Dr. Amy Nett: Great question. I think at the introduction I mentioned that I went to Georgetown Medical School and then did residency and fellowship at Stanford. I trained in radiology and then did fellowships in pediatric radiology and musculoskeletal radiology and during my fellowship training realized that radiology and, really, conventional medicine just didn’t make sense to me. It was a very slow transition in terms of just spending a lot of time while I was a radiology fellow reading about functional medicine, I’m sure as a lot of you have done. You just find this alternative approach that makes so much more sense, and you just start going through this information as much as you can and really just devouring it. I went through as much as I could, I found Chris’s site, and it was not an easy transition. At some point, you do have to make a leap that a lot of people might be very surprised by and might discourage in a sense, especially if you’re really embedded in that conventional medicine model where people just don’t understand the functional approach and they don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with the conventional approach.
The transition is really just a lot of using your free time to learn about functional medicine, learning these different approaches, and then just embracing it and understanding … you know, it was a little bit hard for me, too, in that I felt like I had seven years of this specialty training and that was really what I was trained to do, but at some point, you sort of get comfortable enough. It was a little bit difficult for me, feeling like, wait, I want a three-year fellowship or formal training in functional medicine.
You’re getting pretty formal training here, which is fantastic, but at some point, you just recognize that you learn as you go with patients, and once you have an adequate knowledge base, you can really help people with your understanding and what you put into learning on your own. It’s getting to the point where there are not enough functional medicine practitioners, and it’s great that you’re all here, and for those of you making that transition from conventional to functional medicine, I’ve been there, and if you have more specific questions about it, I’m happy to talk to you more about that transition. It’s exciting, but for me, it was pretty scary at the same time, but I’m incredibly glad I did make that transition.
Some people really just didn’t understand in the conventional medical world. Again, this is just going back to how I made the career transition between going from a conventional MD to a functional MD. Honestly, initially I think a lot of the conventional physicians I worked with really didn’t understand, and I definitely did lose … it’s hard to say that I lost friends, but I lost acquaintances by making the transition to functional medicine. But then a lot of people that I know from being in the conventional medical world, honestly, they’ve seen me make this transition, and I’m personally so much happier. I find my job so much more satisfying and fulfilling that a lot of people, when I run into them in town or that sort of thing and explain what I’m doing, they actually see that I’m just a lot happier, and they’re sort of more interested in what I’m doing, and even if they don’t entirely agree with it, it’s OK. We have different approaches, and hopefully people will respect that you want to take a different approach.
I think the way I explained it was as I often do. In the introduction, it was that I had some of my own health struggles, and I didn’t feel that conventional medicine was a good fit for me, and it just makes a lot more sense to approach health and well-being from a perspective of … well, as Chris said in the Week One information, it’s an approach for health and well-being as opposed to disease management, which conventional medicine is. When I do explain it to conventional MDs, I try not to say these things, like, “Well, conventional medicine is just disease management,” but I just try to explain that it makes more sense to me. I’m able to spend more time with patients. I’m able to really dig into the lifestyle pieces. Sometimes I don’t even explain the discrepancies between functional medicine and conventional medicine, but I just say, “You know, I’m able to take a more holistic approach, I spend time with people, and it just fits better for me.”
Hopefully you’ll find something that works for you in answering or explaining why you’re making that change, but I understand it’s difficult. I struggled with it initially, and I feel like once I made the jump, now that I know it’s really the right career for me and it’s the right approach for me and it’s what I love doing every day, it gets easier to just explain that. If people don’t understand it, it’s unfortunate, but I accept that, too.