Chris Kresser: Unfortunately, I’m not the best person to ask about this because I was never in your situation, Angelie, where I had that particular dilemma because I started exclusively with a functional practice, but I still have certainly encountered patients that are more familiar with a conventional approach. Maybe in my case it might be that one of my patients who follows my work refers their mom to me or somehow talks their mom into coming to see me and she knows really nothing about it other than her son or daughter told her to come, or someone who just happened to read one article that I wrote and then contacted me on that basis and doesn’t really know anything about functional medicine or Paleo or ancestral health, so I do get them occasionally. I think you really have to feel it out on a patient-by-patient basis because there’s no answer that will work for everybody or approach that will work for everybody.
In some cases, I just use really simple analogies, as I’ve used in some of my presentations and I’m sure you’ve seen. I talk about the rock-in-your-shoe analogy. If you have a rock in your shoe and it’s making your foot hurt, you can take painkillers that will help, but obviously taking off your shoe and dumping out the rock is going to be a better solution over the long term. Everybody gets that. It’s not hard to understand. People just nod their head and say, “Yeah, of course. That makes sense.” And then you say, “Well, it’s kind of the same way in medicine.” In the conventional approach, if you have high blood pressure, you’re prescribed a drug to lower it, and if you have high cholesterol, you’re prescribed a drug to lower that. And that can work. It definitely brings it down, but just like taking Advil for a rock in your shoe isn’t the best long-term approach to dealing with that problem, taking a drug to lower your cholesterol or a drug to lower your blood pressure is equivalent. It’s not going to fix the problem over the long term, and what we really need to do is identify what the rock is that’s causing the high blood pressure or the high cholesterol and take that metaphoric rock out of the shoe. People tend to understand that pretty well.
Then the next step, it gets more complicated or maybe a little more of a sell if someone has no gut issues and you’re suggesting to do several hundred dollars of gut testing on them. That might require a little more explanation as to the connection between gut dysbiosis or gut pathology and their particular problem. I’ve found that case studies work really well. People love stories. Human beings love stories. It’s part of our DNA. We have a rich, longstanding, oral storytelling tradition, and just hearing about somebody else that had symptoms that are similar to them that improved with the protocol similar to what you’re suggesting for that person, that sometimes can really eliminate the need for lots of different explanations. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and you could say a case study is worth a thousand words in terms of communicating about functional medicine.
Another possibility would be having them watch a video about functional medicine. My presentation, “Future of Medicine,” which you all watched as part of the introductory content to this lecture and is one I’m going to be making available to you with a script and bullet points, one of the things that you could do is you could record yourself narrating that presentation and then make that available on your website or somewhere where you could send patients to it. That’s one option.
I’m trying to think if the Functional Forum has any introductory kinds of videos to functional medicine or Mark Hyman does or the Cleveland Clinic. Does anyone on the call know that? It would be pretty cool to send them to the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine website because the Cleveland Clinic has a really fantastic reputation as a mainstream cutting-edge medical institution, and you’re kind of killing a couple of birds with one stone there if you send them to that website to watch a video on functional medicine. They’ll get educated about functional medicine, and they’ll also see that it’s something that’s being pretty aggressively deployed at one of the most respected medical institutions in the country.