years will determine whether we can build the capacity to reverse chronic disease at scale. This is what makes up your network sufficiency. And if that network breaks down, then you get chronic disease, and that’s why you don’t live to 100 I just want to address sort of an elephant in the room, that this is an extremely unlikely situation, right? The mandate of Health and Human Services, one of the mandates is to popularize vaccination, Building Network sufficiency, clinically, inside the body, build a community, and building a network of practices that can reverse chronic disease.
And that is what we’re all about. This is it? This is the moment. This is the moment. Hello and welcome to the new evolution of medicine podcast. In history, you probably have watched or listened to the evolution of medicine podcast. You have also maybe watched the functional forum. From now on, it’s the same thing. We are going to be bringing you a show every week, and we’re going to be diving into the most important news, information, tools and resources to facilitate this healthcare evolution that we’re all involved with. I’m super excited, because this is really the first episode of what I’m calling season two. If you’ve been with us along the way, you know that we’ve had the functional forum. We’ve done a show the first Monday of every month. For over 11 years, we’ve done over 300 episodes of the podcast, but now it is time to take everything up at least one notch, and that looks like doing this show every week.
We’re going to be doing longer sessions. I’m here in my studio at home. I’ve spent the last weekend putting together a studio so I can have guests here, and we could do extended, long form content with innovators, agitators, people on the cutting edge of the evolution of medicine. So there’s lots to look forward to, and we’re going to get right into it today. Later on, I’m going to be sharing with you some of the segments that we’re going to be doing. Also, I’m going to introduce you to the mission partners. We don’t have sponsors on the show, we have mission partners, because ultimately, it’s going to take a village to facilitate the transformation that we are all about. So let’s jump into it first and foremost, and we’re going to talk first. Typically, we’re going to do the news as the first section. But this time, I want to take a little bit of time just to lay out what is the plan and where does it all come from?
And I want to start today by talking about something that has captured my attention for the last month, and it’s two words, and I really think it speaks to the mission that we’ve been on here at the evolution of medicine all the way along, and I think it speaks to what we’re all about. And these two words were quoted to me for the first time at a recent conference, the integrative medicine for mental health conference, and the person who shared those words was Dr Dale Bredesen. Dr Bredesen is someone that I’ve known for a long time. If you go back into the records, you know that in 2017 there was an Institute for Functional medicine’s annual International Conference, and Dale Bredesen was one of the keynotes. And it’s really where he connected with the functional medicine community and showcased his ideas that cognitive decline could be prevented, and so he talked about Alzheimer’s being a network insufficiency.
And I really think that’s a very, very important word, and what I want to do right now is share all the different ways in which I feel like we are all working on network insufficiency. So let’s start at the clinical level. What was he talking about when he said, Alzheimer’s is a network insufficiency? Well, ultimately, whether it be the networks in the brain or the networks in the body that end up causing dysfunction in the brain, clinically, we are dealing with a network insufficiency. What does that mean? Well, for those of you who are trained in functional medicine, this should be very familiar. So let’s start at the beginning, and let’s talk about the functional medicine matrix. If you know, the reason why it was called the functional forum is because the first time I saw the functional medicine matrix, I realized that this could be a common language for groups of practitioners and a network of clinics to be unified around, and ultimately, we’ve talked about that.
That’s why we had a partnership with the Institute for Functional Medicine over all these years. But if you look at the functional medicine matrix, what you see is the key thing that separates functional medicine from lifestyle medicine. If you look at the functional medicine matrix, you’ll see lifestyle medicine. At the bottom, you’ll see the foundational elements of lifestyle that have to be there to bring the body back to health. However, it’s the seven segments of the matrix. The functional medicine matrix was created to help practitioners think about organizing the patient’s clinical imbalances. And you can see here there are seven different pieces to that, assimilation, structural integrity, communication, transport, elimination and biotransformation, energy and defense and repair. Now, if you think about that, almost all of them are networks, right? What is the structural integrity network? It is the nervous system. It’s the spine. It’s the way that the body communicates in that way.
What are the communication network? Is the way the. The body communicates. Think about the endocrine system and hormone transport. Think about defense and repair. That’s the network of organs and systems, the immune system and the gut, that keep us healthy and keep our defense to the environment around us. So you can see, if you’re trained in functional medicine, you’re already in the understanding that this is network insufficiency, and that’s why Dale Bredesen is talking about those two words, because Alzheimer’s comes not just from the network insufficiency inside the brain, but as the systems of the body break down. What is the end result? It could be Alzheimer’s and dementia in other patients. It could be all kinds of other things. And over the last 11 years, we’ve looked at all the different chronic diseases through the lens of functional medicine to see as the networks start to degrade, as function goes down, then you get symptoms coming.
So you should also be very familiar with this. But there’s another level of network insufficiency that we’ve also been very, very focused on over the last 11 years. As you know, I wrote the book The Community cure, and that was really talking about the network insufficiency of community that creates and leads to chronic disease. And again, I want to just show this tool, because this was a graphic that I saw recently at an event, which was a pitch by the blue zone organization to come in to a city that’s just down the road from me, Eldorado hills, and they were given the pitch, and they were talking about your life radius. And ultimately, in the book, I made the assertion that loneliness is a key driver of all cause mortality. Where did that come from? So in 2015 there was the, you know, the Institute for Functional medicine’s annual conference, and they talked about human social genomics, how social stress is a bigger driver of all cause mortality.
And so let’s talk about in the Blue Zones, what are they doing? They’re rebuilding community. That’s the plan of the Blue Zones, because they saw that in the six blue zones that exist, the one thing that is in common with all of them is community. So as we look at this, what they call the life radius, you see that on an individual level, there’s a pledge to be healthy, right? There’s a pledge to participate in your own health. In Okinawa, Japan, Moai talks to that, talks about the five people that you grow up with, that you’re friends with for your whole life purpose as an important part of the life radius. And so that’s all sort of to the individual. But if you look at the community, think about the grocery store stores, the work sites, the restaurants, the schools, the faith based communities. This is what makes up your network sufficiency.
And if that network breaks down, then you get chronic disease, and that’s why you don’t live to 100 and in America, particularly, all of this over the last 100 years has sort of degraded, and that’s why we find ourselves to a point where we have network insufficiency at the social level. And that’s why we’ve looked at things like group visits. We spent a lot of time talking about group visits, because I believe that the place where community can be most obviously brought back is in the medical system. Because this is where people, lonely people, end up in the medical system. And bringing back community is a big part of how we address this network insufficiency. So you can see at the two levels, there’s the clinical level, sort of inside the body, and then there’s also the psychosocial level.
We are in the business of dealing with network insufficiency. And that brings us to the third use of the word network insufficiency, that and then there’s many more that we’ll get to over the time. You know what we’ve really been doing here at the evolution of medicine is to build the network build network sufficiency as it relates to having a functional medicine doctor in every town, in every village, and one of the things I’m most proud of through the functional forum, whether it was at the very beginning making it easy for doctors to learn about functional medicine because it was free online, whether we built communities of functional medicine practitioners to Make it easy for practitioners to see that other people were doing this, and this was the future of medicine, and not just some wacky idea. Then it looked at things like the practice accelerator and all the things we did through the evolution of medicine to make it easy for doctors to quit their job, start a micro practice with the minimum possible amount of capital, and get on with building the practice the future.
All of that was, you know, looking to build network sufficiency with regard to practices that could bring back network in the human body. So you see, it’s a meta concept, because there’s three levels at least, and there are more levels, but we’re just going to get that into today. So this is what the next stage of the evolution of medicine is all about. And this is why I’m excited to start with Episode One, to just share that. And if you’re a practitioner, if you’ve built your own practice, if you’re sitting on the sidelines and you’re still waiting to start a practice where you can reverse chronic disease, now is the time, and we’ll talk about over the next few episodes. Why this is the time, some of the things that are happening culturally, why this is a perfect time to get started. And we’re also going to make it easy for you to find the resource partners, so that you can go out and do this effectively, because we’ve learned so much in the last 11 years.
And then I would say, you know, the key thing, if you if you already have a practice, we want to talk a lot about scalability and how you can go from one doctor to five doctors to 10 doctors. You know, it’s a lot easier for one clinic to go to 10 doctors and see, you know, 200 new patients a month than it is to just start 1000 more practices. And if you’re out there and you’re you’ve already built a successful practice, we’re going to be bringing resources to you along the way. So this is sort of like who we are and what we do. We’ve talked about network sufficiency from all these different levels, and now we’re going to get into talking about where to go from here. Now ultimately, we’re super excited to have alongside us some of the same mission partners that have been here since the beginning, and those partners I’m going to share with you. I’m going to get into some of the details as we go through this session and through the content, are organizations that you’re probably very familiar with if you’ve been following so Fullscript is coming back on to be a mission partner, and Fullscript, over the last 15 years, has become a massive powerhouse, initially organizing the logistics as it relates to supplements, but very soon, organizing logistics as it pertains to lab testing.
And this is perfect timing too, because the number of organizations that are offering lab testing to people in your community is going up exponentially. You know about function health, but now you probably know that like whoop and aura and all of these other consumer facing technologies are all getting into the lab business. And I’m super excited for Fullscript, because Fullscript is going to make it possible for any clinic to deliver labs in a very easy to use way, so that every clinic can have their own essentially function health. And I think that’s going to be a big deal when it comes to growing so if you haven’t got a Fullscript account, you can go to goevomed.com/fullscript, and over the next little while, we’re going to be talking about some of the tools that they’re offering to make it easy for you to really engage your community, really engage them with labs.
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the rise of function health is that there’s a lot of interest in people understanding their own physiology, and so I think that you as the practitioner are the right person to help them interpret that information and help guide them towards health. So network insufficiency as the problem and these mission partners as the solution. So that’s where we’re started, and that’s where we’re going. So before we get into the next segment, you know, one of the things that I want to do throughout the show is to be able to talk about the news and what’s happening, because this is the most exciting time in history to be alive.
Ultimately, you know, so many of the ideas that were embedded in the functional, integrative, alternative medicine industry are now becoming not just normal in society, right, where we see practitioners and we see some concepts making it into the mainstream, now part of mainstream understanding. And this is completely different than 11 years ago, right when we started the functional form, or 20 years ago, when I came into the industry, so many ideas have gone mainstream. And then now, for the first time ever, some of these ideas are now making their way into government policy, right?
And it is a weird time. I mean, when I first started, and I was a sales rep 20 years ago, or I was working in a clinic in Georgia, you know, this kind of medicine was few and far between, and there were very small, micro practices of people going outside of the standard of care. And you could, you know, in that case, in that moment when I started, the biggest thing that practitioners were worried about was losing their license for practicing outside of the standard of care. So ultimately, you know, this is a big moment, and now we’re starting to see that even at a governmental level, these ideas are being talked about.
And look, I know that this particular element of what we’re going to be talking about here is extremely triggering for practitioners, because I know that not everyone sees what I see, and doesn’t necessarily see that what’s happening politically in the country is good for the average person, but this mission is what I care about, and I see that we are making exponential strides in getting some of the ideas out and getting those ideas put into place so that we can really create health at scale. And ultimately, what I wanted to share is an extraordinary thing that happened this week. Now, just to give you some context, for 10 years before I started the functional forum, you know, I would work with little practices all across the Northeast, and I would go to practitioner education events.
And some of what I want to show you today is is extraordinary, because ideas that have locked both doctors and patients into the idea. Year that a pharmaceutical first approach is the way to deal with disease, and chronic disease is breaking down, and trust is breaking down because ideas are coming to light that have not been able to come to light before. And I want to share with you today. As part of it, I’m going to share with you a seven minute video that was put out last week by the Secretary for Health, for Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy, Jr.
And before I get into this again, like I want to give a caveat to say I understand that there is a range of politics of people that you know care about functional medicine, kept you know care about the transformation of health. But I hope you’ll see in this video that some of what’s being covered in here is significant. So here’s the video that I’m going to share, and let’s just check in a little bit here. F Kennedy, Jr, your hh, as a secretary at my recent finance committee hearing, Senator Cantwell showed us this chart to illustrate the decline in infectious disease during the 20th century. The vaccine industry has long used this kind of chart as proof of the common claim that vaccines had saved hundreds of millions of American lives, the momentous 70% decline in mortalities in the United States and Western Europe from contagious diseases since 1900 marks one of the most monumental public health advances in all of human history. Was this really an achievement of mass vaccination programs?
As many people, including Senator Cantwell, claim, before we go any further, I just want to address sort of an elephant in the room, that this is an extremely unlikely situation, right? First, that Bobby Kennedy is the head of Health and Human Services. But secondly, what’s about to happen here is he’s going to share information that sort of, in some ways, goes against the mandate of Health and Human Services. The mandate of Health and Human Services, one of the mandates is to popularize vaccination. Right? That’s one of the things. And I just, I guess I want to say, like, although this is really unlikely. I also want to say the situation is also very unlikely. I want to give two examples. So if you look at transportation, it’s obvious that the person in charge of encouraging or the government agency that’s in charge of encouraging the use and growth of transportation is not the same person that are not the same organization that runs transportation safety, right? It’s the same in nuclear where, in nuclear energy, the people that organ, you know, the organizations that deal with safety, aren’t there, you know, pushing, you know, pushing that.
And you can see that it’s there’s obvious conflicts of interest. If you were to have the board that was lobbying on behalf of of nuclear energy, it would be crazy to have them in charge of safety, but here we are in medicine, where the Health and Human Services is actually three things at once, right? It is part of their mandate is to increase the use of tools like vaccines, right? So that’s part of their mandate. The other mandate is to organize the safety of the vaccine. So there’s a huge issue. And then, because of the 1986 act, that puts that takes liability away from the pharmaceutical companies. Uniquely, if you have a vaccine injury and you and you want to bring a lawsuit, you come up against Health and Human Services, they have to actually defend those same tools. So you can see that while this is weird and unlikely, the situation is even more weird and even more unlikely, because in transport and in nuclear power, you would it’s obvious that these two should not be the same thing, and yet, here we are health and human services running all three. So this is an unlikely situation, but overall, this is an unlikely moment, and this is a weird way that things have been set up.
The most comprehensive evidence based study that rigorously examines this issue is a CDC funded study that was published in 2000 performed by a team of researchers from CDC and Johns Hopkins University, and led by Dr Bernard Guyer, the scientists meticulously examined 100 years of government infectious disease mortality data, and they concluded that nearly all the mortality reductions occurred before the introduction of vaccines, and that vaccinations could therefore claim little of the credit. For example, you can see from this graph that in 1900 some 13,000 Americans a year were dying of measles by 1960 however, this number had dropped to a few 100, but the measles vaccine was not introduced until three years later. Therefore almost all the measles mortality had disappeared before the vaccine. So the measles vaccine can’t really claim the credit for saving all those lives. Let’s look at pertussis, also known as whooping cough.
Again, we see the biggest drop in pertussis as occurred before the introduction of the Pertussis vaccine. The same is true for influenza. Massive flu mortalities had already disappeared by the 1960s or. But the vaccine was not widely disseminated until the 1980s so once again, the vaccine cannot claim the credit. And look how tuberculosis deaths nearly disappeared along the exact same timeline as all those other infectious diseases. Even though there was no mass vaccination for TB in the United States, the mortalities disappeared without any help from a vaccine. Likewise, there was never a scurvy vaccine, but scurvy deaths also disappeared along the exact same timeline. The same is true for scarlet fever, which I had as a boy. Deaths from scarlet fever disappeared in lockstep alongside the drops in deaths from all those other contagions. So what act?
So I would just say, like, I’ve been waiting for this information to be communicated en masse since I first heard about it, sitting in a little lecture with a chiropractor in New Jersey as he shared this for the first time to me in 2007 I was like, I didn’t learn this growing up. And so I think it’s really critical for so many reasons. So let’s continue on.
So what actually did cause the decline in infectious disease mortality? A landmark 1977 study by McKinley and McKinley was required of reading in most American medical schools during the 1970s and early 1980s that study attributed the decline not to medical advances or innovations, but almost exclusively to agricultural and engineering innovations that improve nutrition.
Is nutrition, right? Everyone in our community, everyone in functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, knows how important nutrition is, and yes, we can talk about that in the micro today. What this study is showing is the degree to which the improvements in nutrition allowed us to have healthy immune systems. We talk about this every day. We need to come to a conclusion, as a society and as physicians, the role of nutrition in health, and what better way to understand that than to pick at the canard of our shared history and really think deeply about what did what these included better roads, air, transport and refrigeration and superior sanitation.
This was the same period that flush toilets and water chlorination became widespread. The McKinley has credited less than 3.5% of the mortality declines to all medical measures put together, including antibiotics, surgeries and vaccines. And here, for example, you see the introduction of chlorination correlates pretty perfectly with the decline in infectious disease mortality in 1970 Harvard Medical School Professor Edward Kass was arguably the world’s preeminent infectious disease authority. He was both the founder and longtime editor of the Journal of infectious diseases, and president and founding member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in his address that year to a joint meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America and the 10th inner science conference on antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, Dr Kass issued a prescient public warning that actors within the medical industry would try to take credit for the momentous reduction in disease fatalities in order to advance their profits, their prestige and their influence. Dr Kass challenged the emerging claim that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Dr Kass observed that the decline of mass deaths from these dreaded killers occurred prior to the widespread proliferation of vaccines. He warned against what he called the half truths and medical research had stamped out the great Ulrich Iserloh the past, tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, peripheral sepsis, etc. He cautioned against the claim that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors in extending life expectancy. The deceptive graph that Senator Cantwell showed the nation is precisely the kind of scientifically basis propaganda device against which Professor Kass warned us, and yet it is a common trope promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and allied Medical Association and there are highly paid politicians to evangelize us into believing that vaccines alone saved all of those lives.
Senator Cantwell has taken some $456,000 from pharmaceutical companies. The mantric pronouncement that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives is so embedded in conventional wisdom that it rarely receives the kind of skepticism and the rigorous scientific examination that public health agencies should apply to all dogmas. Vaccines are a critical part of public health. They can prevent infections like measles altogether and the serious injuries that sometimes accompany measles, and they can prevent you from spreading measles to others but blind faith in vaccination alone. As our only recourse against death by infection has inclined our medical system to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and vitamins and diet exercise and other lifestyle changes that might fortify human immune systems against all kinds of sickness.
Come on. This is it. This is the moment. This is the moment. You know, in future shows, we’ll talk about why this is the moment and what’s happening to make it easy. But like we need to first of all take away the bounds that have been put around us in medicine to understand that a pharmaceutical, pharmaceuticals are the thing that create health. Health doesn’t come from a pill. Health comes from exactly the things that RFK is talking about here. We all know that. And the reason why America had so many covid deaths compared to any other country is because we’ve been reliant on pharmaceuticals. And even in that situation, we weren’t allowed to prescribe the pharmaceuticals that might have benefited us from day one. Think about ivermectin.
Think about the practitioners that got in trouble by recommending vitamin D when it was clear right from the beginning that those people who had reasonable levels of vitamin D did not die from covid. You know, that is the cost of living in this paradigm, and we have to break free of that paradigm. And I think that most practitioners in functional medicine, in lifestyle medicine, in precision medicine, in longevity medicine, are breaking free. But I think a video like this, if shared with other practitioners, could help doctors to break free and say, hey, I want to be part of the solution. And what is the solution? Building Network sufficiency. Building Network sufficiency, clinically inside the body, building community and building a network of practices that can reverse chronic disease, and that is what we’re all about.
And I wanted to show this video, and I wanted to comment in it, because I think this is a significant moment for our community, for our movement, that this kind of information is getting out from the head of Health and Human Services, the idea that good health comes only in a syringe and distort public health priorities and lead to misallocations of public health resources during the Biden administration, the US government’s unbalanced response to the covid pandemic exemplified this peril. American citizens paid a steep price. The United States had more covid deaths than any other nation under President Trump’s leadership, we are going to ensure that America has the best childhood vaccine schedule, the best childhood vaccine schedule. What does that mean? Well, let’s just look at other countries that have less infant mortality.
Let’s look at other countries that have lower level, you know, better health, that have longer life expectancy, and see what that looks like. I didn’t grow up in America, so I had the UK vaccine schedule, although my parents were really up on this, so I didn’t have the full barrage. But ultimately, you can see that this is just a critical topic for us. And you know, it’s a risk for me to start this second season of the evolution of medicine podcast and the functional forum on this topic. But I think it gets to the heart of what needs to happen for us to address this network sufficiency. We’re going to address vaccine injuries. We’re going to modernize American vaccines with transparent gold standard science. We’re going to eliminate and correct conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives, and we’re going to ensure scientific and medical freedom produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
It’s a great video. Please share this with someone who needs to hear it, with a practitioner, with a doctor, with anyone. This is mission critical for us to focus on salutogenesis, health care, around health that’s been the message, that’s been the mission, and this is the moment. So thank you so much for being with us here. I want to share another one of our mission partners, like, if you want to get the word out right about your practice and what you’re doing in your practice, you need to do marketing.
And I think that this has been, you know, something that’s been, you know, important to those practices that have been really successful in this ultimately, think of marketing in a new way. How do you educate your community around creating health those practices that are really thriving are pre educating and so another one of our mission partners is Big Boost Marketing.
So Ulrich Iserloh, who is the founder of Big Boost Marketing, he was the chief operating officer of the Evolution of Medicine in those early years 2014 to 2019 and since 2019 he has been or actually since 2014 he has been continually learning about how to get the word out there in a consistent way so that you can bring patients into your practice.
You can educate the whole community, and those people who are ready to get started can come and work with you. And he’s very, very skilled at producing new appointments, new discovery calls, at the lowest possible rate. This is critical. So go to goevomed.com/bigboost. You could take a practice audit. You can find out more about this. We’re super happy to have Uli on the team, and he’s been a team, been part of the team since the very beginning.
All right, so one of the things that was part of the functional forum at the beginning that sort of got lost a little bit, I would say, in the last half a dozen years, is that it was funny, right? One of the reasons why I ended up starting the Functional Forum is that I got to speak at conferences from 2010 to 2013 I spoke at this conference called Heal Thy Practice. And it was the first conference that was really designed around helping functional doctors, or primary care doctors, conventional doctors, make the switch to functional and integrated medicine.
And that’s how I met all of the great speakers there. Dr Jeff Glad, who you’ll be seeing here in the future, who’s now the Chief Medical Officer of Fullscript. He was the chair. We really developed our friendship there. I saw Dr Shilpa Saxena, Dr David Perlmutter, so many of the mainstays of our community. I saw them do their thing there, and I realized these are aspirational voices that we need to give more people. Because you just watch Dr Shilpa Saxena, you want to be a functional medicine doctor. You watch Perlmutter, you realize that he’s funny and that he’s engaging, and so ultimately, I wanted to bring some comedy back to the show. Check it out.
What the future of psychiatry definitely isn’t is taking tons of antidepressants that have been tested over a very short period of time. All right, hello and welcome to a new segment that we’re going to do for the first time. I don’t have TV. I don’t have a TV in my house, much to my 12 year old disappointment when I go on trips, sometimes I’ll turn on the TV in the hotel, and I’ll be shocked to see drug ads. And drug ads are totally out of control. That’s why they’re thinking of changing the law about them. Ultimately, what I want to do is to take you through some of my favorite ones, and we’re going to look at them and we’re going to see what they do. So we’re going to start with one of my favorites. It’s called Abilify. Now Abilify, have to give it to the marketing people. Is a good name, because it does help you to do things maybe you couldn’t do otherwise. So let’s just start to check out the beginning of this and see what we think. Should we be taking Abilify?
Here’s me, and here’s my depression. Before I started taking Abilify, I was taking an antidepressant alone. Most days. I could put on a brave face alone, or that’s the only drug you’re taking. You’re taking Abilify alone. What does that mean, having no friends or being disconnected from society and from other people, massive risk of depression probably the underlying mechanism. So what does alone mean? Then it’ll through. But other days, I still struggled with my depression. I was managing, but it always had a way of creeping up on me. I felt stuck. I just couldn’t shake my depression, so I talked to my doctor. He said adding a vilified to my antidepressant could help with my depression, right?
Okay, let’s just talk a little bit about the history of how a doctor would prescribe an antidepressant, right? So, you know, historically, this class of drugs was not prescribed by my doctor. This would be done by a psychiatrist if you’re referred. But you know, at some point, the pharmaceutical companies realized that that was not creating enough sales, and they wanted to empower the frontline physician to dispense drugs like Abilify. And so they created the PHQ nine test, which is the most simple set of questions to determine, should we be on a drug. So obviously you can see you go to the doctor. What does the doctor recommend? Being in a group, walking in nature, being more connected, changing what you eat, dealing with your stress, sleeping differently, no. What does the doctor recommend?
And that some people had symptom improvement as early as one to two weeks. One to two weeks, tell me about a free trial offer from Abilify. Free trial offer, I feel more in control of my depression. Abilify freely. More in control of your depression because of a free program to get you hooked on something that you’ll need to take forever.
It is not for everyone. Call your doctor if your depression worsens, or if you have unusual changes in behavior or thoughts of suicide. Antidepressants can increase these in children, teens and young adults. Elderly dementia patients taking Abilify have an increased risk of death or stroke. Wait.
Hang on so children, teens or young adults, no good. Older people with dementia, not sure if that’s worth it to have a stroke, call your doctor if you have high fever, stiff muscles and confusion to address a possible life threatening condition, or if you have uncontrollable muscle movements, as these could become permanent. High blood sugar has been reported with Abilify and medicines like it. In some cases, extreme high blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Other risks include decreases in white blood cells, which can be serious, dizziness upon stent, not great if you’re going into any sort of immune incident. Like an epidemic, like a pandemic, but we’ll carry on ending seizures, trouble swallowing and impaired judgment, or motor skills.
Depression used to define me. Then my doctor added Abilify. Depression used to define me. Now it’s my lack of motor skills to my antidepressant. Now I feel better if you’re still struggling with depression. Talk to your doctor to see if the option of adding Abilify is right for you. And be sure to ask about the free the free trial offer is actually almost the worst part of it, right? Because ultimately it’s like, Oh, we’ll get you hooked on this thing that then you think you’ll need forever. I just spent time at the integrative medicine for mental health conference, and, you know, is really bringing together people from Lifestyle Medicine, integrative medicine, psychedelic medicine, to talk about the future of psychiatry. What the future of psychiatry definitely isn’t is taking tons of antidepressants that have been tested over a very short period of time for only a few people. I think it’s a current disaster. The percentage of people who are on this is crazy, and then you see all of the side effects. So Abilify, good name, not sure about the video.
One out of 10 wouldn’t recommend. All right, I hope you enjoyed that. You know, there is comedy to find in that. And if you like this segment, let me know. You can get back to me and write to me. We can leave a comment below if you like this segment. If you want us to keep doing those kind of segments, we’ll do them. I’ve got lots of other ideas for things that could be funny. There’s a lot of irony in the state of medicine right now, so there’s a lot to make fun of. And I like doing that, and I think I want to make it part of the show. But I’d love to, love to hear from you, so let me know what you think on that end.
All right, another one of our mission partners is TruNeura, and I’ve been talking about it for the last year and a half. Dr Christine Burke. Many of you know she’s my doctor. She’s an incredible clinician. She’s so organized. I’ve met 1000s, 10s of 1000s of practitioners over the last 11 years, and Dr Burke is in the one first percentile of most organized practitioners. And you know, she is passionate about transforming the way that we deal with cognitive decline, and in no other industry, or no other niche of functional matters, there’s such an opportunity.
Because ultimately, you know, you have millions and millions, you have the silver tsunami. So you have all the people in the in this, you know, in America right now, who are coming into the years where cognitive decline might happen. We’re seeing earlier and earlier cognitive decline, because if we have to look at it through an environmental lens, we have to look through it a network lens, and if you look at through that lens, you know there is a huge opportunity now to build a brain health practice in the future. And TruNeura is a clinical implementation platform to make it easy for you to synthesize all of the data labs, conventional labs, functional medicine labs, very soon, genomic data, and make it easy for you to get your head around all of that data so that you can actually reverse cognitive decline.
It is happening. We are going to have some very, very exciting news in the future about the study that Dr Burke has been part of. Evan Thia, she’s one of the six trial sites. I can’t talk about the results today, but at immh and at IFM this year, cat tubes shared the outcomes. And you know it is going to show the world it’s not placebo, right? Doing a precision medicine approach can reverse cognitive decline. There’s unlimited demand. There’s very, very little supply, and that’s why true neuro is a big part of what I think can build network efficiency around this area. So if you want to go to truneura.com/demo you can get a demo with the team over there. Very excited to see what is happening over at TruNeura.
All right, so for the last segment, and this is going to be a regular segment that we’re going to do, we’re going to talk about to do. We’re going to talk about innovation corner. And innovation corner, you know, one of the coolest things that we’ve always done over the evolution of medicine and the functional forum is to talk about innovations in the industry, right to bring you ideas that we think is cool. Fullscript started like that, right back when we started. Everyone just did their supplements in a certain way.
This is the first time Fullscript was the first way that was an innovation at that time, right? And then we brought you so many innovations over the years, and it’s one of my favorite things to talk about, because I ran a practice, and I know how hard it is to run a practice, so you know, whether it be electronic health records that we recommended over time, or tools like, you know, like Fullscript, many different kinds of cool things out there, and I want to share one here today. The name of this segment is called the truth about Freedom Practice Coaching. Because ultimately, if you’ve been here all along the way, you know that Freedom Practice Coaching was actually our first sponsor.
So in the summer of 2014 Dr, Charlie Webb got in touch with me. He says, Look, we want to sponsor the functional forum. We love what you’re doing. And so they became not only the first sponsor of the show, but also they really helped us, you know, get off the ground with evolution of medicine the first time around. Now, one of the cool things about Freedom Practice Coaching, they’ve been around for, you know, since 2010 2011 2012 and, you know, in the early days, I have to admit that it was a very. Very regimented company, like they wanted you to follow exactly the model to build a practice. And that looked like creating episodes of care, you know, selling those episodes of care, and then delivering those episodes of care. And for some people, that was a great fit. And for some people, that was not a great fit.
And I do know that, you know, during the years 2016 17, when we were, you know, working with them, there were practitioners who didn’t want to sell a package, who didn’t want to reorganize their practice in that way. And, you know, felt like Freedom Practice Coaching was not delivering that. However, I had a transformational moment in 2023 so I was asked by Seth Conger, who’s the COO of Freedom Practice Coaching, to be part of their team, specifically with regard to something that he had started called legacy. And legacy was essentially a mastermind for those practitioners that had achieved success with Freedom Practice Coaching. They had got to over a million dollars in revenue, and really knew their business inside out. And so he started a group there, and I showed up, and the first thing that happened is that two of the first doctors that I met there said, hey, thanks so much. Like we heard about Freedom Practice Coaching nine years ago, and we’re here because of you. And that was really cool to see, because ultimately, you know, they had gone from strength to strength. They had businesses that were doing 234, $100,000 a month.
And you know, they’d been part of Freedom Practice Coaching for nine years, because they recognized that the even the new problems that they were coming into were being solved by Seth and his team. And Seth has really brought a new energy to Freedom Practice Coaching. He was one of their Prime customers when he built his clinic reversing cognitive decline that he then sold, and then he came to Freedom Practice Coaching to help clinicians be successful. And you know, that was a great learning. And over the last couple of years, I’ve worked really closely with the Freedom Practice Coaching team, because, you know, we believe that there are many different ways to build a successful practice. You know, I’ve helped practitioners through the practice accelerator, build membership programs, and you can see that membership is hot, and we’re going to be talking about this in the future because of the legislation that is coming around direct primary care coming in January.
This is a huge accelerant. But what I want to talk about with innovation corner is something that Seth has created, and I believe it’s one of the most useful tools that I have seen in my 20 years of being in this space. If you’ve ever heard from Seth, what you know is that he really understands the three stages of building a practice. There’s the startup phase, there’s the growth phase, and there’s the scale phase. And what he says is that if you’ve had problems in delivering, in you know, in growing your practice, it’s typically not that you’re doing the wrong thing, but you’re doing the right thing at the wrong time. So maybe you go to a conference, and someone says, Hey, I hired this person, and they do this in my practice, and that may be right for you, but it might be the wrong thing. It might be the right thing at the wrong time.
And so one of the things that Seth has created, having been now worked with hundreds of practices, especially in the scale phase, is he created something called the scalability assessment. And this scalability assessment is something that you can fill out. Takes about 20 minutes. It looks at all the different areas of your practice you know from all you know, whether it be the people, how you organize, the pricing, all of that stuff, looks at it and then delivers you, once you finish that, a full report that basically gives you a step by step guide on what you need to fix in your practice. Because there are probably, with most practices that we see, most practices have, you know, some elements where they’re in startup, some elements where they’re in scale, and some elements where they’re in gross, and that is a sort of a recipe for disaster. And ultimately, you know, this tool is really valuable. So if you go to goevomed.com/scalability, take that test. It takes 20 to 30 minutes, but the insight that you will get as to understanding where your practice is now and where it should go is valuable. And they will even add in an hour consultation with one of their key people to be able to help you understand the information. And if you just run with it from there, you know, that’s what it’s designed to do.
And if you need help implementing it, that’s there too. And I’m super excited to have Freedom Practice Coaching as a mission partner, because I believe that they are the best in the business when it comes to helping practitioners step into entrepreneurship. And part of the way that we are going to address this network insufficiency, the number of clinics that are doing this effectively is we have to have physicians and other practitioners, just like you step into entrepreneurship and and truly be successful. And so go to goevomed.com/scalability, do it. It takes 20 minutes. You’ll have a fully prepared presentation off the back of it, and you can set a time with one of the team there.
I highly recommend it, and that is innovation corner. So hopefully you see what this series, season two of the evolution of medicine. Podcast, the functional forum is all about. It’s about building a network of practices that can reverse cross. Chronic disease at scale, and we here in America, are way ahead of even other countries, because the functional medicine ecosystem does not exist to this degree in other countries. And so we are leading the world in working out how to reverse chronic illness. And this is the most important conversation in the world, because chronic illness will bankrupt every major industrialized country in the next 20 years, if we don’t do something about it, that was the learning that I got from being a health economist doing health economics.
That’s why I’ve been involved for 20 years. And hopefully you can see today with what we shared coming from Health and Human Services, and what you see coming from the network itself and all of these organizations that are the mission partners, and everything else that’s happening in the industry. This is our moment. The next five years will determine whether we can build the capacity to reverse chronic disease at scale. I know we can do it. I know you can do it, and I know we will do it. This is episode one of the evolution of medicine podcast. Please share this comment below. Like it. You can find it on YouTube. Maybe some of you are listening to this audioly, but you know, please tell some practitioner friends about the reimagination of the evolution of medicine. We would love to bring more practitioners along for the ride, and we’ll be doing this every week from my studio. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
.
Subscribe
Download
Click here to download this podcast
music provided by intomusic.co
