Episode 276: The What & Why of Intuitive Functional Medicine™
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At The Funk’tional Nutritionist, we’ve seen that lasting solutions for our clients aren’t limited to functional medicine strategies alone. This is why Team FN has always utilized a truly root cause approach to healing, with resources and support for the body AND the mind. In this episode, Erin defines the Intuitive Functional Medicine™ approach, how it can be used in practice, and why it’s so important. This episode is intentionally designed to get you to think outside of the box and shake up some of your beliefs!
In this episode:
How intuitive medicine goes beyond functional medicine limitations [5:00]
Ancient wisdom, inner knowing and the divine masculine/feminine [8:02]
Tools to heal the four bodies [17:05]
The stories of your body as a root cause [22:07]
How to turn information into action [26:43]
Why it can be harmful to treat our beliefs as truths [41:42]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™
Kion Aminos (Get 20% off monthly orders and 10% off one time orders)
Organifi supplement powder (Save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase)
Qualia Mind (get $100 off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with code FUNK)
Learn more about Functional Nutrition
Related episodes:
212: A Functional Medicine Approach to Labs
220: Hormone Lab Testing: A Non-Algorithmic Approach
245: Our Favorite Functional Labs
246: Becoming a Better Functional Practitioner
247: Overcoming Self-Doubt: Mindset of a Successful Practitioner
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model, they're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect, so I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same.
Erin Holt [00:00:45]:
This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. You'll get things here that you won't get other places. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share, because you never know whose life you might change and, of course, keep coming back for more. Now give me the mic so I can take it away. Hello, my friends. How are you? Today's podcast is heavily inspired by a conversation that we were having in the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy just this morning. Actually, I taught a class where I answered everybody's submitted questions and kind of made a joke.
Erin Holt [00:01:34]:
I'm like this. Maybe this needs to be a podcast. And so here we are. It is less than 24 hours later. I do want to remind you that the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy is open for enrollment. That is a 14 month practitioner training. It's for RDs, nutrition professionals,
Erin Holt [00:01:54]:
we've got NPs and chiropractors up in there as well. It's 14 months, and I stand by that. And I think some of what we're going to talk about today is going to explain why it is such a robust program. So this show is called the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, in case you didn't know that. Welcome. And it's spelled with a K because I've always done things a little bit differently. And it's kind of like I want to give listeners a heads up, like, hey, when you tune in, I'm a little funky. This might be a little different than what you're used to.
Erin Holt [00:02:28]:
That is, by design, I am not afraid to walk in multiple worlds. It's just kind of been my entire career, so I embrace it. It's what excites me. It's what inspires me. It's kind of where I weave my magic. Because this show is about functional nutrition. We talk a lot about functional medicine. Functional nutrition and functional medicine are really steeped in the same philosophy and have share some of the same tenets and I've spent plenty of episodes defining functional medicine, and I also talk about where I think functional medicine falls short.
Erin Holt [00:03:04]:
Now, if you're a practitioner tuning into the show, because I know I've got a lot of you here. Hi. In the show notes, we will link up five other episodes where I'm talking into functional medicine modalities and really talking to practitioners how to take a functional medicine approach, nonagorithmic approaches to functional lab testing, how to become a better functional practitioner, so on and so forth. Today I want to speak into why I am starting to refer to what we do here as intuitive functional medicine. I'm going to talk about what I think that means and why I think it is important. So this show is for practitioners and non practitioners alike. Now, if you are a practitioner, it is kind of intentionally designed to get you to think outside the box and maybe shake up some of your beliefs. And if you find yourself being agitated, we just ordered a new washer washing machine.
Erin Holt [00:04:04]:
We had a front loader for the past nine years. And recently I noticed the rubber insert was covered in, like, mildew mold, whatever. I was like, we got to get rid of this thing. Top loader. And it has the agitator, the old school agitator. So if you feel like you're being rumbled up, agitated in a top loader washing machine today, I encourage you to stay to the end, because I talk about how and why it's so important to kind of shake up our beliefs and how I practice that. I am somebody who tends, has a tendency to be really convicted in their beliefs almost to the point of righteousness. And so this is a wicked practice for me to be like, oh, okay, this is what I believe. I believe it strongly.
Erin Holt [00:04:52]:
But I'm also open to seeing a new perspective in a new way. And I think we can and we must do this if we want to be really good, compassionate practitioners. So stay till the end, even if you feel like you're in a washing machine. Okay? Okay. Now, last week you heard Lauren. She is the newest member of Team FN, and she mentioned how she was she has been working in a conventional clinic, and she introduces functional modalities into more of a conventional setting. And it's not uncommon for functional practitioners to do this, especially newer ones. Lauren is not a newer practitioner, but I think when people start to kind of dip their toe into the functional world, part of their practice is kind of catching people when they fall out or fail out from conventional medicine.
Erin Holt [00:05:52]:
And I think that that's where the functional medicine model, a simplified version of the functional medicine model can really work because it provides a totally new framework and different approach. But what we see here at TFN and what I've seen for years in my practice is many, if not most, of our clients are actually coming to us from other functional providers. So that's enough to make our head scratch a little bit, right? If the functional medicine model is the panacea, is the be all, end all, why are people bipping and bopping from one functional provider to the next? Shouldn't it be the solution to end all of that? Well, it's not, this is not a dig or a knock at practitioners. Some of these are really well intentioned providers. But this is where a few years back, I started to really see even functional medicine has its limitations. Now as a refresher. Functional medicine is all about trying to figure out where the body is not functioning, essentially, and to get it to start to function properly. And this is what is meant by taking a root cause approach.
Erin Holt [00:07:07]:
We want to figure out where the problem is and address the issue. And I started understanding that sometimes it's not as simple as oh, my root cause is SIBO or giardia or low cortisol. Sometimes we actually have to get to the root of the root of the root. And sometimes that looks like subconscious beliefs that we're holding onto that are impacting our healing. Sometimes that's suppressed emotion or suppressed experiences. Sometimes that's inner children or inner parts that are trying to get our attention and really need to be integrated into the whole. Sometimes that is energy densities that are in the kind of holding onto in the energy body. Sometimes it's ways we create safety structures in the I know some of you listening to this right now might be, ah, that sounds a little woo woo or a little out there.
Erin Holt [00:08:02]:
A couple of months ago, we received a Funk'tional Nutrition Academy application that just says, I don't really like the woo woo stuff. I fully recognize that a lot of conventionally trained practitioners and clinicians are like, that's a little too out there for me. The thing about this though, is that the things that we now consider out there used to be how we lived our lives. We used to live our lives according to the cycles of the Earth, according to moon cycles, according to the Earth's pharmacy. We used to have reverence and respect for all of this. Energy medicine goes back thousands, thousands of years. This stuff is baked into our DNA. There is a reclamation that is happening with a lot of people right now where we are returning to ancient wisdom.
Erin Holt [00:08:55]:
So even though it might seem a little out there, little woo woo, now there's this remembering that's happening like, oh, somewhere in my body I used to know this. The body is ancient. It's older than the stories in our mind. Our understanding of health and healing has really dramatically changed over the years. Our body hasn't. The body is ancient. The body holds ancient wisdom in it. And that to me, is what intuitive medicine really honors.
Erin Holt [00:09:27]:
That intuition, that inner knowing a connection with ourselves and a connection with something even deeper than ourselves. And oftentimes for true sustainable healing, we have to go deeper than stool tests. And so years back, I started coloring outside the lines a little bit, and I started to bring together, weave together all of the modalities that I have learned over the past 15 years. And so for those of you who are not familiar with my background, while I was in dietetic school studying organic chemistry and nutritional biochemistry and A and P and all that good stuff, I was also simultaneously studying energy medicine, energy anatomy, intuitive medicine, clairvoyance, or seeing energy clearly. After I graduated, I did a yoga teacher training, and so I kind of leaned even more into spirituality and started learning more about that world. And so this was baked into me from very early on. When I started taking my first nutrition clients back in 2011, it was with all of this background, I brought all of this to my work. The mind body connection has always been at the forefront of my work.
Erin Holt [00:10:42]:
My practice has always been based on the body and the mind together. And for some of my OGs out there, some of you have been following my work legit since 2011. You know, you can validate this. You can back this up. Candace Pert, my she-ro, refers to this as bodymind. It's written intentionally as one word without a hyphen to really emphasize that unity. The body and the mind, they're not the same. They're not the same, but they cannot be understood separately from each other.
Erin Holt [00:11:16]:
Gabor Mate says the pieces can be studied separately, but we cannot fully understand any of them without grasping the whole picture. Now, in order to take a root cause approach, you have to have an understanding of mechanisms. And I talked about this in episode 246, Becoming a Better Functional Practitioner, you have to have like a thirst if you want to practice the functional medicine, you got to understand mechanisms of the human body, what is going on, right? What happens. But I think we also, to take a true root cause approach, have to have an understanding of mechanisms beyond even the physical body.
Erin Holt [00:13:41]:
So let's get into it. What do I mean by intuitive functional medicine? What does this mean to me? For starters, it is a whole human approach. Sometimes I refer to this as or I describe this as my beating heart sees your beating heart, which I know that does actually sound super far out. So I'm going to use later on in the show, towards the end, I'm going to use an actual example to showcase what I mean by that. But it's intuitive, so it includes aspects of the divine feminine. And if you're not familiar with divine feminine, divine masculine, let me explain. They are archetypes that are part of every human being.
Erin Holt [00:14:26]:
It's kind of like a yin and a yang. You can't have one without the other. So it's not that one is found in a man and one is found in a woman. It's found in all of us. One is not better than the other. They are both very necessary. And it's the embodiment of both that allows for our highest expression for ourselves, and I would say our highest expression of our health. The divine feminine, or the sacred feminine, however, has been pretty suppressed in our society.
Erin Holt [00:14:58]:
Traits of the divine feminine are not seen as valuable as traits of the divine masculine in our culture, in our society. And this is especially true in healthcare. So there's been a real imbalance of divine masculine energies and divine feminine energies. So traits of the divine masculine look like logic, reason, intellect, action, firmness, survival, strength, rationality. It's like linear. Traits of the divine feminine, on the other hand, are intuition, nurturing, healing, expression, wisdom, patience, emotions, flexibility, fluidity. And you can see why it's so important to have a bit of both. If we have one without the other, we become imbalanced.
Erin Holt [00:15:53]:
And divine masculine is really all about external authority. And I've talked about that, how that weaves itself into our health care systems. I have to reach outside of myself for the answers it's outsourcing. Whereas divine feminine is internal authority it's an inner knowing. It's that intuition piece. It's self sourcing. The divine masculine really rules the mind. Where the divine feminine allows us to drop into the body.
Erin Holt [00:16:28]:
The divine masculine is fixing where divine feminine is allowing. So you can see the difference in how they are both really important. Divine feminine allows us to sync up with Mother Earth. It reconnects us with our inner healer. It allows and honors our primal urges rather than suppresses them. It honors cycles. Cycles within ourselves, hormonal cycles, menstrual cycles, even our circadian rhythms. And outside of ourselves, like the cycles of the Earth, it's recognizing that there are in fact cycles.
Erin Holt [00:17:05]:
Our bodies are not linear. Healing is not linear. Time is not linear. That's not even a woo woo concept, not even a woo woo thing to say anymore. But it recognizes cycles and it allows for rest. It allows for space to tend to the physical body. It is seeing and honoring the physical body as a sacred vessel. It encourages us to speak to our body in the language that it understands by feeding our body.
Erin Holt [00:17:39]:
Nourishing whole foods, nature exposure, sun exposure, hydration, water, rest. These are all ways to resource our physical bodies, which is really important. We cannot bypass the physical body. We have to nurture and nourish and resource the physical body. When we do that, we're more resilient. When we are more resourced, we are more resilient. And this is important because we know stress and trauma's impact on our physical health. We know, for example, with autoimmune disease, there is almost always a trigger.
Erin Holt [00:18:16]:
And that trigger is almost always a stressful event. We will come in contact with emotional conflict in our lives. Welcome to being a human right. We will come in contact with things that feel hard and heavy to work through. And we can resource our physical body up so that these things don't have as much opportunity to sideswipe us, to completely take us out. That's what I mean by being resourced, creates resiliency. So with intuitive functional medicine, we are still upholding all the tenets of functional medicine. But we understand and we have a deep respect for the interplay between the body and the mind.
Erin Holt [00:18:58]:
And we recognize all four bodies, physical, mental, emotional, energetic. And we have tools for them all. We can meet people where they're at, where are they struggling and how can we help? I also believe in lab work. I think lab work in data can be so powerful if used correctly. But we're reading beyond the data. We are seeing the human being behind the data, behind the lab results. This is a quote that I've shared, I mean, 150 times if I shared it once. It's from Gabor Mate in his older book,
Erin Holt [00:19:32]:
When the Body Says No, he says the more specialized doctors become, then the more they know about a body part or an organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides. This quote has been a lighthouse, a beacon for me over the past however many years. This is it. I want to see the human being behind the labs. Right? And we're seeing this with functional medicine. Unfortunately, the more we understand specific lab markers, the less we understand the human being behind those lab markers. And so with intuitive functional medicine, we want to bring the human being back into the picture. We are also using that data.
Erin Holt [00:20:17]:
So I do love me some functional labs, I really do. But we're using that data to bridge the gap between where our clients are and where they want to be. We're not just teaching them that there's a bridge, we're actually helping them build their own bridge. And these healing relationships that we are creating with intuitive functional medicine, I consider them to be like, we're copilots. We're in this together. It's a co creation. Rather than, I hold all the knowledge, power, and authority and you listen to me, it's recognizing that, hey, we're kind of in this dance together. And I trust that you know some things about you too.
Erin Holt [00:21:00]:
And if you don't trust that, if you're not there yet, we can work to build that trust together. A participant in Manifest Your Health just brought this up this week, and she is a former one on one client of mine. And she typed into the chat when I was teaching class. She said, I suspected that I was reacting to eggs, gluten, and dairy, and I really wanted to do a food sensitivity test. So we did one. And guess what she was reacting to? You betcha. Eggs, gluten, and dairy. There weren't the only things that we tested for, but it was the only things that she reacted to.
Erin Holt [00:21:38]:
And this person said because she was speaking into the group, she said, Erin, use that as evidence to showcase to me that I really know my body. I really understand what my body is communicating to me. I can trust myself more. I'm paraphrasing what she said, but that was essentially it. And it was a way that she started to build rapport and trust with her body. And so this is why I say functional labs can be great if leveraged correctly. But I always think of the best healers, the best practitioners, the best clinicians I've worked with are always the ones who bring me closer to the medicine inside of me. In order for them to do that, they have to believe that it's there.
Erin Holt [00:22:21]:
They have to believe that it exists. So as practitioners in intuitive functional medicine, that is really, really important. We have to see a possibility in which this person holds the clues and the codes to their own healing. We can help them get there. We are part of the process. We can be the guides. We can share information with them that they might not have yet. But it is a co creation.
Erin Holt [00:22:45]:
It is a collaboration. And that's what I think is very, very different than how we have thought about healthcare in the past. It reminds me of the Rumi quote. You suppose you are the trouble, but you are the cure. You suppose that you are the lock on the door, but you are the key that opens it. This is how I truly view in every single client. I truly believe they have the key to open the door for themselves. I have to help them find it more often than not.
Erin Holt [00:23:17]:
But that's part of my job. And so I believe that part of intuitive, functional medicine is returning people to themselves. That's kind of how I view it. And that's not always a linear journey. That's what we try to do. That's what we try to do so often with health. We try to take something so nonlinear and make it linear. What I've been trying to do with my work for as long as I've been doing this is to get people to understand there's more to it than that.
Erin Holt [00:23:45]:
It's maybe a little bit more complex than we want it to be. People are like, in Instagram and comments like, how do I heal my RA? It's like, gosh, there's really no easy button for this stuff. I wish there was. If I find it, I promise I will share it on Instagram. I'll share it on the podcast. But more often than not, it entails a complete unlearning and relearning about what we understand about our health and our human bodies. Another Gabor Mate quote, can't get enough.
Erin Holt [00:24:13]:
He says that health and illness are not random states in a particular body or body part. They are, in fact, an expression of an entire life lived, one that cannot, in turn, be understood in isolation. It is influenced by, or better yet, it arises from a web of circumstances, relationships, events and experiences. Dr. Jeffrey Rediger says no matter what the disease process is, it's always about the story. So what's your story? It's like Pretty Woman. What's your dream? What's your dream? What's your story? If it took 20 years for these health challenges to arrive, take me through the past 20 years. What happened? What happened to you? What were the beliefs you formed about that? What got stuck? What wasn't expressed? Where are you currently being siphoned from? Everybody's got a story.
Erin Holt [00:25:12]:
What is yours and is your practitioner asking you about it? And practitioners, is this part of how you're practicing? Because through your client's storytelling, you learn about them. Their stories hold the codes for their healing, and through listening to their stories, you could help them decode those. That's how you find the root causes that's intuitive functional medicine. And I get it. We live in the age of influencing and social media and sound bites. And just like, if you can't say it in like, three words in 3 seconds, nobody's listening. Nobody's paying attention. I get it, I really do.
Erin Holt [00:25:58]:
But I just see so many people dumbing it down to make it more palatable. And I think that's either because they don't understand the complexities themselves, or they just want to do more clickbaity material. It's like five foods to eat to heal your RA. I'm like, that's not real. That's not going to heal anybody's RA. And so I think that's why people are so lost in the sauce of online wellness, why people are so confused about health. Because we have to take a full picture perspective, and we need practitioners who are willing and able to do this without confusing people more. We want to take complex information and present it in such a way that we can turn it into action steps.
Erin Holt [00:26:43]:
For the most part, it's not more information that people need. It's more implementation. If information alone was an effective way to change behavior, we would all be doing the things we need to do to take us closer to our goals. So it's not more information and more data in the five foods to eat to heal your autoimmune condition. It's strategies to integrate the information and data into our day to day lives. And when I'm talking about information from labs, too, so this is part of the job of somebody practicing intuitive functional medicine. How are you incorporating that data into actual change? And this is what we need to help people. There always has to be some level of coaching involved.
Erin Holt [00:27:27]:
It's not just like, hey, I read a lab and I can interpret that lab. And my concern and this is probably going to piss a handful of people off, if not more. We're seeing all of these practitioner trainings pop up, which is like six weeks or four weeks or two weeks to learn how to read a GI Map stool test. But I'm just like, who is that helping? What is that going to solve? What is the intention behind that? How do you translate that information into healing? I just think that taking a piecemeal approach to functional medicine is contributing to the problems that we have, because who's there to help you to pull all of these pieces together? So you learn about the Dutch test over here in two weeks, and you learn about the GI Map over here in six weeks, and then you learn here, and you learn here, and you're learning in dribs and drabs. But who's helping you pull it all together? Because the client on the other side of all these labs that you're running, that's what they need you to do. And that's what functional medicine at its core should be. It should be a root cause approach, and you cannot spot treat and take a root cause approach. And I think this is where functional education is actually failing practitioners.
Erin Holt [00:28:47]:
There is a gap where most functional education ends and application to your client care begins. And that's what we hear, like, nine times out of ten from our Funk'tional Nutrition Academy students. It's like, I've done a lot of little trainings. I don't know how to pull it all together. I don't know how to put it into a plan that really helps the whole human sitting on the other side of my desk. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Knowing how to run functional labs does not make you a functional medicine provider. And knowledge can only go so far with your clients.
Erin Holt [00:29:28]:
In order to truly deepen your understanding of all the inner workings of the human body and all the interplays of the different body, in order to take, like, a real root cause approach with your clients and evolve and expand. As a practitioner, you need a program that will do more than teach you how to run a lab and create a protocol that's not working. That's not working anymore. And that's why the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy is 14 months. That's why there's mentorship baked in. That's why there's so much support baked in. That's why it's a long one. You're with us for a while because we want to make sure that when we train practitioners, they are really getting that full, whole human approach and a deep level of understanding and clinical confidence.
Erin Holt [00:32:05]:
Now, when students are applying, or potential students interested parties are applying, sometimes I get the question, are all your practices evidenced based? And most are, but not all. And I want to speak into that today, especially if you are somebody, because, again, coming from more of a conventional background, there is this belief, this strong convicted belief, that anything I do, anything I say, anything I recommend, must be evidence based.
Erin Holt [00:33:17]:
And I'm going to quote a current FNA student. She's an RD named Holly Samuel. So shout out to Holly. She says, we're evidence based, but we're not evidenced limited. And that is a banger right there, and I believe it. I believe deeply in storytelling. I believe in listening to my mentors. I believed that things are passed down through oration is that what I mean to say? Oration we orate we pass stories down.
Erin Holt [00:33:52]:
I believe in listening to my elders, the people that came before me, the people that have been doing this work for a lot longer than me. I love this line from Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer. The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before, who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers. There is something really special about storytelling, and I believe in those stories, and I believe in listening to people. And I've said time and time again, anecdotal evidence is evidence. I believe people's stories. I listen to people, and I believe them. Many of our structures are flawed.
Erin Holt [00:34:33]:
I don't think anybody listening is going to deny that. And so we can't keep operating within flawed structures and expect radically different results. So I believe in trying things outside the box when the box isn't working for someone. And I don't need a white paper behind every single suggestion I make. I recommend breath work, the style of breath work that I teach and recommend. I don't think, as far as I know, there's no white paper behind that. There's no medical lit to say, yes, this is very appropriate, but yet I've taught it to hundreds of people and seen profound shift. So I'm going to keep recommending it.
Erin Holt [00:35:15]:
I'm going to keep teaching it. I recognize that some people do need a white paper behind everything they recommend. I think that creates a sense of safety within them. I think they have bought into a storyline that says that is the only way we can keep people safe. But I do also think that this does some people, some disservice the reality of our current situation. There are people who are in a health crisis, and they might not be able to wait for that paper to come out. I saw recently, and this is really the first time that I've ever seen HS called out like this. So hydrodentist, hidradenitis suppurativa.
Erin Holt [00:36:03]:
Oh, my gosh. I can never say that. It's like me trying to say, ulcerative. See? Can't do it. You see, there are some autoimmune conditions that I simply cannot say. I cannot make my tongue do the words HS. It's an autoimmune condition that affects the skin. Okay? Okay.
Erin Holt [00:36:18]
And last week, I saw an ad on TV, and she was talking about it took me seven years. I went to doctor to doctor. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. I was so embarrassed. I didn't know what it was. Finally, she got an answer. She felt so validated. She felt so good.
Erin Holt [00:36:33]:
Years ago, years ago, this was just like a little pocket of the population. Now we're speaking onto that like primetime television. It's not niche medicine anymore. This is quickly becoming the norm. So if you're a practitioner, you got to get ready. You got to mount up. Wave is coming, my dudes. And I think that in these chronic autoimmune health situations that are becoming more and more and more prevalent, we have to be willing to try some different things.
Erin Holt [00:37:09]:
I am eternally grateful to the healers and the practitioners and the providers and the clinicians that I've worked with over the years that were willing to think outside the box for me, for my health. I'm not telling anybody to be irresponsible. I'm just saying that if we only operate inside the box and that box is really rigid and really inflexible, then we cannot be shocked when we're not able to get people really good results. And I'm even talking about the box of functional medicine. I run a lab test. I do a protocol that is functional medicine. No, it isn't. And it will work
Erin Holt [00:37:45]:
for some people, it will. That's how we get stuck. That's how we get trapped into it, because we get a few successes, and we're like, yes, I've cracked the code. I'm doing it. I'm doing the functional medicine. And then we get the next client, right? And the protocol isn't working for them. And we're like, oh, well, the protocol worked for a few other people, so it's not the protocol. I think it might be you.
Erin Holt [00:38:04]:
So we toss them aside. We get somebody else, and we're like, uhoh uhoh. This is the problem, right? This is a problem because, like I said, the box coloring inside the lines, doing the evidenced based stuff that will get, I don't know, 70, 80% of people better. What are you doing for the other 20% to 30%? They're just being chucked out by the wayside. And my concern and what I think we're going to start to see is that that 20% to 30% is going to start to grow. I think that's what the HS ad is telling us. There's a new wave coming in. So in, I don't know, 10-20 years, that 20% to 30% might look more like 50%.
Erin Holt [00:38:49]:
These really chronic complex cases. So where are you going to be in your practice? Are you going to have tools to help potentially half the population, or are you going to be so stuck inside the box that you don't allow yourself the opportunity to grow as a practitioner? And I think to be a compassionate practitioner, we have to be willing to play in the gray just a little bit. A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my naturopath. I just was achy, had a stiff neck. She's like, let's run a Lyme test. I'm like, yeah, that sounds about right. By the way, the Lyme test came back negative. And so, all right.
Erin Holt [00:39:32]:
I was like, okay, we're running the Lyme test. She drew my blood. Okay, like, check, check. We're going to do this. And then I thought we were done, and she says to me, hey, so tell me about your grief. She knew that I had lost my stepfather four months prior. So what she did in that moment, she's like, I'm going to be willing to color outside the lines a little bit. And her willingness to do that cracked me open a bit, and it allowed me to access parts of myself that I had closed myself off from.
Erin Holt [00:40:06]:
And when we do this, we allow ourselves to access healing. So I was able to see, based on that one little comment, that one little, hey, I'm going to step outside the box for a quick sec. I was able to see that so much of my external pain was a byproduct of my internal pain that I wasn't looking at. So she was a human with a beating heart connecting to another human with a beating heart. She was willing to turn toward my suffering, even though it was uncomfortable, even though it was maybe a little left, and look at it head on. And that is, by definition, compassion. And so this is what I mean by outside the box. I'm not suggesting that everyone start telling their clients to lick tree frogs.
Erin Holt [00:40:55]:
I'm just saying widen the lens. Another beautiful quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer. She says, "sometimes people think that what I'm talking about is promoting indigenous science over western science. But what I'm really working toward is a relationship between them. It's this powerful invitation to look at the world through multiple streams of knowledge, not just one." And that one I feel all the way down into my belly, right through my throat, heart down into my belly. Looking at the world or looking at healing or looking at our practice through multiple streams of knowledge, not just one. I think that is where we all collectively need to go.
Erin Holt [00:41:42]:
And that's what I mean by intuitive functional medicine. It's embracing some of that divine feminine, some of that fluidity, that willingness to shapeshift your beliefs a little bit. The more we live in the energy of our beliefs, the deeper we invest in them. And the more we invest in them, the more we identify with them as truth. The more we identify with our beliefs as truth, the harder it is to break out of them, the harder it is to change our mind. And I think that a practitioner that is unable to change their mind is potentially a dangerous practitioner because that's someone who is unable to see another viewpoint or hear another perspective. And so what happens when a client of yours comes to you with something that misaligns with your beliefs? And this is what I was saying earlier. I get it, I get it, I get it.
Erin Holt [00:42:44]:
I have strong beliefs too. I really do. And also over the years, I have flip flopped on a couple of my really convicted beliefs. And if you've listened to the show for six years, you've probably heard some of my opinions flex a little bit. Things like I think about weight loss or even like my stance on protein powders. Things have changed. Why have they changed? Because I listened to what people were telling me. Because I believed them.
Erin Holt [00:43:14]:
Because I listened to their stories. Because I asked for their stories and I believe them. So anyway, those are my thoughts for you for the week. There is absolutely undeniably an increasing need, demand desire for another way, another path to healing, another approach. And I don't believe that we have to throw out one approach in order to embrace another. I think they all get to take a seat at the table. I think we can have all options available to us all of the time. But I think that this desire for another way is why we're seeing more and more and more functional practitioners.
Erin Holt [00:43:59]:
And I love it. I love it. My goal and my mission is to make sure those functional providers are ready for the wave that's coming and y'all feel equipped to support people in the way that they desire and deserve to be supported in a more full bodied, whole human way. And so if this is something that feels right and true for you, join the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy. Fill out an application, schedule a discovery call. We'll talk to you, we'll talk you through it, and I would absolutely love to have you as part of our fall cohort. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and keep coming back for more.
Erin Holt [00:45:00]:
Take care of you.
