In this final episode of 2022, James reviews key topics from the year of growth and provides a sneak peek of what is to come in 2023, the year of connection.
The Evolution of Medicine community has experienced impressive growth and witnessed significant shifts in 2022. We learned about deprescribing to help patients escape the polypharmacy public health disaster. We have applied functional medicine principles to help patients who experience long COVID and other post-viral syndromes.
Increasingly, we are also seeing signs that the mainstream is moving in our direction, and we must position ourselves to be ready when more patients come our way. Functional medicine needs to scale up, in part to help address the mental health crisis that exploded during the COVID era. More patients are also seeking support from functional medicine providers for vaccine injuries, such as myocarditis.
Healthcare systems are now adopting functional medicine and building integrative care into their hospital and insurance systems. Group care is being delivered on a larger scale as well, which increases access to functional medicine.
While the Evolution of Medicine is apolitical, James also discusses how medicine has been impacted by the economic and political climates in the US and UK.
Listen to the full episode to hear more of James’ reflections about:
- Long COVID, controversies regarding its prevalence and why our community is able to provide the best help for patients
- Signs that mainstream medicine is moving in our direction
- Censorship, authoritarianism and technology
- The effects of the pandemic on mental health, especially for children
- Upcoming 2023 initiatives well-worth anticipating
James Maskell: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very special end of year podcast. I’m your host, James Maskell, and this is the Evolution of Medicine podcast. And I wanted to take a moment to wrap up what’s happened in 2022, our year of growth, and prepare for 2023, our year of connection.
And so, I’m grateful. First off, I want to say thank you to our sponsors here on the podcast. So, Fullscript, we’ve been partners with them for eight years. Everyone, probably, who’s listening to this knows what Fullscript does. They’ve built an incredible technology that helps with patient adherence and organization of your supplements. Go to goevomed.com/fullscript to find out more about them and to set up an account if you don’t have one. Lots of cool things coming from them in 2023.
And then the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, our ongoing sponsor. Great. This year they launched their membership program, and they’ve got now hundreds of physician and practitioner members utilizing all of their content to build unique education tools and resources for their patients and a really great service.
So, I’m really excited to kick off the year and talk about the big themes. We’ve got a lot of exciting themes that we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about long COVID, polypharmacy de-prescribing. We’re going to talk about lifestyle medicine movement. We’re going to talk about the mainstream coming our way. We’ll talk a little bit about vaccine injury. We’ll talk a little bit about anxiety, psychedelics, technology, health insurance changes. These are all the things that we’ve spoken about in 2022.
We’re obviously going to talk a little bit about what we expect in 2023. We’ve got some exciting things happening in 2023. On my end, we are going to bring out a second edition of the Evolution of Medicine book, which we’re excited about with so many doctors quitting their jobs. That’s really what the first book, Evolution of Medicine, was about: giving practitioners and doctors a roadmap to establish their own practice and practice in their own terms. So, we’re bringing out a second edition. We’ll be upgrading the Practice Accelerator as well. So, lots more to talk about on that end.
So, let’s start with long COVID. If you’ve been following the last few emails, you recognize that there is something interesting happening, where on one hand long COVID is being seen as this huge backend issue off the back of COVID where 30% of people are affected in some way and it’s going to cost this much money and it’s catastrophic. And then on the other side, you see research coming out saying that it’s mainly psychosomatic and that it’s not as big a deal and that it goes away. And essentially, one of the things that I would say is that these two things can both be true.
Ultimately, one of the reasons why long COVID is such a big issue here in America and maybe isn’t in many other countries is just that the degree to which one gets long COVID is a reflection of your function. And you could have known that from Ari Vojdani’s session that we did back in April 2020 where he showed who’s going to get a bad case of COVID and who’s going to get not such a bad case. It’s based on the function of the body. Same with Leo Galland’s podcast that we released in October, which was amazing by the way, and if you didn’t listen to it, definitely go back and listen to it. But he talked about this web of long COVID. All of those sections of the web are a function of what? Of the function of the body. So, if you have underlying dysfunction, it will lead to worse outcomes when you have a case of COVID.
And that’s why this multisystem, systems biology approach that is the hallmark of functional medicine where we can use multiple modalities, where we can target specific function and specific systems, has to be the way forward. We want to build function and that’s ultimately what we’re here doing at functional medicine. So, I think functional medicine is most important in all of those areas because if we can help patients build function, the chances of them having these long-term effects will be less, and we can really get to grips with long COVID.
So, I’d encourage any practitioners that are listening: Why aren’t you doing long COVID groups in your practice? Why aren’t you creating ways that people with long COVID can self-identify in the local area and have an easy, low-cost way to come into your practice? I think that’s a great marketing strategy for 2023.
The next thing I want to talk about is polypharmacy and deprescribing. So, big research this year on polypharmacy, and this again plays right into the evolution of medicine and functional medicine because it’s really only our community that is versed and interested in deprescribing, right? Getting people off medication, looking at people’s medication and starting to taper them off in different ways. There are people whose job that is—a well-trained pharmacist will do that—but ultimately, most pharmacists are not trained in improving the function of the system.
In order to deprescribe effectively, you have to have some part of the care that is helping people do healthy behaviors consistently and improve their function through lifestyle and functional means. So, if you don’t have that skillset, it’s very difficult to deprescribe. And one of the reasons why I’m really excited about this and interested in this is that, in my work with Heal Community this year, we’ve actually seen some really effective models for deprescribing at scale. And that deprescribing at scale looks like doctors using groups, as an example, to help patients over a period of time—let’s say six months—go through a process of building healthier and healthier function, and through that process, deprescribing is what’s needed.
Having spoken to some doctors this year, it’s interesting. I spoke to a doctor on my travels. I was speaking at a conference in Mexico, and they said, look, one of the biggest risks when you’re doing type two diabetes work with patients is that if you get patients really engaged with a new diet and they have uncontrolled diabetes, one of the things that tends to happen is that if they get really into it and they start doing the food things, within a matter of weeks or two weeks or three weeks, their dose of metformin, their dose of the drugs that they’re taking for their type two diabetes will be inappropriate because their blood sugar regulation, their blood sugar has changed because of the diet that you put them on, if they’re involved.
So, this idea of the old functional medicine model where you see someone, you give them a routine and you see them in three months is probably not going to be effective. If food as medicine does its thing, we need to have a mechanism to understand: How’s this person doing? And they could be feeling bad because they’re taking too much medication because their lifestyle has dramatically changed.
That’s why these longitudinal groups are a really, really important part of deprescribing because it gives you a feedback mechanism. And if you need to have a doctor to deprescribe you the medication or get you off the polypharmacy, one, you have to have a model for people to actually get better consistently because ultimately adherence to a whole program without some support—coaching support, group support, peer support—is tricky. And that’s why more and more clinics are using health coaches. More and more big systems are using health coaches to reinforce healthy behaviors. But you need to have a model by which people can’t wait three months still on their same medication. If they start doing the healthy behaviors consistently, it’s going to be shorter. They’re going to need to come off. And so, we need to have models that can take that into account. But I think our community, again, is very well set up for being successful in delivering care that can reduce polypharmacy and deprescribe.
All right. The third theme that I want to talk about… And I just say before we get into it, I used to do this with my partner, Gabe, before he passed away, and it was one of my favorite things to do is to do these kind of podcasts where we go and talk about the news. We even had a news segment. So, I’m just feeling a little sad that he’s not with us anymore, but I’m hopeful that you’re enjoying this wherever you’re listening.
All right, another big trend, lifestyle medicine taking off. So, whether that’s the state of Florida that brought together the Healthier You Florida, that was basically a functional medicine for all policy. You’ve talked about New York City, right? Lifestyle medicine. And I saw a whole presentation on lifestyle medicine and what’s happening in New York, and I want to share my thoughts on that because I shared it a few different places. I shared it on LinkedIn and I shared my experience of seeing what was happening in essentially a team-focused lifestyle medicine, six pillar approach to helping people with chronic illnesses reverse chronic illness. That is what is happening. I saw Dr. McCracken, who’s running that, is launching the program. It started in one hospital, now it’s going to seven hospitals. They focus on all six pillars, not just food. Right?
I know that food is a massively divisive issue in our community, and I know that, even on the Evolution of Medicine, when we started, it was kind of peak paleo, right? 2014, if you remember that moment. And so, we had a paleo day on the Evolution of Medicine Summit. And I can’t disagree with the whole community when they tell me, look, if you’re trying to reverse a chronic illness, you need meat. And a lot of doctors tell me that and doctors that I trust, and I don’t think they have a reason to lie. When you’re looking to reverse autoimmune disease, you need meat. And so, I’m not going to stand here and say that’s not true, but I can also say that there are organizations that are using vegan diets and reversing chronic illness.
So, what I saw when I saw the presentation on what was happening in New York was it was a team-based approach, it was multimodal, that was being run and being delivered to people who can’t normally afford concierge care. And it was successful in reversing their chronic illness. It included things that even paleo people would agree with, like getting a box of vegetables into your house every week. That’s part of the program there. Look at Chris Kresser’s website, man. It’s a picture of him in a kitchen with a lot of vegetables. So, it’s like whether you’re paleo or vegan or whatever diet you have, Mediterranean, vegetables are typically a part of it. And ultimately helping people to learn how to cook vegetables is a critical skill that we need to create health.
When I posted this thing about New York on Instagram, it was like I was attacked by all the meat-focused people. And I love them, too, and I’ve seen them lecture, and I’m a big fan of all their work. People like… There’s a number of dieticians out there that I think are doing a great job in showcasing the power of regenerative medicine, regenerative agriculture, regenerative meat. I agree with all of those ideas. I agree that there is a lot of experience in using meat to reverse chronic illness as a key part of the diet to build up strength.
I also see that efforts that are being made to bring team-based, lifestyle-focused, six-pillar care to people that can’t afford it, we need to support that. I am going to support that because I believe that whatever you think of a diet, having people who have never been able to afford sleep, education, movement support, stress, environmental stuff… People need that. And so, I’m excited to see what’s happening in New York.
There was the Hunger Conference this year, which I think was a big deal for many reasons, but one of the things is that conference has made a change in the landscape. And the change in the landscape is people now talk about reversing diet-related chronic illness. That has not been a conversation that’s been having at the highest level that is now being had, and I think that’s really, really exciting and validates the work of everyone in our community for all of this time. So, I think that’s a big deal.
Even the functional medicine… The Institute of Functional Medicine has a lifestyle course now as a way to bring doctors along. And I would say it’s a good strategy. If you want to get new doctors along for the ride, the first thing that we need to do is we need to… Lifestyle is a good starting point. The things that are most caustic to new doctors are supplements and esoteric testing.
The lifestyle component is an easy way to get new doctors on board, new health systems on board. And that’s why the American College of Lifestyle Medicine has been so successful at getting health systems on board with lifestyle medicine because it’s actually an easy way to get buy-in from health systems because who can really argue with the fact that we need a dramatic increase in healthy lifestyle? I mean, it’s really obvious to me anyway. So, that’s been a big theme. The growth of lifestyle medicine at the state level in Florida, at the city level in New York, inside the functional medicine ecosystem, the Hunger Conference, a hundred plus health systems putting up their hand to say, “We want lifestyle medicine.”
It’s critical, and I’m really excited to see that movement growing because it’s the same thing. We’re all involved in the same work. We’re involved in salutogenic health, creating health. That’s what we’re all in the business of and I’m excited to see it. And it was great to go to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine conference this year and see this whole other community that I never engage with, where the doctors love their jobs, and the patients are getting better, and outcomes are being tracked, all of that. Really powerful.
All right, the next theme I want to talk about is: Is the mainstream coming our way? And I want to give a couple of examples. So, earlier in the podcast this year, our most popular podcast of the year was with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. And I’ve become big fans of theirs. I listen to their podcast every week. They are evolutionary biologists. And when I interviewed them, it became clear that, ultimately, whichever lens you approach the world at, whether it be economics or whether it be evolutionary biology or otherwise, this idea that we need to create health in communities is universally valuable.
And so, I see in their book, they really laid out the case for a lot of functional medicine and a lot of integrative medicine ideas. On that podcast, they shared some things that are evolutionarily consistent, everywhere evolutionary biology comes in. But these principles now then apply into integrative thoughts or things that we learned at integrative conferences over the years being validated by a completely different scientific area, evolutionary biology. So, that was super interesting. So, those guys are definitely showcasing to me that there’s this scientific group that recognizes that what we’re doing is really important.
But also look at people like ZDoggMD. For a long time, I would say ZDoggMD was sort of an adversary to the functional medicine movement, but if you look at some of his content over the pandemic and more recently, there’s a strong focus on meditation. He had one amazing meltdown where he just said, “Hey, we’re delivering way too much care, but it’s not the right care. People just need to do these healthy behaviors consistently.” He hasn’t got his head around functional medicine yet or all parts of it, but I heard an interview that he did with Daniel Schmachtenberger, who spoke about, okay, in brain health, who is leading the way in brain health? It’s Perlmutter. It’s Bredesen. It’s these people that are showcasing that you can improve your neurological function with diet and exercise and functional medicine interventions.
So, I see them starting to come our way to validate this. And I also look at someone like Vinay Prasad. Love his blog. He’s created a new movement called Sensible Medicine. It’s very medical. It’s not really functional medicine. But one of the interesting things that I saw that I just wanted to comment on because… The state of Florida has been in accused of being anti-science, right? And I mentioned earlier they have this program, which is essentially functional medicine for everyone, which is called Healthier You Florida. But because of their other ideas, and we’ll talk about a little bit of this later, they’ve been given the label anti-science in the media.
And I was interested to think about what would two doctors, like Zdogg and Vinay Prasad, who have another podcast that I listen to, what would they think of Joe Ladapo, who is the Surgeon General in Florida who’s been essentially doing the opposite of what the CDC has said? And I’ll talk a little bit about that. But I was interested, what is their opinion?
And their opinion was like, look, they’ve spoken to people who know him when he was in California before. They’ve listened to his ideas, and ultimately, they think he was right. I think we have to face the facts that there’s never been a randomized control trial on masks and the fact that they work, and there’s more and more information coming out showing that masks had very little benefit, if any, and if anything, may have had negative consequences, if you take it in the totality.
Look at school shutdowns. That was a big issue for me personally, but like I don’t think it was, in retrospect, healthy to shut down all the schools with healthy kids. And this will start to come out now. And I think that, ultimately, you see people like Vinay Prasad on the front lines talking about the fact that there’s been some horrible decision-making inside the powers that be and that, ultimately, people are losing trust in medicine because of the way that the CDC and the FDA has gone about their work in the last two years.
And so, I think that there’s really an opportunity for us to take advantage of this, to align with the fact that we are built on the right foundation, which is we are built on: How do we create health? Now there’s still going to be some arguments as to best practices and policy, especially when it comes to things like vaccines. But ultimately, I think that the mainstream is coming our way, and we need just to position ourselves to be ready for that. And it’s been really interesting to see how people that I think are leading allopaths, like a ZDoggMD, like a Vinay Prasad, starting to come around to this way of thinking.
Look, we got to talk about vaccine injury. Ultimately, the majority of the practitioners that I engage with are seeing vaccine injury in their offices. Right? Because where do people go? They get told that it’s all in their head from conventional medicine, and then they end up in functional medicine offices. This has been happening forever. This is why there’s so much discord towards vaccines in our community because practitioners in our community see the results of the downsides. And that was happening before COVID, but now we have the COVID vaccine has generated way more negative outcomes than any vaccine in history. You could judge that through VAERS. There was the V-safe data all coming out to show that we have significant amount of vaccine injury from the mRNA vaccines.
An obvious example, the World Cup just finished, right? Look at all the people. It became most obvious initially in sports where you have healthy people having heart issues. Sergio Aguero would have been upfront for Argentina, but when he moved from Manchester City to Barcelona, had a heart issue and was celebrating there with Argentina at the end, but… That was one example. There’s so many examples and growing all the time. And myocarditis has become a term that everyone knows now.
Ultimately, how this plays out over the next two years, especially leading up to the election, is going to be critical. I think that we are in the perfect position to acknowledge that vaccine injury exists. In certain cases to be able to help rebuild function after vaccine injury. This is a strength for us. But ultimately, we have to be in reality that this is happening and it is happening.
To what degree it’s happening, it’s hard to know. But I think over the next two years this will become a main topic. Why? Because, and this is something that I was going to talk about a bit later with 2023, but I heard last week, DeSantis put on another event, and DeSantis is likely to be a main contender in the Republican race. So, you’re going to hear a lot more about it. He is essentially setting up what they call a shadow CDC.
Now, there’s a lot of use of the word shadow out there, and you may be familiar with a lot of different shadows. When I say shadow CDC or when they say shadow CDC, I actually have to reflect on British politics. So, in Britain you have the government. So, at the moment, it’s the Conservative Party. What do they call the equivalent of the chancellor in the Labor Party, which is sort of the opposition? They call it the shadow chancellor. And that’s because it’s the person that can hold the main chancellor accountable to whatever policies they have. So, have you ever seen on TV where they have the arguing back and forth, prime minister’s question time and all of that that happens in Parliament? There’s a shadow government and that shadow government is the opposition because they essentially hold accountable the people making the decisions, who are the people in power. And we have Labor and Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats.
So, what DeSantis is setting up is essentially a shadow CDC. They used that phrase this last week. And in that shadow CDC are some pretty credible people. You’ve got Jay Bhattacharya, who’s a Stanford professor and has been on it since the beginning. He saw John Ioannidis’ numbers with the zero prevalency and realized that the death rate of COVID was way lower than they thought. Still two and a half years later, the New York Times overstating the death rate of COVID by a 10X the other day. So, Jay Bhattacharya has got tons of credibility.
Martin Kulldorff, right? Martin Kulldorff is the reason why Sweden didn’t lock down because he’s a PhD epidemiologist from Harvard, MD/PhD, and he is so well thought of in Sweden that his op-eds is what stopped Sweden from following the policy of every other country in the world.
Those two, along with Dr. Gupta from Oxford, they were the ones that came up with the Great Barrington Declaration. Obviously, you can see that there’s some backside of it where they’ve been talked about as fringe epidemiologists by Fauci. But these guys are the real deal epidemiologists, and I think it’s going to prove that they were right. They were right that we should focus our attention on everyone. We shouldn’t shut down the economy.
The costs of shutting down the economy have real effects, particularly on the poor, particularly on the underserved. Who was fine during the pandemic? People like myself sitting at home making my living doing this, sitting in front of Zoom and making videos. The people who had to go out to work when the economy shuts down and their restaurant shuts down and small business shuts down, they lose their jobs. Businesses go out of business. And we’re still even starting to see the effects of that now. And it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse because we’re going to moving into a depression and recession.
And it’s not just them. They’ve got like Dr. Benn from Denmark, who’s done incredible research on the non-specific effects of vaccines. You’ve got now Bret Weinstein involved. You’ve got Ladapo. You’ve got Chris D’Adamo, who was on the November Functional Forum. Go and watch that. We fixed the audio. I’m sorry that it sucked the first time. But Chris D’Adamo is essentially the guy that convinced DeSantis to go on this pathway. And I think it’s good for us to have conversations about this because ultimately, Florida isn’t just complaining about the vaccine. They are setting policy around health creation, around functional medicine. They have a policy that recommends Quercetin, first time in the world. We need to support that. We need to respect that because ultimately that is a very likely source to bring functional medicine to the masses in a way that is maybe unexpected from people in our community but is a big deal, in my opinion.
And I grew up in England. I know Labor and Conservative. I don’t really… I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m just a guy witnessing what’s happening, and I care about functional medicine. And that’s why I went to go interview a Democrat in Idaho, Paulette Jordan, a few years ago because she wanted integrative medicine for everyone because she’s a First Nations person and that resonates with her humanity. And it’s the same reason why I think it’s worth supporting these efforts in Florida and at least being aware that there is a shadow CDC being created and really top doctors… Tracy Hope, not that far away in Davis, really showcasing things like school shutdowns, masks and so forth. I think the more data that we can create that showcases that chronic disease is reversible by doing health-focused work, we’ve got people in the right place to support that.
But I also recognize that Hunger Conference was a big deal and made a lot of progress in our direction. So, if we can have both sides of the aisle fighting to take responsibility or claim ownership of this movement that we’re all part of, that’s good for us. I think that’s really exciting. And so, you see on the Democrat side, you have the New York City thing. On the Republican side, you have it with Florida. Let them fight over it. Let them be as holistic as possible. Let them take this forward, and let’s have this be a real debate going into the 2024 election cycle.
Alright, couple of other things. Anxiety’s off the chain. Right? Kids, lifestyle, phones, culture, pandemic. The kids aren’t alright, and we need to really get into this because the numbers are shocking. I’m really excited to see what’s possible, but there’s not enough care to go around. And anything that any of us can do to support children in the 13 to 18 age is mission critical because I think there are some very dysfunctional 13- to 18-year-olds based on, as I said, the pandemic, screen time, this weird culture thing that we’re all going through now. And it’s a very, very difficult time to be a teenager.
So, I just wish that whatever you can do in your clinical practice, whatever you can do as a gift to your community, whatever you can do as an adult, as a parent, as someone who cares about kids, there’s a lot of kids that need support because we have some high excess deaths, and we have all kinds of other issues that need to be looked at with anxiety with children. And it’s an anxious time to be alive in many ways.
I think on the other side of that, I’m excited to see the growth in psychedelic medicine, and we are definitely seeing that taking off in all different ways. I don’t think there are psychedelic clinics that are making any money, that’s for sure. But I think it’s a new area. Obviously, you’ve got legislation changing in Oregon and those kind of places, but I think psychedelic care is salutogenic in nature and is very synergistic with the efforts of the lifestyle/functional medicine movements. And so, I look forward to seeing how that’s going to make it into mainstream care.
I think just a couple of other things, like we’re definitely seeing the growth of sort of technology-based authoritarianism. I think these latest Twitter files and all the things that are coming out just showing to what degree technology and the government have been working together to suppress information in the world. And this was particularly felt by our community.
I mean, Instagram at the beginning of the pandemic, it didn’t allow you to search by #naturalimmunity. You couldn’t search for #naturalimmunity on Instagram and you couldn’t tag things natural immunity. That is a great example. What did we need at that moment? We needed people to understand that, ultimately, you could gain immunity to COVID through natural immunity and that natural immunity is more robust than vaccine-induced immunity. Why do you need six boosters? So, ultimately, technology has affected all of us, and there’s been a dark side of technology over the last few years as Facebook and Instagram and most obviously Twitter—although it’s obviously happening in all of the companies—have shifted the way that we talk about things.
I mean, last year, I had on the podcast a doctor from Oklahoma who literally ran the COVID response for seven hospitals. So, this is a doctor that has taken responsibility in the time of the pandemic to essentially showcase in Oklahoma and to take care of seven hospitals in the COVID delivery. And yet that guy was sanctioned from writing about how do we create health in the pandemic and lifestyle things that we can do, supplement things that we can do, was banned from Facebook for doing that. I was banned for these kind of things, many other people in our community. It’s crazy.
Ultimately, we need to be aware of the potential of authoritarianism, and authoritarianism as a very destructive force in our world. And I’m here in support of medical freedom, freedom for doctors to practice in the way they want, freedom for patients to participate in their own health in the way that they want.
And ultimately, I am concerned by not just how content is distributed and how content and ideas are communicated, but coming in 2023, we’re going to see the beginning of currencies and other things that will create a lot more… We’ve been slowly bringing all of these things into our lives without realizing the implications of it. And I think it’s going to be a big year for everyone to wake up to the technological control grid that’s been created around us and decide whether or not that’s a future that we really want for ourselves and our kids and our grandkids, who will be affected by the decisions that we’re making right now.
Big health insurance changes already happened in 2021 and then reinforced in 2022 and then now you see in 2023. Some big news for this year. Some important wrap-up information. I was hoping to have Dr. Robin Berzin on the podcast. Think I’m going to get her early next year. But Parsley Health, the most successful functional medicine practice probably in the country in terms of numbers of patients and growth, now available on insurance in New York and now going enterprise to insurance companies. And this is an amazing step and so much respect to Robin for everything that she’s done. But essentially, it’s showcasing that big companies and smart money is moving back towards insurance because, ultimately, we’re going into a recession and insurance is changing.
We’ve had Cheng Ruan on the show. Go back to March podcast and listen back to that. But Cheng Ruan is an incredible physician and has built a practice around the payer system and taking Medicare and Medicaid. And the opportunities for people who are building that are growing exponentially. And I think for all of the practitioners who are listening to this, think about how you’re going to get money from patients in 2023 because there’s going to be less money around than there was before. People are going to be more unhealthy. So, that may balance itself out as people get more and more desperate.
But ultimately, I would say we really have to focus on finding ways to keep your business afloat and that means finding ways to make it easy for people to engage with you. And so, I think, looking at health insurance again is a big deal and that’s why at HealCommunity, we’ve been really focused on making it easy for clinics that bill insurance to run groups because it’s a hyper profitable way of dealing on insurance. And if you want to find out more about HealCommunity, go to healcommunity.com. We’d love to connect with you. We’re working with some health systems. We’re working with some big clinics and excited to see what’s possible in 2023.
So, let’s talk about 2023. It’s coming quick, and it’s going to be probably a tough year in many different ways. We’ve got this recession coming on. We’ve got a lot of things. It’s not really sure what’s going to happen with the housing market, with the stock market, et cetera, et cetera. What can we focus on? So, we can focus on the things that I shared there. So, this year we’re excited that we’re going to bring out… I’m rewriting the Evolution of Medicine book. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people, doctors and nurses and practitioners that have quit healthcare and are now looking for what’s next. The tagline of that book was join the movement to fall back in love with medicine. And ultimately, we’re excited to bring out a second addition to guide the path for all of those doctors to come in and find their way into building independent lifestyle and functional medicine clinics, the direct primary care movement, and to build that. So, that’s a big deal in 2023.
We’re also going to revamp the Practice Accelerator. I can’t wait to introduce you to Patrick and Yaa from our team who are going to be working with practitioners to build strong, sustainable practices and really grateful for the opportunity of that.
And then, yeah, a couple of other things that I’ve got going on. So, in January, I’m going to be starting an invite-only community called the Health Medicine Alliance. The name of the Health Medicine Alliance comes from actually a term that Joe Pizzorno termed, which is one of his efforts to bring the lifestyle, functional, integrative, naturopathic medicine communities together. And I think that health medicine resonates for me because it’s essentially like the salutogenic alliance, people who are in the service of creating health and creating function.
The Health Medicine Alliance is going to be for leaders inside health systems that are implementing lifestyle medicine, integrated medicine, functional medicine. Why is this critical? It’s because this is where the action is, in my opinion. This is how the medicine is evolving. Big health systems are realizing they need to have lifestyle medicine. They need to have functional medicine because patients are going to practitioners like you, and they’ve seen that there’s a patient demand for this kind of care.
What we are looking to do here at the Health Medicine Alliance is just to share best practices so that this can be deployed effectively and so that people that can’t afford the kind of care that maybe you’re offering at certain clinics, concierge clinics, can have access to some elements of this care. Likely, it will be in groups because that is the only profitable way to deliver lifestyle, integrative and functional medicine at the health system level. But the differences between lifestyle, integrative and functional melt away when you’re dealing at the health system level, and the problems are actually very similar. It’s staffing, it’s scaling, it’s virtual care and in-person care, it’s training, all these kind of things.
I’m excited to see organizations like ACLM starting to make it really easy for doctors to get trained in lifestyle medicine. Humana took them on. New York City’s taken them on. They offered a hundred thousand free passes to their training. And I think that’s a really exciting theme for this year.
Also, think about the shadow CDC and how the conversation about how things went in the pandemic and accountability for that. Now with the shift in the legislature, will you see accountability for decisions in the pandemic? I hope so. And I hope that one of the things that we will continue to talk about is the fact that all problems in healthcare lessen with a significantly healthier population. Cost, pressure on physicians, all of these things change when you create a healthy culture and you help people implement that healthy culture. And I think many of you, hopefully all of you who are listening to this, resonate with the fact that that has to be what we focus on.
And we are here for you. So, the Evolution of Medicine, we’re here for you. If you’ve built your practice, or you have a dream to build a practice, or you want to align your day-to-day efforts with your heart and the way that you want to practice medicine, we’ve got the book. We’re near the Practice Accelerator. We’ll be opening that back up in February, and then we’ll be relaunching the Practice Accelerator in September along with the book. So, watch out for that. That’s one of the things that I’ll focus on next year.
With HealCommunity, we are really trying to make it easy for health systems to adopt health-focused care. And so, if you work inside a health system and you’ve been frustrated with how they’ve dealt with care and how they’re dealing with chronic illnesses, and you know that chronic illness is reversible and you’re just not seeing it in your place of work, get in touch. We are having a great success at convincing the money men and the budget people at these hospitals and health systems that lifestyle medicine and functional medicine delivered in groups can be both profitable and scalable and valuable. And so, that’s what I’m going to spend the rest of my time doing in 2023.
I hope wherever you are, wherever you’re listening to this, that you have an amazing end to the rest of your year. It’s been really another beautiful experience to be part of this community and make content and to hear from so many of you that are on the front lines. Super excited about some international potential for 2023. Last year, there was the biggest ever functional, integrated, personalized medicine conference in the UK. I’m going to be speaking at that June 29th, 30th and 1st. I’m excited to be back in the UK next summer.
Conferences that I’ll be at this year… I’ll probably be at PLMI in April in Chicago. I’ll probably be at the IFM Annual Conference. I’ll probably be at Health 2023, which is a new conference that is massive… 11,000 people. It’s not functional medicine, but I think we need to get a functional medicine contingent there this year. So, I’ll probably be at that. And then the American College of Lifestyle Medicine was really inspiring, and I’m hoping to be able to attend that as well because I feel like there’s a lot of momentum for health-focused care in that community.
So, thanks so much for listening. Feel free to get in touch and excited to support you in your journey to impact the health of your community in 2023. They need you. We need you. The world needs you. I’m grateful for your time and attention. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the evolution of medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools like the group visit toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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